Not sure I understand the ratchets, so continuing with the theme of broken glasses:
Not so long ago (200 yr? 300 yr?) almost all people spent a significant fraction (2/3+?) of their time just keeping themselves fed. We've automated enough of that that even with distribution, etc. the time budget for keeping oneself fed is now actually dominated by eating (~1/7) and not by production (~1/20?).
So, 200 or 300 years in the future, will we have done something similar to other physiological needs? other safety needs? (note here that many aspects of keeping oneself fed in prior centuries involved long-lead time skills that are no longer necessary because we produce and distribute food in an entirely different manner)
Upon reflection, the broken glasses scenario is not so dire: distribution of new lenses (produced in bulk) according to Rx is low-enough skill that one might imagine easily finding volunteers who schlep packages for the variety of social contact it affords. The toothache would be more difficult, because there treatment (currently) requires specialised knowledge. (and fixing the lens-making machine might be easy enough if one takes the "DEC repairman" attitude of parts are cheap, time and knowledge is expensive, so just swap old parts for new until it passes the self-test again?)
Not sure if good faith is good enough to get me rate-undelimited, but here goes (:
[e.g. Maxwell's] Ratchets are part of the firmware debug, ideally a debug should be irreversible, yes?
Sorry about the TUFs, it was a lagniappe for gvicino (--assuming you've already seen my previous rant on it.) some (most?) have the form of a reverse rachet: discontinuity+monotonic. I surmise that it would be a good entity with which to model complexodynamic (economic) agents ("peers") trying to debug (cooperate with) one another.
(Each assuming an epsilon of bad faith in the other peers?)
For glasses, unbreakable or, in 30 years time, self-healing teutonic glasses.
EDIT: main problem with today's deployment finance ("VC"): it monotonically moves complexity/brittleness (eg cloud is arguably simpler than locally-served wares as a business model, but not as a technology) -- but not S-Sophistication.
The lust for funding software comes from the seduction of centralized simplification. The business of deploying atoms has no moat besides the violent one.
Not so long ago (200 yr? 300 yr?) almost all people spent a significant fraction (2/3+?) of their time just keeping themselves fed. We've automated enough of that that even with distribution, etc. the time budget for keeping oneself fed is now actually dominated by eating (~1/7) and not by production (~1/20?).
So, 200 or 300 years in the future, will we have done something similar to other physiological needs? other safety needs? (note here that many aspects of keeping oneself fed in prior centuries involved long-lead time skills that are no longer necessary because we produce and distribute food in an entirely different manner)
Upon reflection, the broken glasses scenario is not so dire: distribution of new lenses (produced in bulk) according to Rx is low-enough skill that one might imagine easily finding volunteers who schlep packages for the variety of social contact it affords. The toothache would be more difficult, because there treatment (currently) requires specialised knowledge. (and fixing the lens-making machine might be easy enough if one takes the "DEC repairman" attitude of parts are cheap, time and knowledge is expensive, so just swap old parts for new until it passes the self-test again?)