I believe there's an entire section in Deepness In The Sky about how future coders a million years from now are still hacking stuff together with python.
There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely…the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems.
We already have software archaeology today. People who are into software preservation track down old media, original creators, and dig through clues to restore pixel-perfect copies of abandonware. It's only going to get bigger / more important with time if we don't concentrate on open standards and open source everywhere.
And it's sad that many archivists have to break the law in order to secure the longevity of important cultural works.
Our abusive relationship with modern commercialism has disintegrated the value of art, folklore and tools, both in the eyes of consumers and producers, and we no longer as a society seek to preserve the greatest works of today's most cutting-edge mediums. It's quite a sad state of affairs, which will only be mourned with increasing intensity as time marches on and curious researchers try to piece together the early days of the internet and personal computing.
I'd say game emulation is currently the most prevalent heavyweight archaeology.
In the more common case, it's simply archiving -- we still have hardware it can run on (e.g. x86).
The GPGPU and ML stuff is likely going to age poorer, although at least we had the sense to funnel most high level code through standardized APIs and libraries.
Seems quite possible that the the present will seem to future archeologists like an illiterate dark ages, between civilisations from which paper records, that last long enough for them to find, are preserved.
This is why, if you expand your cognitive light cone to distant future generations, you will conclude that using Rust is the only moral choice. (I still don't, but I mean still.)
It’s not hard to imagine a program of ever increasing complexity, highly redundant, error-prone, yet also stochastically, statically, increasingly effective.
The primary pushback from this would be our pathetically tiny short term memory. Blow that limitation up and complexity that seems incomprehensible to us becomes perfectly reasonable.
That would help for sure, but you would soon reach the limit of how much at the same time our brains can process consistently and how large mental model we can still effectively use.
Situation that have 500 viewpoints and 10,000 variously interacting facts to consider won't be any more comprehensible for a mere human, short term memory limiting us or not.
The world of Deepness in the Sky (at that time, A Fire Upon the Deep is a very different time) doesn't have AI. It has civilizations that rise and fall every few centuries. The Qeng Ho are a trading culture that was formed to try to bind the wandering traders of the universe together into something that could stifle those collapses. This is probably strongly influenced by Foundation by Asimov.
Other things are quite advanced - but computing is rather "dumb". What is there is driven by a great weight of inertia of massive software (all written by regular humans) that itself is too large to fully audit and understand.
The story it tells is very much one about humans and societies.
If you need an arbitrary point of reference to count time from, what's simpler, making a new one or using the existing predominant one that everything else does?
Making a competing standard and then having to deal with interop between standards is not simpler or better unless there's an actual benefit to be had.
Simplification is only accessible when understanding all systems are complex. Meaning, to simplify is just the ability to break down complexity into smaller parts.
We do this through categorization. For example, integrated circuits can be broken down into simplistic AND, OR, XOR, NOR, NAND, X OR, and NOt gates. Yet tying those together creates usable components such as Wifi radios and manufacturing automation.
Over simplification are concepts that lack understanding of complex systems. These are exploited by politicians. For example, deregulation will help drive the economy. Yet regulations have been proven to assist the economy long term by preventing the next variation of thalidomide. The panacea drug of the 1950s and 1960s that killed their users or caused massive birth defects.
I remember a sci-fi book where they were talking about one of the characters hacking on thousand-year-old code, but I could never remember what book it was from. Maybe this was it and it's time for a reread.
Continuing on from the sibling comment about the 0 second...
So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support. Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations. Every so often, the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents. Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge.
“We should rewrite it all,” said Pham.
“It’s been done,” said Sura, not looking up. She was preparing to go off-Watch, and had spent the last four days trying to root a problem out of the coldsleep automation.
“It’s been tried,” corrected Bret, just back from the freezers. “But even the top levels of fleet system code are enormous. You and a thousand of your friends would have to work for a century or so to reproduce it.” Trinli grinned evilly. “And guess what—even if you did, by the time you finished, you’d have your own set of inconsistencies. And you still wouldn’t be consistent with all the applications that might be needed now and then.”
Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. “The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more significant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy—take the situation I have here.” She waved at the dependency chart she had been working on. “We are low on working fluid for the coffins. Like a million other things, there was none for sale on dear old Canberra. Well, the obvious thing is to move the coffins near the aft hull, and cool by direct radiation. We don’t have the proper equipment to support this—so lately, I’ve been doing my share of archeology. It seems that five hundred years ago, a similar thing happened after an in-system war at Torma. They hacked together a temperature maintenance package that is precisely what we need.”
“Almost precisely.” Bret was grinning again. “With some minor revisions.”
At times I've adopted the term Programmer-at-Arms for what my job occasionally turns into. :D And as a sibling poster mentions, the whole thing with the epoch is a great nod to software archeology.
We have better tools they're just apparently too hard for us to use, yet some how in the same thought we think we can create anything remotely like intelligence, very odd cognitive dissonance.
it does not seem odd to me at all that we could create intelligence, and even possibly loving grace, in a computer.
I'm not sure why there would be cognitive dissonance- sure, my tools may be primitive, but I can also grab my chisel and plane and see that it's similar in form to chisel and plane from 2000 years ago (they look pretty much the same, but these days they're made of stronger stuff). I can easily imagine a Real Programmer 2000 years from now looking back and thinking that python, or even a vacuum tube, is merely a simplified version of their quantum matter assembler.
We'll still be hacking stuff with python when the singularity comes. It will be ultra high tech alien stuff that we can't hack or understand, only AI can, and the tech will look like magic to us, and most will not be able to resist the bait of depending upon this miraculous technology that we can't understand or debug.
We (as a species) already depend upon lots of miraculous technology that we (as individuals) cannot understand nor debug.
Even as IT professionals this is true. How many developers these days can debug a problem in their JavaScript runtime or Rust developers track down a bug in their CPU? There’s so much abstracted away from us that few people can fully grasp the entire stack their code executes. So those outside of tech don’t even stand a chance understanding computers.
And that’s just focusing on IT. I also depend on medical equipment operated by doctors but have no way of completely understanding that equipment nor procedure myself. I drive a car that I couldn’t repair. Watch TV that I didn’t produce beamed to me via satellites that I didnt built nor fire into space. Eat food that I didn’t grow.
We are already well past the point of understanding the technology behind the stuff that we depend upon daily.
This is the most intellectually lazy take I've ever seen, and I truly wish people would stop throwing up their hands and giving in. You can absolutely peel back the layers with enough will. At least assuming anti-consumer cryptography/malicious toolmaking is not employed.
> You can absolutely peel back the layers with enough will.
I originally started from writing Python scripts and running Web servers, after 10 years I decided that pure software is too boring, and now I came to know the basics of high-speed digital signal propagation in circuit boards.
So I agree with you conceptually. But practically speaking, it also requires an eternal life, an external brain storage, or possibly both. At least in my experience, I find that my time and attention doesn't allow me to investigate everything I'd like to.
"No one on the planet knows how to build a computer mouse."
>"No one on the planet knows how to build a computer mouse.
Counterpoint:
If a man has done it, a man can do it.
Also,
It wouldn't be research if you already knew what you were doing.
Just because a particular assembly has it's tasks divided up between a myriad of people does not mean it is impossible to unify those tasks into a single person. In point of fact, the continued existence of mice can be directly attributed that someone has the network of knowledge/knowers of pieces of the problem already nailed down.
Yes, the level of detail the real world flings at us on a regular basis is surprisingly deep, but hardly ineffable.
> If a man has done it, a man can do it. [...] Just because a particular assembly has it's tasks divided up between a myriad of people does not mean it is impossible to unify those tasks into a single person.
I don't understand your argument, in particular, the linked article already refuted this point by saying the following, but you didn't provide a counterargument to that:
> But let’s imagine an extraordinarily talented man who started on the factory floor, worked his way through an engineering degree, moved up through the ranks to design the very thing he was building before, and knows the roles of everyone on his team so well that he could do all their jobs himself. Surely this brilliant person knows how to make a mouse. Or does he? He may understand circuits – but does he know every detail of how to build a diode from raw materials? He may understand plastics – but could he single-handedly synthesize a plastic from its constituent chemicals? Does he understand how to mine silicon out of the ground? Nobody in the world – not one single human being anywhere – knows how to make a mouse. It’s orders of magnitude too complex for a solitary mind.
