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societal engineering knowledge database

"If you look at the development of the Internet, or the power grid, or new chips, or airplanes there’s something disturbing happening. The companies that do these things have a secret that they don’t want people to know: they’re struggling to be able to continue developing their systems. What’s hurting the chip companies isn’t the cost of the fab, as bad as that is, but the cost of taping out of a chip. When you want to place a billion transistors, the design tools don’t work any more. They assume that at some point somebody understands what they want to make, but it doesn’t work when the system gets large enough. The companies that work on airplanes or the power grid don’t really understand them as wholes any more. This means that, in a world of thermodynamic-scale engineering, you have to make a transition from designing systems to designing principles by which systems work, without actually saying how they do it." -neil gershenfeld