A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible.

As recently as 1980 or so, an extremely smart person could understand pretty much everything in the technology world. Now that is no longer remotely possible.

But that happens over and over again — in 1800, the same was true for science.

As the world gets more complex, it’s just not possible for one human mind to hold much of it. I have a fairly broad and pretty wide understanding of IT, but I probably know 2-3% of the IT world reasonably well. The average IT person is probably somewhere in the 0.25% to 0.5% range.

And unfortunately the world gets more complex all the time, so the amount one person can understand gets lower each year. So, relatively, we are all getting dumber all the time.