4 ms·

Except of course that the false dichotomy excludes the prospect of purely mechanical controls, or even electronic (but non-digital) ones, which don't periodical

• falcor84 2y ago
  But brains - robotic or biological - do get scrambled. E.g if you assign a repeating task to a human, and then leave and check in on them after a few months, there's a significant probability that they've burnt-out, or otherwise mishandling it for some reason, and you need to apply an intervention, up to and including replacing them. I would like to propose something like Godel's incompleteness theorem - Falcor's law of unreliability: any system complex enough to effectively and consistently solve a problem beyond some threshold of complexity (e.g. independently doing the dishes), is necessarily so complex that it cannot continuously run on its own without requiring occasional outside intervention. As per the Fundamental theorem of software engineering, we can always address any given failure mode by adding another layer of indirection/management, but the fundamental issue would still apply to the larger system. Arguably the only solution is an evolutionary one, whereby there's no single system that is consistently reliable, but the (antifragile) ecosystem as a whole is.