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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: 4, Insightful) by SecurityGuy on Wednesday July 20 2016, @06:22PM
There seems to be a false premise at play, namely that it's important that we not have things that are more complicated than can be held in the mind of a single person. The fact that we're building ever more complicated systems of things that work really well would seem to disprove that premise.
As for "a collection of federal laws "22 million words long with 80,000 connections between one section and another."", yes, there's a difference between useful complexity and excessive complexity.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday July 20 2016, @08:28PM
The fact that we're building ever more complicated systems of things that work really well
Not really, no. We can trade off higher tech to patch over stuff, and play expensive games with abstraction but there are limits.
Its a simple systems engineering problem. It almost echos of Shannon's Law relating an information rate (ditto), a bandwidth (tech level?), and power to noise ratio. (lines of code vs bug rate?)
There's been a lot of work done in reliability engineering.
Going a different direction, people who've never taken formal theory of computing classes tend to have really weird and unfortunately completely wrong intuitive ideas about simple scalability issues or halting problem related questions or what boils down to Godel's little problem.
If you're bored you can emulate a ram to CPU interconnect as a telecommunications bit stream, then play all kinds of weird games WRT bit error rates and power and noise. It turns out that even if you could build an infinite amount of infinitely fast ram, there are Shannons Law limits to how much fun you can have with that theoretically infinite processor. And since an ALU latch is just another transmission line etc etc etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 21 2016, @01:28PM
maybe it's about not allowing systems to fly thru the "too-complex" barrier so that they become a system upon itself.
if you want something to "not change" then you can make it complex so that other people cannot find a flaw or understand the intention of the system so as to be able to find a simpler solution.
also there's the danger that complex systems become irreplaceable and that humans need to be educated from early age to have enough time to grasp it by the time they are mature to add or rather maintain it. this is then a very complex system that can define a whole society, culture and maybe even language?
it is financially NOT interesting to keep systems simple and to the point?
it can also give rise to the notion of "heretics": this is the way it is done and no other way is tolerated.
in anyway, if planning to seriously go to outerspace for more then a dick-measuring plant-the-flag mission then humankind will be faced with a much more complex : ) problem then rocket-engine design: maintainability, replace-ability, repair-ability and easy resourcing of new components.
it will border on a manhatten project squared.
it will be like reinventing DNA but for spaceships and habitats.
maybe when meeting aliens, their stuff will integrate flawless because: universal space-technology DNA :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 27 2016, @07:57PM
The premise of "holding things in a single mind" is essentially the distinction between Engineering and Systems Engineering.
In a similar way, a distinction can be made between Programming in the Small and Programming in the Large.