The processing-function relationships of many polymeric materials suffer from a predictive bottleneck that is analogous to that of chaotic systems. Many properties of polymer films (e.g., electronic mobilities, ionic conductivities, degree of crystallinity, fracture strain, among many others) are strongly dependent on processing details due to the kinetically-trapped nature of many films. That is not to say that the physics of typical processing steps are not well understood. Taking solution-processing as an example, the atomistic details of polymer solvation, mesoscopic stress fields from non-equilibrium flows, and the evolution of temperature and concentration gradients during drying processes can all be simulated with mature and accurate methodologies. Nevertheless, the necessary resolution in initial conditions is impractical to make such modeling predictive of any particular system, even if it can be descriptive of general behaviors and trends. Similar to the case of billiards, there is no contradiction in saying that many processing protocols are completely understandable but nevertheless unpredictable. It is a live question whether given a new polymer chemistry and macroscopic processing details, one could predict all processing-dependent properties of a non-equilibrium film (Note: equilibrium films are processing independent and so excluded from this discussion). We are skeptical that it will ever be possible due to the inherent accumulation of errors in moving between lengthscales and the limited resolution of initial conditions. The enduring art-form of crystallizing different polymorphs is an analogous application that illustrates the same point. For the current purposes, the polymer processing example only serves to illustrate the analogy between chaotic systems and the limited predictability of processes that are nevertheless well understood.