[s_kilk]

Well, we do have a body of knowledge on those problems, as a sister-comment points out, Biology, and Cybernetics which abstracted the lessons from biology and generalized them to all machine-like systems.

It's just that this body of knowledge is not really compatible with the kind of stuff that the hyper-rationalist cult of lesswrong are into, and so tends to be ignored.

In fact, the author here is re-inventing Cybernetics from whole cloth (especially that of Ashby and Beer, in particular, Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety and Beer's Viable System Model), but without any engagement with the mass of existing knowledge.

[EDIT: I've just realized that the original author is being re-posted on lesswrong in this case, and isn't necessarily part of that milieu. I'd still encourage them (if they're reading) to check out Ross Ashby and Stafford Beer, because their intuitions align very strongly with the kind of research done by those Cyberneticians!]