[PhilipRoman]

>No one person understands (or could possibly understand) the whole system from the silicon up.

I'm not a fan of this meme that seems to be very popular on HN. Someone with knowledge in EE and drivers can easily acquire enough programming knowledge in the higher layers of programming, at which point they can fill the gaps and understand the entire stack. The only real barrier is that hardware today is largely proprietary, meaning you need to actually work at the company that makes it to have access to the details.

[samsartor]

Good point. I agree actually, many people do put the work in to understand the whole stack. But one person could not have built the whole thing themselves obviously. All I was trying to say is we already live with superhuman intelligences every day, they are called "teams".