"Most of our information infrastructure today is more akin to nano-engineering." #readingToday

Even a small amount of noise in the distribution of starting times could lead to unexpected effects in the equilibration time, sometimes annealing the material, sometimes disrupting it. This made the illusion of determinism difficult to promise. The lesson was that there is more to scaling than a simple model can predict, when one deals with small numbers. The continuity we experience in bulk materials comes from many more orders of magnitude of averaging that a few tens of agents. Most of our information infrastructure today is more akin to nano-engineering.

In Search of Certainty, Mark Burgess, 2013