[stefco_]

But our chief technical innovation was factoring problems into smaller ones. This is such a vital innovation that it's practically synonymous with engineering. So even superficially complex, organic-looking, highly optimized solutions will need to somehow factor nicely in order for us to be able to keep iterating on them. So in the end, it will have to just be a more clever or elegant factoring of the problem (unless we augment our intelligence in some way that lets us solve much more complex systems without factoring).

[TeMPOraL]

I think they do factor nicely, in the design space. Those highly optimized solutions don't appear out of the blue, but from the set of more or less explicit constraints encoded in optimizing software. We can move forward with treating a complex part as an atomic unit, something just fabricated to computer-generated design, and iterate on the set of properties we're interested in.

(Whether that's ultimately a good approach, I don't know. I haven't thought about this too deeply yet.)