A very familiar class of discontinuities in engineering refers to functionality being successfully implemented for the first time. This is a moment where a design finally comes together, all its components adjusted to fit with each other, the show-stopping bugs removed from the system. And then it just works, where it didn’t before.
And yet, counterintuitively, these discontinuities don’t lead to discontinuities, because it is invariably the case that the first prototype is not dramatically more useful than what came before—often less so—and requires many rounds of debugging and improvement before the new technology can fulfill its potential.
Arguably, you can call the whole process of development “planning”, and look only at the final product. So, your argument seems to depend on an arbitrarily chosen line between cognitive work and effects that are to be judged for “discontinuity”.
A very familiar class of discontinuities in engineering refers to functionality being successfully implemented for the first time. This is a moment where a design finally comes together, all its components adjusted to fit with each other, the show-stopping bugs removed from the system. And then it just works, where it didn’t before.
And yet, counterintuitively, these discontinuities don’t lead to discontinuities, because it is invariably the case that the first prototype is not dramatically more useful than what came before—often less so—and requires many rounds of debugging and improvement before the new technology can fulfill its potential.
Arguably, you can call the whole process of development “planning”, and look only at the final product. So, your argument seems to depend on an arbitrarily chosen line between cognitive work and effects that are to be judged for “discontinuity”.