The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.
Interpretation
Complex systems can be effectively created by combining simpler, functioning components.
This quote emphasizes the importance of starting with basic elements that are well-understood and effective, as a means to construct more elaborate systems. By focusing on creating simple systems first, we can ensure that each part works independently, which ultimately contributes to the reliability and efficiency of the overall complex system.
In practice
In a tech conference discussion on software engineering, someone might share this quote to emphasize modular programming.
This is actually a very important principle that science is learning about large systems like evolution and that futurists are learning about anticipating human society: just because a future scenario is plausible doesn't mean we can get there from here.
Humans are the reproductive organs of technology.
Social media's greatest assets - anonymity, 'virality,' interconnectedness - are also its main weaknesses.
What I think is coming instead are much more organic ways of organizing information than our current categorization schemes allow, based on two units - the link, which can point to anything, and the tag, which is a way of attaching labels to links. The strategy of tagging - free-form labeling, without regard to categorical constraints - seems like a recipe for disaster, but as the Web has shown us, you can extract a surprising amount of value from big messy data sets.
AI has been making tremendous progress in machine translation, self-driving cars, etc. Basically, all the progress I see is in specialised intelligence. It might be hundreds or thousands of years or, if there is an unexpected breakthrough, decades.
You can't defend. You can't prevent. The only thing you can do is detect and respond.
The expansive anarchy of the Internet continues to lull us into believing that, because we can see something, that something should be seen. Because we can say something, there is something that must be said.
The Open Source theorem says that if you give away source code, innovation will occur. Certainly, Unix was done this way... However, the corollary states that the innovation will occur elsewhere. No matter how many people you hire. So the only way to get close to the state of the art is to give the people who are going to be doing the innovative things the means to do it. That's why we had built-in source code with Unix. Open source is tapping the energy that's out there.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.