When was the last time someone knew all there was to know? Who was the last person we could say probably knew all there was for them to know?

Cave men probably did, maybe some old philosophers like Plato or Pythagoras. I asked ChatGPT and it claims Davinci is a common answer. I ask this not to settle on a definitive name, but to show just how long it’s been since anyone could claim to know everything.

Just in the past 50 years enough knowledge has been created that in no one lifetime can we expect to know all of it, and this has been true for a long time. even on a surface level, there's just no way you really know everything.

Since it's related to my field, I'll use chip design as an example. These little chips have become so complex that a single person cannot be a whole chip designer. The depth at each step of the process is so much that people's entire careers are based around them.

We have engineers who fabricate the chip, engineers who design the architecture for it, ones who lay out the transistors, ones who code the design in RTL, those who verify it works, some who package them- and none of this even goes into the engineers who develop software for these weird silicon things. Each of these teams is a field, these people dedicate their whole life on ONE part of a chip. There's so much knowledge that exists in this field that no single person can tell you the details of everything start to finish.

This isn't limited to chip design, almost any topic can go this deep. So much so we're at a point where specialists have to forgo other knowledge to go deeper. It gets harder and harder to bridge connections between specializations because one must dedicate their whole life just to grasp a portion of one topic. We're reaching a hard limit of how much we can actually do in our lifespan.

Eventually, it will take our entire life to reach the edge of the unknown. We will not be able to come up with new knowledge, because there's too much that already exists as a prerequisite. No one will be able to even cover one singular specialization in their lifespan. We can compress this knowledge to it's densest point (ex: skipping derivations of equations, teaching proven things simply as fact), but as we discover more there is an eventual limit. At that point we've reached the limit of human knowledge.