Item — HN Reader

A close family member worked at Bell labs during the cold war era. According to them,

The reason is very simple. There was a big picture motivation: the war, followed by the cold war. Once the big picture motivation wasn't there anymore, that sort of organizational structure(or lack of it) does not work the same way. What ends up happening is what a sibling comment has noted:

> My observation has been that smart people don't want this anymore, at least not within the context of an organization. If you give your employees this freedom, many will take advantage of it and do nothing.

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You might say, but `grep` wasn't used for war! Correct, but it came up as a side effect of working on much larger endeavours that tied into that bigger picture.

This has been true for most of recent human history. You might know this already, but Fourier was part of most of Napoleon's expeditions, and his work on decomposing waveforms arose out of his work on the "big picture": ballistics.

2 comments

So what you’re saying is it will take a war fought by autonomous robots on behalf of two massively wealthy adversarial nations in order to finally get us a robot that can do the dishes?

Any big picture motivation works, war is just the most timeless human activity. But, the space programs of various countries are also good examples. However, one could of course argue that the space program arose out of competing in the cold war.

They are called 'Dishwashers'

War is simultaneously the best and worst thing humanity can do. Killing each other is a pointless activity, yet the imminent threat of death and the idea of destroying your enemy is the strongest motivator to work together and accomplish innovative and seemingly impossible tasks.

I would argue that it has little to do with war itself but the rather to environment where we can use collective effort to solve strategic goals.

There is a idea that collective action is always inferior to private action, but I would argue there is a subset of problems with outsized effects where solving the problem is far more important than solving the problem as efficient as possible. This is particular for problems where the effects are large and impossible for markets to price in all the effects.

One example is war fighting itself where winning is far more important than being cheap. Although efficiently matters, it only matters in the context of increasing your changes of winning. How would you price in the destruction of a city? How are you going to collect the money if you manage to save it?