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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: 2) by frojack on Thursday July 21 2016, @01:33AM
This is why its a good idea to toss the whole damn thing out and do something different once every few generations.
Just when you thought you could master the internal combustion engine, they started computerizing what use to be done mechanically.
Then along comes Tesla. Fully electric cars are orders of magnitude more simple than a modern ICE.
We could start by throwing Germans out of software development. I say this with tongue lodged firmly in cheek, but jeezus those guys will add three layers of indirection from the time you get up to fill your coffee cup till you sit back down. One config file gets broken out into 3 sub-directories full of little files all included or excluded by some script which is equally scattered to the four corners of the hard disk. Germans: Please stop!!!
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.