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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 sjames on Wednesday July 20 2016, @10:24PM
Did you forget to pass it -O3 permitting it to elide instructions?
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday July 21 2016, @12:32AM
I admit I haven't kept up with what compilers can do. I know -O3 was added quite a few years ago. And I know register juggling has gotten very sophisticated. As I recall, optimal register assignment is an NP-hard problem, but there are few enough registers and fast enough computers now that the compiler can employ an exponential algorithm to find the optimal solution without making compilation unacceptably slow. How far optimization goes now or will go in the near future, I don't know, all the way to -O6?
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday July 21 2016, @01:20AM
We're up to -O6 (or perhaps more by now), but it's not standard and it may take unsafe liberties with floating point.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 21 2016, @09:16AM
Optimization will not be good enough until it goes to eleven!