Far from unprecedented, just radically different than what people are used to in computing. There are a lot other domains whose history (and present) on semi-i

Far from unprecedented, just radically different than what people are used to in computing. There are a lot other domains whose history (and present) on semi-informed stumbling into something effective and then spending decades (or lifetimes) trying to reverse engineer how it works, when it doesn't work, what the peripheral consequences are, and how impactful those consequences are. Metallurgy and material science, agriculture, chemistry, pharmaceuticals, psychology, etc etc 20th century discrete/digital computing and computer science, having hewn close to mathematics and logic for most of its life, is actually the more unprecedented history as far as practical sciences go. The flipside of all this is that all those other practical sciences have come with really very messy histories in terms of unintended consequences and premature applications, and (for better or worse) we can anticipate the same here.