‘I Could Solve Most of Your Problems’: Eric Schmidt’s Pentagon Offensive
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Then came Vietnam. Eventually McNamara would admit
> "We were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why."
You can read more in "McNamara Recalls, and Regrets, Vietnam" https://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/09/world/mcnamara-recalls-an....
Besides military problems, we face environmental catastrophe, which Silicon Valley's ethos that technology will solve it, when it's mostly exacerbating it, and I expect Schmidt will end up more than "wrong, terribly wrong."
The parallels with Donald Rumsfeld's time as Secretary of Defense are remarkable - it seems Rumsfeld was making all the moves and mistakes that McNamara made. I fully expect Eric Schmidt to suffer the same fate.
It's (IMHO) not as good as The Fog of War, but it's still very much worth a watch.
I wonder who the Roman or Byzantine McNamaras are? Surely our foolishness extents deep into the past.
> By the mid-1960's, Mr. McNamara says, it was clear that "political stability did not exist and was unlikely ever to be achieved"
You can not call this just an incompetency. He is a type of a person who can not be entrusted with lacing his own shoes, let alone statecraft.
People must stop decrying types like McNamara, Kisinger, Dulles as some kind of "smart calculating types." They were top idiots at the apex of power, and their coming was a prelude to what America got itself in now.
WW2 was about outproducing and out-delivering competitors - the U.S. won largely because its collective industrial might built weapons that the Axis powers couldn't match. And it was directed largely through top-down control: FDR and the War Department had broad control over large swaths of the American economy, high-ranking generals and admirals directed huge military operations, and the public trusted their authorities enough to play their part.
I wonder how much of the structure of modern-day nation-states stems from WW2, and how much is misaligned to current technology and problems. Military technology has a way of dictating political organization, and military technology is pretty different now than in 1945.
Is this because the journalists reported in line of thought of the outlet they were working for?
I wholeheartedly disagree. I contend that McNamara, Kisinger, and Dulles were smart calculating types, but STILL the wrong person for the job.
Miss-characterizing past statesmen idiots paves the way and lowers the bar the next round of statesmen, who only need to differentiate themselves by not being idiots.
This is exactly what is required, isn't it?
You had no shortage of people from the field of policy studies who got hired to the white house not passing even that low bar.
May I know, who are you?
Claiming that McNamara, Kissinger, and Dulles were all idiots and above that low bar will do better is a recipe for failure.
"The Best and the Brightest" (https://www.amazon.com/Best-Brightest-David-Halberstam/dp/04...)
The title refers to individuals who at the time were widely admired -- including of course Robert McNamara. These individuals were of keen intellect, and had been educated at Ivy League and equivalent schools; many had PhD's. They had a reputation as successful managers and leaders who prided themselves on straight talk. And yet, these "uber-men," working together as a team with the best of intentions, gradually managed to entangle the US into the hell of the Vietnam war, by many accounts mismanaged the war, and, last but least, deceived the public about it.
Reading through their Wiki pages briefly, the thing that stands out to me the most are the ages. McNamara was 42 when he became SecDef. Schmidt is currently 65. Those 23 years matter on the back end. Schmidt may have the dynamism still, but his career is set and his life's trajectory is on the downslope. McNamara's career apexed with the SecDef role. He was at the height of his working life. Sure, Schmidt is smart and hard working, but that fire doesn't seem to be there like it was with McNamara, understandably.
> While that philosophy has led to social networks that spread disinformation and other unintended consequences, Mr. Schmidt said he was convinced that applying new and relatively untested technology to complex situations — including deadly ones — would make service members more efficient and bolster the United States in its competition with China.
If the NYT would cast an equally cynical eye at politicians as they are doing at Eric Schmidt, it might actually be productive.
To me, this article is so drenched in loathing that it's hard to read. (E.g., the second paragraph that I highlighted seems to misattribute elements of the authors' opinions to Eric Schmidt.)
"NYT dislikes this guy so much it's distracting. I wish they did this with most politicians."
They're extremely critical of anything the GOP does, and moderately negative on the populist left. Maybe they're too cosy with corporate Democrats, but those are the same Davos set as Schmidt et al.
If anything, I feel like the Silicon Valley titans have gotten a free pass from the media for too long. It's only in the past few years that issues like data privacy or monopoly power have started to get coverage in major media after decades of the EFF or Mozilla banging their lonely drums.
It's always framed as, "[thing] is happening, I don't like it. [Platform] is too powerful, they're too big, and they tolerate [terrorism/racism/foreign propaganda]". The article is published, gets rewritten by other journos, [platform] has its censors wipe or suppress [thing], and publication magically forgets that [platform]'s market position was ever problematic.
This happens a lot, both to the right and to leftists with critiques of the established political order.
> Do you really think the NYT is uncritical of politicians?
From their own WH Correspondent: Once again, wondering how Trump would have fared had he ever run for office in NY and had to face either the NYC or Albany press corp.
... guess the NYT doesn't think highly of themselves at all.
NYT On Biden: We found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Biden, beyond hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable.
Later removed because "the [Biden] campaign thought that the phrasing was awkward"
The NYT is flaming garbage.
NYT hired the founding editor of BuzzFeed News, whose nearly first article at NYT was investigating NYT's cover-up of Reade's allegations and exposing NYT's collusion with the Biden campaign, in the form of an interview with an NYT executive editor who freely admits it all and can't understand what all the fuss is about.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/business/media/joe-biden-...
BuzzFeed News is the team bringing integrity to the NYT.
Actually, it's kind of fun to see the lefties attacking one another.
More please.
We have somewhat better (but still bad) image search, and somewhat better (but still bad) machine translations. Anything else?
Even if there were no benefits, I think the quote in question was pointless without noting this. But what the quote actually refers to is a "worldview where advances in software and A.I. are the keys to figuring out almost any issue" — I would say it's safe to say that software has had some positive impact in the world.
You forget what the NYT produces... it is Manufacturing Consent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
Also, Schmidt could solve a lot of problems by stopping the censorship of non-mainstream content on Google Search, YouTube and possibly elsewhere.
Finally, he could solve a bunch of problems by _stopping_ Google's collaboration with the US government and the NSA.
Yeah because exactly what the world needs is a bunch of Machine Learning algorithms thrown at matters of life and death and strategic decision making of the US military.
Over the last ten years technology has really turned into a cult. I think Eric should go and watch Colossus: The Forbin Project if he's never seen it.
Obviously these problems are difficult in some way, otherwise they would have been solved, but at least pick problems that are worth solving.
But I'm equally mad at not wanting to fix boring infrastructure first, like parent said. I see a lot of high quality transformation efforts, albeit anecdotally, in the military. Can we focus on the more boring civic systems, lest we find out that not only COBOL unemployment platforms are in trouble?
Problems like the IRS website are are about incompetence at the lowest levels, not incompetence at the highest levels.
The apparently-lousy contractor is not just randomly inept. They are a product of high-level decisions to have a slow, inflexible hiring process, to replace lots of in-house expertise with contractors, and to award contracts in a way that emphasizes skill with the contracting process over skill at delivering useful results.
It’s essentially a political problem and a well-known CEO certainly has the clout to catch politicians’ ears.
That being said, I am not American, so my opinion on this is irrelevant.