[FRIAM] Eternal questions

[Steve Smith]

> Then Cory Doctorow ponders the other eternal question: is this all
> bullshit?
>
> https://doctorow.medium.com/machine-learnings-crumbling-foundations-bd11efa22b0
> <https://doctorow.medium.com/machine-learnings-crumbling-foundations-bd11efa22b0>
>
> -- rec --


After decades at LANL, I'm painfully aware of "Technological Debt"...  
I have built few technological assets in my subsequent decade+ on my own
and in consequence, very little technological debt.    I feel more of
that in my personal extended phenotype (home/stead, vehicles, computer
tech, hand-tools) these days.   Am I hampered in some way by my
dependence on (now 15 year old) Ryobi 18V cordless hand-tool
technology?  Is my 2001 Dodge Diesel Truck "holding me back" in some
way?  Certainly the maintenance demands some of my archaic (e.g. 50 year
old well and water distribution network) systems are more finicky than a
modern refresh of them might be?

This article leads me to ponder whether "evolution of species" itself
does not accrue "Technological Debt"?  Is the "Junk DNA/genes" we like
to credit as being more of a "boneyard" to pull out in a pinch (closer
in mutation space than "creating" entire new genes, etc.?) also in some
way a burden?   Certainly we want to believe that vestigal features such
as the Appendix or Tonsils or Tailbones, etc.  are "harmless",  but we
also know that they do represent (sometimes) liabilities which might
outweigh their remaining functional advantages?   Is this (also) how
some species (or more aptly clades like Marsupials) end up going
extinct?   By building a house of cards of
functional-enough-but-not-quite-good-enough-in-the-context-of-yet-better
technology, do we set ourselves up for eventual failure?

Trees are self-pruning, are evolutionary trees also? 

- sas