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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) by donkeyhotay on Wednesday July 20 2016, @07:04PM
Even with things as simple as toilets.
I helped a friend fix a toilet this weekend. She tried to do it herself, but the useful idiot at the DIY store sold her a new filler valve (which was NOT what she needed), and not only that, but the most expensive and complicated one in the store. The filler valve was so complicated, she could not get it to work. All she needed was a new flapper -- a $3 item. We put the stupid valve back into the box, and went back to the store and returned it. We got a flapper and a new filler valve that was about 1/3 the cost of the first one (unfortunately she had damaged the old valve trying to remove it). I showed her how to fix it, and she had a working toilet with only a few minutes of effort.
And the question is, why was this filler valve so complex? It was billed as "preventing leaks", but in operation, it was actually allowing the float to stay stuck in the down position which GUARANTEES a leak. A big messy EXPENSIVE leak. What engineer would design such a complicated stupid thing? All it needs is a simple, uncomplicated float, that will shut off the water when it gets to the correct height. We're all getting so sharp, we're cutting ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JNCF on Wednesday July 20 2016, @07:40PM
Of course, a float will get caught on the chain more often than a filler valve will. For some tanks this only happens with an improperly adjusted (or plastic) chain, but others position the handle and the flapper so that the float can't be angled out of the way while keeping the chain short enough to do its job and the metal rod holding the float long enough to fill the tank properly. For such a poorly designed tank, the unobtrusive filler valve is a god send.
Even for tanks where this isn't an issue I buy the most pervasive brand of filler valves now (Fluid MasterTM) because I appreciate being able to replace the top half of them without disconnecting the bottom half, and I know I can get a new one anywhere. Hugging toilets is not fun, and neither is draining that last less-than-half-inch of water out of tank. The water is more-or-less clean, but the area around it that gets redampened by any water that runs down the bottom of the tank to outside of the bowl isn't.
But enough about toilets, the topic is bullshit!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 21 2016, @02:04AM
You simply disposed of their shitty solution b/c they didn't give you a shit disposal solution.