Superiority (1951)
metallicman.com
metallicman.com
With any new technology we expect certain performance - we get this from the “The Economist effect” - where the simple one paragraph explanation of a complex field enables us to have a grasp on a concept but not the full difficulties.
So we expect the nuclear missile to hit its target whereas the thing about nukes is they were designed to be used despite being horribly inaccurate.
Anticipation is time bounded - we get depressed when the thing we expect is not done today - we can imagine it so why can’t we have it. This is the problem behind all crunch development times, all VC funded CEO replacements and every lying progress report ever.
And experience is what tells us where we really are - it is looking at a Trident missile spiralling round in front page photos and saying … what have we missed.
Weapons operate always at the frontier of what is possible. Nuclear weapons probably are not really there - we can fly the prototype over unchallenged airspace but launching rockets is hard.
Whether it's weapons or civilian technology like smartphones, automobiles, or a "cashless society" we know there are side effects, and unknowns. But we choose to focus on only the rosy, optimistic side.
For most of us that is pandering to laziness, convenience, low-effort and less thinking. For those involved in making money, the negatives are far away in space and time, so they can always kick the can down the road.
This is how supremacy becomes weakness.
Money buys a louder voice and drowns out cautious minds with better vision of the long-term future and marginal scenarios. They are Cassandras. Luddites.
Those with experience are dismissed as old and irrelevant.
Hubris leads to absolute dependency and complacency.
In a long enough time-line we'll always encounter an accident or enemy using older "low-tech". The greatest threat to our security is always our own hubris. Sadly I see buckets of it here on HN.
If we assume the 80/20 rule to hold about most things in world (80% profits from 20% customers, 80% of benefits to society from 20% workers), then we can assume the same 80/20 rule applies to the bits left over - ie the remining 20% of profits will have 80% of those generated by 20% of the left over 80% of customers)
Roughly speaking then 96% of all good stuff comes from 36% of stuff we do
We could say then that if we could find the 2/3 of useless activity that only generates 4% of good stuff we can for example cut carbon emissions by 2/3 - and only need to lose the crappy plastic toys on front of magazines, or most peoples commutes or …
What I think I am saying is that 2/3 of the jobs people do are useless - and yet in any organisation they are the majority and hence bend the organisation
Don’t worry dear reader I am sure like me you are one of the non useless ones … like me , like me
Golgafrinchans [0]
Now if we could only work out what that useless third is. ?!
But there's always the finite risk that plastic landfill fodder and chindogu attached to kids magazines is the essential saving grace of humanity.
:)
That's just pulling arbitrary number out of thin air with extra steps.
China or maybe Japan though, I could see it being able to maybe catch on there though, it could be very beneficial to the problems they're facing with their aging populations and abysmal and worsening (heading to ~zero?) reproduction.
(1)I'm being a bit coy here because during Uncle Ronnie's administration, I had a job and security clearance involving this.
1. We have learnt not to trust untested equipment
2. We have learnt that under pressure well meaning people will demonstrate equipment that while kind of representative of the reality are honed, improved and generously helped to perform well on test
3. Only repeatable performance under active competition is a real measure. It’s why sane people like open well designed markets. And it’s why weapons that get battle tested tend to be reliable
I am sure that overall if we read the red button nukes will fire and land and kill millions.
It’s just the day after I expect that the auditors will find a large number failed to fire, or failed to leave the tube, went the wrong way or simply otherwise went wrong
The point of credible threat is not one shot one kill, but so many shots we can basically guarantee a kill.
In other other words, both sides hold enormous number of nukes ostensibly to ensure they have some to fire after a first strike - but the effects of an enemy first strike are indistinguishable from poor engineering and beauracracy
I mean maybe the USA was a on it’s A game for fifty plus years … us in the UK well …
Not that that is a fun headline of course.
Obviously everything around it is super secret but the muttering around this one seemed to be that the rocket noticed the warhead seemed wrong (which it was because you don't strap a real nuke to it!) And aborted itself. I only add this because I think its interesting.
