alt Hacker News“Finally, Bucciarelli is right that systems like telephony are so inherently complex, have been built on top of so many different layers in so many different places, that no one person can ever actually understand how the whole thing works. This is the fundamental nature of complex technologies: our knowledge of these systems will always be partial, at best. Yes, AI will make this situation worse. But it’s a situation that we’ve been in for a long time.”
As an anecdote, I worked at a telco that is the only connectivity for around 50k people spread over a vast area. We had a massive power outage at the CO, and the backup generator failed. Everything, Even 911 was down (a VERY big deal) for basically everyone for most of a day. They stationed police and ambulances in the bigger cities and towns so people could directly ask for help.
With all hands on deck scrambling HARD, a week later we still didn’t have everything back up, because we didn’t know how. A ton of it had never been down since the 60s.
A mess indeed.