Preventing the Collapse of Civilization / Jonathan Blow (Thekla, Inc)

Caption notes

In this 2019 talk, Jonathan Blow challenges the intuition that technology improves automatically. He connects software failures he encountered, complicated toolchains and the transfer of knowledge between generations, worrying that a system manageable by today’s team may not remain maintainable by its successors. He advocates removing unnecessary steps and retaining an understanding of lower-level mechanisms. In the questions he also acknowledges inherent problem complexity and uncertainty about whether simplification will suffice. This is a developer’s argument, not an independently verified account of ancient civilizations, accidents, industry productivity or failure rates, and it does not establish measurable industry-wide or civilizational decline.