Oh, that sounds like plausible muttering, and may be consistent with the utterances of the naval authorities.
But I suspect this post was in response to the "it's obsolete" comments on the F35 post earlier today, with lots of calls for work on drones.
The warning in Clarke's story is not that we shouldn't build new tech, however. We should absolutely build new tech, and have skunk works and the like. But we shouldn't stop building the existing tech as long as it is effective in battle. The concern comes when we don't have the capacity to build "what's next" because the most important piece is made in a little island off the coast of another continent full of potential adversaries.
In some cases the old system is outclassed so badly attempting to keep using it would be a fatal mistake (cavalry charges at machine gun nests). Other times a new system can be way better, but the rate of production is so far behind the old model you can't make enough fast enough to make a difference. And then other times the new systems have such terrible weaknesses they can be a risk to the entire nation state.
Those don't take any hindsight.
Another organisation I know of replaced its "old" .net desktop client with a nice shiny Microsoft derived web solution using some customised COTs and it would solve all their maintenance issues. Sigh its a disaster as expected made all the worse because they fired the developers before the switch was even really done.
Over and over this mistake is made to rewrite and replace instead of refactor on the assumption the old code is crufty rather than battle hardened and that writing new code is easier than editing old. Never do these organisations learn to develop more maintenance friendly systems along the way.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke
> During the Second World War from 1941 to 1946, he served in the Royal Air Force as a radar specialist and was involved in the early-warning radar defence system, which contributed to the RAF's success during the Battle of Britain. Clarke spent most of his wartime service working on ground-controlled approach (GCA) radar
> Although GCA did not see much practical use during the war, after several years of development it proved vital to the Berlin Airlift of 1948–1949.
I think he must have had some pretty good first-hand experience WRT deploying new tech during a war!
The US also famously had the whole Mark-14 torpedo fiasco, the torpedo issue in the story is not quite similar but there might be an echo.
USA and the west focussing on ‘super weapons’ like f22, f35, super carriers etc etc. and Ukraine is losing the war because they don’t have enough bullets and mortars, and we don’t have enough factories to increase production.
Most of the modern USA weapons only work under condition of being totally dominant and being able to have your supply chain work perfectly. This story really is a very good analogy.
One further point - and this is what makes this war even more tragic - say Ukraine do get all the super weapons annd they do work as expected, and are on their merry way to Moscow, what would Russia do? Most likely their military doct9rine of dropping some tactical or not-so-tactical nukes.
As Sean Bean knows, one does not simply invade a nuclear power.
Ukraine controls a lot of their territory, they have a lot of well paved runways to operate out of.
This delirious out of touchness is making the West lose the war.
We did give them long range missiles. And now quite a lot of tanks. But - and this a has been admitted to by the pentagon - they didn’t think though or provide for servicing them. The poor buggers have all these different western tanks with parts that don’t match. And the Abram’s is powered literally by a jet engine and needs constant servicing. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so completely tragic.
https://bulgarianmilitary.com/2024/03/12/unstoppable-russian...
Europe on the other hand unilaterally disarmed after the Berlin Wall fell because they couldn’t anticipate a world where Russia reverted to historical form and the US wasn’t carrying NATO on its back.
Now they’ve got Putin on one side, potentially Trump pulling out of NATO on the other, oops.
It’s an established fact that Ukraine is running out of everything and we can’t make more.
Even CNN now reporting it. https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/03/10/politics/russia-artillery...
Ukraine has no f22, f35, super carriers etc etc. If it would have them, then it would stomp over invading army.
The Analyzer contained just short of a million vacuum tubes and needed a team of five hundred technicians to maintain and operate it
...and yet it in no way invalidates the point of the story, which hits home just as hard as ever.
Technician -> MLOps Engineers
There is wisdom here that is directly applicable to the work of the average HN denizen. Boring beats cool almost every time.