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This week Samuel Arbesman, a complexity scientist and writer, will publish "Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension." It's a well-developed guide for dealing with technologies that elude our full understanding. In his book, Arbesman writes we're entering the entanglement age, a phrase coined by Danny Hillis, "in which we are building systems that can't be grasped in their totality or held in the mind of a single person." In the case of driverless cars, machine learning systems build their own algorithms to teach themselves — and in the process become too complex to reverse engineer.
And it's not just software that's become unknowable to individual experts, says Arbesman.
Machines like particle accelerators and Boeing airplanes have millions of individual parts and miles of internal wiring. Even a technology like the U.S. Constitution, which began as an elegantly simple operating system, has grown to include a collection of federal laws "22 million words long with 80,000 connections between one section and another."
In the face of increasing complexity, experts are ever more likely to be taken by surprise when systems behave in unpredictable and unexpected ways.
Source: http://singularityhub.com/2016/07/17/the-world-will-soon-depend-on-technology-no-one-understands/
For a collection of over three decades of these (among other things) see The Risks Digest - Forum On Risks To The Public In Computers And Related Systems. It's not so much that this is a new problem, as it is an increasingly common one as technology becomes ever more complicated.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 20 2016, @05:33PM
On some level, a screwdriver is more complicated than any person can possibly comprehend. All those atoms connected via electron bridges, etc.
But I look forward to buying your next Singularity(tm) book. Do you have a newsletter?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday July 20 2016, @10:27PM
I wasn't going to go the atomic route, but rather the complexity of nature: never knowing when the volcano will erupt, drought will break, herd of wildebeest will come charging through. As a species, we've been dealing with systems of unknowable complexity and depth since we first learned to talk with each other enough to realize that we just don't know everything we don't know.
The difference now is that these are systems virtually entirely of our own making, made of well defined components that we do understand, not built up from a natural world with components that we don't fully understand.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Thursday July 21 2016, @01:24AM
Neither atoms or volcanoes are pertinent here, because we don't built them, and don't have to maintain them.
We no longer hold any system to a standard of being held in the mind of a single person, and we haven't done that since we crawled out of the cave.
We've practiced a division of labor, and a division of memories. You remember where and when to get the best berries and roots, I'll remember where the rabbits are at any given time of the year.
As we become more people, our total capacity to remember grows. So we fill our individual heads and knowledge grows.
And things that need remembering, (because they need constant attention) are eventually fixed so as not to require attention, or have extensive manuals documenting it all. And the lack of a manual combined with nobody remembering how it works usually means that part gets replaced with a newer model.
Yes, with a few years of inattention, such as after a large meteor strike followed by a couple years of dust winter, there are some things that will fall to disuse, or disrepair, for which parts and technicians are not available. Probably won't be our cars and planes and computers, because these require constant attention, and there are a lot of people knowledgeable in these areas.
Guessing what will fall to disrepair and forgetfulness is the genera of a million distopian novels, but even these probably over sell the case.
The situation is a lot less dire than the breathless article would lead you to believe.
A single mind was never the standard.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 21 2016, @03:13AM
My favorite illustration of documentation was the last nuclear submarine to be built with a paper based documentation system - the paper outweighed the sub. We've since paperless, and if you were to print the paperless documentation, it's orders of magnitude larger than the paper documentation it replaces - EULAs are but one example of text proliferation in the realm of zero delivery cost per page.
Normally, I don't like taxes, but I think a return of a documentary stamp tax would be a good thing. Any agreement that is "legally binding" must pay a tax of $0.01 per 100 words (1000 characters) in order for it to be considered legally binding, whether physically signed, e-signed or click-wrap clicked to agree. Adjust that tax (probably upwards) until agreements start shrinking back to something reasonable. You used to be able to contract for sale and purchase of a home in 6 or so pages, today it's usually upwards of 20, and that's all about the e-sign. There's no more valuable information in the contracts, mostly a lot of repetition and even copy-paste of whole pages, and of course obfuscation of some of the important things under mounds of stuff that really doesn't matter.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by Adamsjas on Thursday July 21 2016, @06:59AM
I think the valuable information is still there, and the people who care, namely the buyer and seller know exactly what matters. The rest is there to protect the lawyers and innocent bystanders.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 21 2016, @08:57PM
The lawyers need to go on a diet.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 21 2016, @09:13AM
Also, humanity depended on the fire since the stone age. But only in modern times we learned to understand it.