[extropy-chat] War and technological progress

[BillK]

On 5/1/07, Thomas wrote:
> That's a good point, but I didn't say all the war funding diminished
> medical and technological progress.  Still, these increased developments
> cannot be vast enough to justify the deaths and the enormous
> disproportion of the allocations.  I doubt this war will prove as
> proportionally fruitful for progress as WWII.  We had much better
> leadership then.
>
<snip>
>
> Does your general "Not true!" mean you think Bush a good leader for us?
>  Does it mean you think war the best choice for achieving progress?
>  Does it mean you think me seriously wrong or deceitful?  Or do you
> perhaps think Bush impeachable for mixing politics and religion on the
> stem cell issue?  -- Thomas
>


I don't do political discussion.  So Bush is irrelevant to my comments.

And my comments are not intended to justify any war.

Just the facts. Many people are so overpowered by the horror of war
that they refuse to recognise that many technical advances come out of
the pressure cooker of wartime.
WWII was remarkable in this respect.

A bit of googling will bring out a list of stuff that the current war
is producing. Some pretty unbelievable stuff is in there. Driverless
cars, for dog's sake!

See:  <http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/html/military.html>

Darpa projects include robot vehicles, computer language translation,
unmanned air
vehicles for observation and combat, swarms of bot devices, laser
weapons, remote surgery, many battlefield medical improvements, etc.

Agreed, wars concentrate on weapons technology. But radar was weapons
tech, so was jet planes, so was O&M for controlling factory
production. When the war stops, all the tech gets reused for
civilians.

It doesn't justify the war or the many deaths. But new tech arrives
quicker when a nation is perceived as being in a fight for survival.


BillK