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by adpirz 478 days ago
I’ve never been able to put it into words, but when we think about engineering in almost any discipline, a significant amount of effort goes into making things buildable by different groups of people. We modularize components or code so that different groups can specialize in isolated segments.

I always imagined if you could have some super mind build an entire complex system, it would find better solutions that got around limitations introduced by the need to make engineering accessible to humans.

4 comments

An "optimal" solution may do away with "wasteful" abstraction of interfaces and come up with something more efficient. But there is wisdom in narrow interfaces and abstractions. Structure helps to evolve over time which at least for now most computer optimization focuses on getting the best solution now.
Doesn't need a supermind to prove this is possible. Mere mortals and simple compilers can inline functions and trade abstraction for performance.
I think it’s half-guess and half-hope but I imagine we’ll spend centuries building really dumb mechanism, then suddenly be completely left in the dust intellectual. I guess that’s what you’d call the singularity. I don’t know if that hypermind will bother designing circuits for us.
Conway's law goes something like that -

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law