system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Will we ever reach a point where it must become necessary for people to specialize their entire lives?

Like will a soft cap, where research has gone so far that it takes a lifetime to catch up, ever occur? Will we avoid this by specializing kids after they have learned all they need to research? Because eventually, it will take an immense amount of time to learn what you need to know to research, right?
gpt
No.

Because specializations and abstractions.

If single specialization would become too big for single person to learn, it will begin split into multiple sub-specializations. This is slow, but natural process. As part of this process, abstractions happen between those sub-specializations. And some of those sub-specializations might become fields by themselves.

Take computers. No single person can understand whole process that happens on the lowest of levels in chip as you visit a website. There are at least dozens of abstractions that are involved. One person might understand low-level chip design, another might understand how chips communicate, another might understand how bits are handled by OS, another might understand how web browser operates and another how website itself works and many inbetweens. Historically computing was just extension electrical engineering, but as it grew it became it's own field. And then it divided into software and hardware. And even those are divided into many sub-specializations.

Same thing happens both in science and engineering.