I've written it about two times actually, but deletions have eaten it.
If we've done it before, we can do it again. The key is navigable access to the right information which is sadly dependent on A) willingness to document, and B) structuring of the set of data for navigable retrieval.
Both were problems we've got solved. Not in the Internet of course. Not anymore, but in libraries.
Also, I reject where the goalposts of the accomplishments of the person in question are stated to arbitrarily end. Nothing keeps one from diving into these secondary areas or specialties. Only perhaps the obstacle of having to be profittable while doing it. And that's what I reject. I do not hold the prevailing wisdom that knowing the Riddle of Mice is intractable to a singular human being. I hold it is intractable to a member of a social system wherein profitable engagement of every member as guided by some subpopulation might tend to make it seem intractable by any member of the governed group. That's a far cry from true ineffability however.
But nobody has done it before. Even the very first computer mouse used off-the-shelf mechanical and electrical components, each of those involved at least one type of technology that took a scientist or engineer's entire lifetime to develop.
> The key is navigable access to the right information which is sadly dependent on A) willingness to document, and B) structuring of the set of data for navigable retrieval.
Now you mention the importance of documentation, it reminds me of Vannevar Bush's Memex and Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu. So it seems that there's a mutual misunderstanding of the actual topic in this debate. We understood the debate as:
* The all-knowing engineer: Whether it's possible for a single individual to learn and understand a technology entirely, down to its every aspect and detail.
Meanwhile, you're in fact debating about different problem, which is:
* The Engineering Library of Alexandria: Whether we can create sufficient documentation of all technical knowledge, the documentation is so complete about every aspect and detail that in principle, it would allow someone to open the "blackboxes" behind every technology for understanding or replication if they really want and need to. Whether or not it can be done in practice by a single physical person is unimportant, perhaps only one or a few blackboxes are opened at a time, not all simultaneously. The question is whether the preserved information is sufficient to allow that in theory. This is similar to the definition of falsifiability in science - impractical experiments still count.
If you're really arguing the second point rather than the first point, I would then say that I can finally understand some of your arguments. So much unproductive conversions can be avoided if you've expressed your points more clearly.
Who said anything about giving up? I’m talking about the current state of play, not some theoretical ideal that is realistically impossible for even the most gifted, never mind the average person.
If anything, you’re massively underestimating the amount of diverse specialist knowledge required in modern society for even simple interactions.
People dedicate their entire lives to some of these fields that underpin the tech we use. It’s not something the average person can pick up in open university while working a full time job and bringing up kids. To suggest it’s just a motivational problem is absurd. And that’s without addressing that the level of physics or mathematics required for some specialties is beyond what some people can naturally accomplish (it would be stupid to assume everyone has the same natural aptitude to all disciplines).
Honestly, I don’t know how you can post “This is the most intellectually lazy take I've ever seen” in any seriousness then go on to say it’s just a problem of will power.
Hard disagree. Do you know how EVERYTHING around you works to the smallest scale? And if you do, when you encounter something new do you just drop everything and meticulously study and take apart that new something? The last time you could be a Renaissance man was, well, during the Renaissance.
Learn the basics and it's amazing the mileage you get. Care enough to try to become a beacon of actual knowlege, and master basic research skills, and the world is your oyster. There is nothing stopping you in this day and age from getting to the bottom of a question other than asshats like Broadcom or Nvidia who go out of their way to foster trade secrecy at all costs.
Cars, electronic devices, manufacturing tools/processes, lawn equipment, chemical processes, software, algorithms, common subassemblys, logistics, mechanics of materials, measuring systems, what excuse does one have to not develop some level of familiarity with these aspects of modern life in a day where information is literally at your fingertips?
