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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: 5, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Wednesday July 20 2016, @07:06PM
This is hardly surprising. Every day businesses depend on software that is a loose hodge-podge that resembles a Rube Goldberg contraption. And they see no value in keeping anyone on staff to refactor or improve things because things "work". When things break or changes are needed they just work around it (often extending the Rube Goldberg-nes) until it becomes life and death critical. Then they get Habib in India on the phone to re-write the entire thing in [inapplicable buzzword of the day] which of course fails because no one even understands their own business logic more or less the existing code.
Sometimes that is acceptable - like your little doodad gadgets for posting to Facefook and Twatter and making phone calls. If a stupid little app breaks, who cares? But I think I will pass on the self-driving cars.