Stewart Brand

That's fantastic.

And, uh, do you think that's solvable and all this going forward with quantum computers?

So you have David Deutsch on Mindscape.

Uh-huh.

Where is he in all that?

He's in the thick of quantum computing, I thought.

Well, it's interesting.

He's become very popular in the tech world here.

We're all reading David Deutsch and basically getting the kind of cosmic level optimism that goes with his understanding that all problems are solvable, but problems never go away.

There's always new ones to solve.

And that's what progress is made of.

And in that sense, progress is inevitable.

And so techies like that, because technological process progress feels, scientific progress feels like it's kind of built into the universe.

Spell it out a little further from the second law perspective.

One of the aspects of maintenance that emerged for me relates to that, which is, as you say, there's way more ways a thing can go wrong than can go right.

And as a consequence, skilled maintainers actually wind up having to know more about the system than the people who designed it and built it.

And a lot of whether a thing is kind of mature and resilient and robust in the world is if the makers, the designers and the manufacturers pay very close attention to what the maintainers are learning about their system.

then all is well because they will design for lower, better, easier maintenance.

And if they don't, the system can be really, really stupid and not getting smarter.

And so one of the things I keep coming across is when the makers of things are paying close attention to the maintainers of those things, all goes well.