I'll give you that the well is heavily poisoned, and that sometimes a return to dead tree mediums of info storage are required to boost signal; but there isn't really an excuse to remain ignorant other than willful ignorance. The answers are out there, you just need to have the will to hunt them down and wrest them from the world.
There is a massive difference between “learning the basics” and understanding it to a competent level that we can reproduce it.
I know the basics of how rockets work but that doesn’t mean I could build a rocket and successfully launch it. Yet your comment suggests I’m already qualified to single-handedly deploy the next Starlink.
Some day you’ll realise that “could conceptually understand this” is a wildly different beast to “should invest the time and energy to understand this.” There are too many layers to too many different systems to understand everything that currently exists, let alone keep up with every new development. Like it or not, the age of universal experts is over. We all must pick our battles.
Do you think I lack the requisite bouncing off fields of specialization to understand the supreme frustration engendered by bouncing into and eventually off the surprising amount of depth pretty much every human field of endeavor is capable of generating?
Logistics, law, military, healthcare, research/academia, education, sales, metrology, aviation, network and library sciences, industrial processes, construction, and manufacture?
All of which, in their depths, hide surprisingly deep tracts of wisdom and tacit knowledge, and between them often exists gulfs of synergy unrealized because there is just rarely a place in society for one who has done both X and Y?
You can take this as evidence of a mind unable to find a niche into whence it can settle long term peaceably, or you can take as words of experience from someone who has never slotted well into the current state of affairs, largely due to having issues with accepting "that's just the way it is".
I'm fully cognizant long term practice opens doors, but I'm also aware the benefits of one's long term practice can transfer with enough care demonstrated in the act of crafting the transference. I'm also fully aware that no matter how "free" or "open-minded" you think yourself to be, the end result to which you can actually live up to those ideas is the extent to which you can lay claim, and our society as structured leaves much to be desired in terms of viability of livelihoods that don't involve centralizations of wealth as the first order problem, and all physical accidents that occur as a result of said centralization being happy accidents. Our means of creating new wealth extractions vs. solving the physical needs of continued societal operation keep diverging further and further away from each other, and no one seems to be able to stop and even process the ludicrousness of what's going wrong with the execution. No one will either as long as people don't try to untangle the very Gordian knot that prompted my original post, yet it seems most people are content to just hide from it as long as the status quo remains such that "Not my problem" holds over their individual mental horizons.
I'm not tossing out hot takes for fun here. I'm tormented by the beast that our societal architecture has transformed us collectively into. I've stared at it's face with a profound sense of loss and unsatisfaction at the level of potential it lives up to, and the Riddle of Mice's individual effability cuts straight to the heart of the matter.
If the Riddle of Mice is truly ineffable to a single person in totality; then we are simply doomed.
We have admitted that we are no longer capable of pushing the frontiers of what we can achieve further than the complexity that it takes to make a circuit board, hosting an IC, fabricated using a combination of lithography masks, UV light sources, photochemisty, and a highly controlled manufacturing environment, all made using equipment made using precision manufacturing techniques (machining, chemical, orelectrically facilitated), assembled into a geospatially bounded factory, with outputs priced in such a way as to provide sufficient social incentivization to attract people to operate the machines; and a multi-axis movement measuring device, programmed to operate over either a USB HID centric protocol, or in cooperation with a p/s 2 interface, utilizing electronic bit toggling and sampling as an information transmission medium, working as a component of a machine local network of components acting in harmony. That we can not in one individual instill the understanding of PCB fabrication processes, semi-conductor fabrication processes, refining and extraction processes for the material inputs thereto, and the measuring processes to divise a means of detecting when a task has been satisfactorally carried out so as to meet the needs of the next step of processing culminating in the assembly of a final product. We cannot, in short, break latger problems into smaller problems, listing them, and enabling an individual to handle those one at a time. Our entire field of study (computer science) is a fraud. Because one entire half of the space/time tradeoff spectrum is just frigging lopped off. Problem decomp doesn't work, and isn't applicable across all problem spaces.
