Re:California bullet train contractors botched bridge project
by ehnto on Thursday August 20, 2020 @11:06AM
(#24224037)
Jonathan Blow had a talk about this that was related to software complexity and losing institutional knowledge over time.
Because technology is essentially knowledge, it has a tendency to deteriorate over time as we build abstractions and people with foundational knowledge move on and people with abstracted knowledge move in.
As a contrived example, China made templates for these bridges, which are an abstraction of the underlying knowledge. In say 50 years time, all the engineers capable of designing the templates have died and no one was needed to make new templates for another 20 years, so no one learned howto design them. So you have lost your ability to design bridge templates and likely no longer understand what makes the current templates work.
That probably wouldn't happen with construction but just an example.
Because technology is essentially knowledge, it has a tendency to deteriorate over time as we build abstractions and people with foundational knowledge move on and people with abstracted knowledge move in.
As a contrived example, China made templates for these bridges, which are an abstraction of the underlying knowledge. In say 50 years time, all the engineers capable of designing the templates have died and no one was needed to make new templates for another 20 years, so no one learned howto design them. So you have lost your ability to design bridge templates and likely no longer understand what makes the current templates work.
That probably wouldn't happen with construction but just an example.