With recent developments in our understanding of heuristic processes and their simulation by digital computers, the way is open to deal scientifically with ill-structured problems – to make the computer coextensive with the human mind.
Here is Navy Matters on single vs. multi function system design: So many people want to cram every capability they can think of onto every […]
Do you think that the distinction between growth at the frontier and catch up growth is always so well defined? So if you think about China, they seem to have innovations: how quickly they can build things; they have an autocratic government, but they’ve managed to keep reasonable stability and the public on board. Isn’t that kind of innovation like a technological innovation and their growth in a way is at some other frontier rather than being just catch up?
We are confronted with the fact that Moore’s Law has led to transistor density growing at 35% per year, creating a vast increase in the number of calculations that can be performed per second, for a constant dollar expenditure. Great! Then, we are told there are 18x more people working in transistor-related research today than in 1971.
Russ Roberts: What is the most important concept in political economy?… your answer, Mike, really surprised me. What was it? Michael Munger: Well, I would claim… that […]
At the frontier, advanced progress is made by trial-and-error and error and error and error. Efficiency in the allocation of resources means doing this calculus of net-present value, expected future cash flows, cost versus benefits. But, at the frontier, you can’t define the benefits.
Here is Jim Galambos on Voices from DARPA, talking about platform design and cost disease: What do we mean by system of systems? It’s really this […]
It may well startle one of the 439 Lockheed engineers, say, who worked on the P3A Orion modification of the Electra, to learn that in […]
Xerox PARC came out of a similar structure [as Bell Labs]. Xerox at the time was a structural monopoly and not a legal one because […]
DARPA and the service research labs achieve amazing results. Have you heard about electronics that will physically vanish on command to prevent adversaries from copying our […]
DARPA has a cultural anthropologist with interesting insights: Cultural anthropology really studies the world we make for ourselves. There we veer into the realm of […]
I’m happy to announce that I’m an Emergent Ventures fellow! I start with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University on October 22. My venture […]
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