That's what we're admitting here if we accept this proposition to be true, which I am not at all willing to grant, seeing as my very existence is predicated on that ability having been demonstrated at least once by someone. The state spaces may be growing, but with that, we devise new ways of coming to terms with addressing and navigating the respective prerequisite corpii of knowledge.
Are there other processes that further constrain the space based on societal architecture? You bet. That's still addressable though. The real question on addressing that though is will. Does it matter enough for everyone to put down what we're doing and really reach a consensus on a new set of societal constraints in order to change the possible realities we can manifest?
TL;DR: the problem is one of will. Not fundamental incapability. Any arguments predicated on "but no one does <drilling down into problem spaces until their brain hurts>" will fall on deaf ears, because despite the ongoing suffering it causes; I do that, because no one else seems to be willing to.
I am the current living counterexample, and if it's my fate to be that so as to cut off everyone trying to lower the bar at the knees, so be it. and I will fight you for as long as I am able so someone can at least point to somebody that does it. If I have to pull a Stallman-esque chief GNU-isance to tilt the scales, then so bloody be it.
It'll be the most courteous fight humanly possible, but I refuse to give any quarter in this regard. The only thing between you and knowing how to do something is your willingness to chase it down. Period.
I'm not trying to cast aspersions on anyone here. Just stating an objective fact. An ugly, inconvenient, really comfortable to partition off in a dark, unfrequented part of your psyche fact. No one here should feel like I'm trying to make them feel like less of a person, or less accomplished than you no doubt are. But I am stating that you and you alone are responsible for drawing the lines indicating the lengths you are ultimately willing to go to achieve X, Y, or Z.
I’m sure you are very knowledgeable in a good variety of fields and I genuinely don’t mean the following comment as a snub but I’d wager you know a lot less than you think you do. In my experience people who claim to understand something, generally don’t. And those who claim ignorance tend to know more than they let on.
The problem with knowledge is that the more you learn, the more you realise you don’t know anything at all.
So if you believe you’re capable of understanding all of human knowledge, then I question how deeply you’re studying each field.
Good luck with your endeavours. I at least respect your ambitions, even though I don’t agree with some of your claims.
"With enough will" makes this sound like Ayn Rand fan fiction.
That's just something you tell yourself to make yourself feel better about trusting the black boxes your life depends on. But it simply isn't true.
People devote their lives to specializing n these things. Yes, "with enough will" - and time, and money - you could pick one or two subjects and do the same. But that still leaves you as a dilettante at best when it comes to everything else.
Perhaps start looking at what your life seems to really demand of you. How are you being employed by those around you? As a means to their ends, or as a means to your own ends?
Rand is garbage, and I'm insulted to end up being brought anywhere near that slop in your philosophical address space. The point I'm trying to make is that there is a helplessness taught by the optimizations we structure our societies around. A capitalist, consumerist society is going to focus around training the largest portion of it's population to act as specialized cogs that can be orchestrated by someone the next layer of abstraction up in pursuit of purely profitable/profitmaking engagements.
If you change the optimizations, you change the system. You change the people that compose that system, you change the very bounds of the human experience.
Just look at how much the world changed around the pandemic. The old order of the office & commute was shattered for many. Look at how deemphasis of throwing more fossil fuels at a problem changes the direction of innovation.
You say the Riddle of Mice is ineffable by a single person. I say you're full of it, and looking at the problem wrong. It's completely effable, you just can't imagine society having a place for such a person given your priors about how the world operates. And in that, you may be right!
That does not equal the Riddle of Mice being conquered by a single person can't happen. It's just unlikely, and dhould such an extraordinary individual exist, you'd likely see them as mad.
Fwiw, I agree with you. most people are way more capable than they think they are., and modern society encourages people to be single-minded and sedentary.
I agree, however there’s a massive gulf between people underachieving and someone being capable of understanding the entire engineering knowledge of humanity.
"The singularity" is science fiction. You can't just infinitely improve software on static hardware - hardware must be designed, manufactured and installed to accommodate improvements. Maybe you could have a powerful AI running as a distributed system across whole data centers, but now you're limited by transmission times etc. There's always a new bottleneck.
