Since these are all large subjects containing multiple domains of expertise, I am inclined to adopt the following rule: anything someone nominates as a bottleneck should be treated as a bottleneck until we have a convincing explanation for why it is not. I expect that once we have a good enough understanding of the relevant fields, convincing explanations should be able to resolve whole groups of prospective bottlenecks.
There are also places where I would expect bottlenecks to appear even if they have not been pointed out yet. These two leap to mind:
1. New intersections between two or more fields.
2. Everything at the systems level of analysis.
I feel like fast progress can be made on both types. While it is common for different fields to have different preferred approaches to a problem, it feels much rarer for there not to be any compatible approaches to a problem in both fields. The challenge would lie in identifying what those approaches are, which mostly just requires a sufficiently broad survey of each field. The systems level of analysis is always a bottleneck in engineering problems; the important thing is to avoid the scenario where it has been neglected.
It feels easy to imagine a scenario where the compatible approach from one of the fields is under-developed, so we would have to go back and develop the missing tools before we can really integrate the fields. It is also common even in well-understood areas for a systems level analysis to identify a critical gap. This doesn’t seem any different to the usual process of problem solving, it’s just each new iteration gets added to the bottleneck list.
Since these are all large subjects containing multiple domains of expertise, I am inclined to adopt the following rule: anything someone nominates as a bottleneck should be treated as a bottleneck until we have a convincing explanation for why it is not. I expect that once we have a good enough understanding of the relevant fields, convincing explanations should be able to resolve whole groups of prospective bottlenecks.
There are also places where I would expect bottlenecks to appear even if they have not been pointed out yet. These two leap to mind:
1. New intersections between two or more fields.
2. Everything at the systems level of analysis.
I feel like fast progress can be made on both types. While it is common for different fields to have different preferred approaches to a problem, it feels much rarer for there not to be any compatible approaches to a problem in both fields. The challenge would lie in identifying what those approaches are, which mostly just requires a sufficiently broad survey of each field. The systems level of analysis is always a bottleneck in engineering problems; the important thing is to avoid the scenario where it has been neglected.
It feels easy to imagine a scenario where the compatible approach from one of the fields is under-developed, so we would have to go back and develop the missing tools before we can really integrate the fields. It is also common even in well-understood areas for a systems level analysis to identify a critical gap. This doesn’t seem any different to the usual process of problem solving, it’s just each new iteration gets added to the bottleneck list.