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Submitted via IRC for Bytram
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: 2, Insightful) by TheSouthernDandy on Wednesday July 20 2016, @06:01PM
"in which we are building systems that can't be grasped in their totality or held in the mind of a single person."
Anyone carrying a wiring diagram for a Boeing 787 in their head? Anyone?
I suspect the intended meaning of the quote is being taken out of context by the OP, but these singularity folks are primarily hucksters, IMHO.
That said, everything is too damn complicated now. I just changed a login password, and have been locked out of our entire network ~10 times because too many partially connected systems rely on the same password, but do not automatically update from a single interface, and N failed attempts results in auto-lockout.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday July 20 2016, @07:24PM
Anyone carrying a wiring diagram for a Boeing 787 in their head? Anyone?
Depends -- is it under 80GB?
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday July 20 2016, @07:39PM
I'll ask Dr. Allcome.
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 21 2016, @01:09PM
i got a dolphine for sell.
i can ship via boeing 787 ...
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Wednesday July 20 2016, @07:39PM
> Anyone carrying a wiring diagram for a Boeing 787 in their head? Anyone?
I'm sure spy recruiters are really happy that microSD cards can now fit all the target's data. Hiding 8-inch floppies in your mouth was a skill that paid better in SoCal than in the KGB...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 20 2016, @09:38PM
The clue is "complexity scientist". Sounds just as bad as those who bill themselves as "futurists".