Jonathan Blow – Preventing the Collapse of Civilization
To state the thesis of the talk:<p>* Knowledge is ephemeral. Even recording knowledge doesn&#x27;t imply or guarantee that it will be passed down the generations entire. In fact, throughout history there are times when humankind &#x27;forgot&#x27; how to do certain things.<p>* This applies to software. Software is getting so much more complex (as is hardware) that the knowledge for how to do the intricate or demanding things isn&#x27;t held by many people, which makes it brittle. Adding layers of complexity on top of each other has created a tower of abstraction that people usually only know a part of, which makes the entire stack brittle if not enough people know every part of it and something breaks (maybe in a hundred years, but if that truly happens, there will be no way to fix it).<p>Jonathan Blow makes some recommendations about how to avert what he calls &#x27;the collapse of civilisation&#x27;. To summarise:<p>* Simplify tools and processes. Reduce complexity, reduce dependencies.<p>* Get a better, more intuitive understanding of your technologies and tools at a lower level.<p>He doesn&#x27;t explicitly solutionise this, but I would argue that his game &#x27;The Witness&#x27; discusses this at varying levels of detail. The gameplay and puzzles demonstrate breaking up knowledge into small composable chunks which can be taught intuitively and wordlessly. The additional materials more explicitly discuss knowledge, learning, understanding and (more generally) truth seeking. If one wanted to avoid the collapse of civilisation, as outlined by the talk, one should play this game and contemplate its message deeply.