Originally shared by Larry Panozzo
Here’s an interesting thought. At one point we were primitive creatures in, colloquially speaking, a jungle. There are even still a few primitive peoples in actual jungles. But now what mankind has rapidly created is a technological jungle that most of us hardly understand, and nobody really understands all of it. As we progress, this jungle is only going to get denser, and while we will no doubt build machines to help us navigate it while simultaneously building machines to make it a better jungle, we still will be entirely dependent on the machines to navigate the jungle. At times we may find ourselves lost in our own jungle.
Furthermore, we are already reaching the point when individual pieces of technology become so complicated that nobody fully understands them. Google is 2 billion lines of code. I’m willing to bet some good money that no one person knows exactly how the google search engine operates, yet it does and billions of people rely on it.
The problem I see with this is that if we don’t engineer technology now that can troubleshoot complex technological systems, there will be a point when complex things break and no one can fix them without massive, expensive collaboration – just because no single person will know enough of the system! (I feel like this has already happened in economics and politics.) I’m not sure we’ve really reached this point yet, but it is at most just a couple decades down the road.