this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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But, of all engineering problems, how many of them are associated with a tokamak fusion reactor?
I'm not saying these people don't exist or that they're not highly valuable. I'm just saying their skills don't need to be applied everywhere all the time, which leaves room for "regular" experts.
I'm deliberately avoiding identifying my industry, but this exists in every industry.
I can be flippant and say "we're not making a web shopping cart here" to my people, but the top engineers making Amazon's shopping cart must deal with a lot of complicated problems.
Do I even need to list things? Think of something that's difficult. Nuclear bombs, medical devices, jet engines, skyscrapers, semiconductors, guided missiles. I could go on and on, but I'd still have to explain to you about the more mundane things like operations research.
In case it helps to illustrate the point, those aren't the most complicated things; those are areas in which a few very complicated, difficult problems exist. For example, semiconductors is a very massive field.
Designing the next utilitarian op amp is not something everyone can do but it's not that difficult of a problem, necessarily.
Designing the next cutting edge CPU (for Intel or AMD or Apple or whatever) on the other hand is (I imagine) a handful of very difficult problems (most of which I have only the vaguest idea of) like optimizing pipeline and predictive execution or how to get to the next level chip design & fabrication process (which itself has a bunch of different issues, from what I gather).
That's where I would expect the 10x or whatever to work. At the cutting edge of engineering and science where the hardest problems are.
Plenty of room for regular experts.