Death by a Thousand Pages
摘要
Designing complex systems is not only a matter of solving technical challenges and doing calculations. It’s also about swallowing tons of written content in the form of standards, reference manuals, regulations, and overall documentation that can easily span hundreds of thousands of pages. An engineer working on aerospace, medical devices, or autonomous vehicles must simultaneously fight with the intricate physics of the problem at hand and a monstrous body of written text to process. With system complexity growing exponentially, the informational overload will only get worse.