alt Hacker NewsDon't we have a problem of ever increasing auto-immune diseases? If we know "enough" then I think we should be able to make it go away. Until that happens, I don't think humanity can claim to know "enough".
Also, evolved systems are hard to reverse engineer.
https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/
If something simple like an electronic circuit with comparatively short evolution can end up with mysterious, un-intutive and complex inter-dependent behavior, imagine how non-understandable an immune system that evolved over millions of years can be..
So I still think we are mostly clueless, and it is nearly impossible to safely engineer changes into something that was not engineered in the first place...
I would flip that framing around entirely. If we were clueless, we would not have had a centuries worth of progress of any kind whatsoever, let alone be brought to the point of testing general purpose vaccines, something that would have been unthinkable perhaps even a decade ago.
Electricity is a convenient example, because it's indisputable that we have leveraged it to do real work based on real understanding. I suspect any and every area of knowledge is subject to a kind complexity crash where the combinations of variables outstrip our ability to track them. But treating that like it negates the knowledge we do have is almost literally what it means to miss the forest for the trees.