[littlestymaar]

This applies to pretty much every technology:

When we built nuclear powerplant we had no idea what really mattered for safety or maintenance, or even what day-to-day operations would be like, and we discovered a lot of things as we ran them (which is why we have been able to keep expanding their lifetime much longer than they were planned for).

Same for airplanes: there's tons of empirical knowledge about them, and people are still trying to build better models for why things that works do works the way they do (a former roommate of mine did a PhD on modeling combustion in jet engines, and she told me how much of the details were unknown, despite the technology being widely used for the past 70 years).

By the way, this is the fundamental reason why waterfall often fails, we generally don't understand enough about something before we build it and use it extensively.

[cubefox]

GOFAI software ≈ airplane

ML model ≈ bird