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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 JoeMerchant on Thursday July 21 2016, @03:13AM
My favorite illustration of documentation was the last nuclear submarine to be built with a paper based documentation system - the paper outweighed the sub. We've since paperless, and if you were to print the paperless documentation, it's orders of magnitude larger than the paper documentation it replaces - EULAs are but one example of text proliferation in the realm of zero delivery cost per page.
Normally, I don't like taxes, but I think a return of a documentary stamp tax would be a good thing. Any agreement that is "legally binding" must pay a tax of $0.01 per 100 words (1000 characters) in order for it to be considered legally binding, whether physically signed, e-signed or click-wrap clicked to agree. Adjust that tax (probably upwards) until agreements start shrinking back to something reasonable. You used to be able to contract for sale and purchase of a home in 6 or so pages, today it's usually upwards of 20, and that's all about the e-sign. There's no more valuable information in the contracts, mostly a lot of repetition and even copy-paste of whole pages, and of course obfuscation of some of the important things under mounds of stuff that really doesn't matter.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by Adamsjas on Thursday July 21 2016, @06:59AM
I think the valuable information is still there, and the people who care, namely the buyer and seller know exactly what matters. The rest is there to protect the lawyers and innocent bystanders.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 21 2016, @08:57PM
The lawyers need to go on a diet.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end