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Arbesman: Large computing systems evolve like biological organisms, not engineered machines

Sam Arbesman · a16z Podcast | It's Complicated · Jan 2, 2019 · at 5:10

Sam Arbesman, author and complexity scientist, explains the shift from traditional engineering mindsets to biological evolutionary mindsets in computing on the a16z Podcast.

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“At the same time, though, these systems, they're not always Fully engineered. They're almost grown. And when they're evolved, and then like, then you often get the kind of all the terminology from evolution of kind of like evolved feature or repurposing some other kind of phenotypic thing, or there's like a whole bunch of like obsolete code in there. And I think then you kind of realize, oh, actually these systems, when they get big enough, they end up looking almost biological.”

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