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You can apply this line of reasoning on many markets, like the pharma or food industry which also have safety concerns. It strikes me as the kind initiatives EU

You can apply this line of reasoning on many markets, like the pharma or food industry which also have safety concerns. It strikes me as the kind initiatives EU attempts nowadays when realizing we are running behind on some tech and want to leverage the one possible advantage we have as a great centralizing power. Not too different from communist states, actually. I agree with the sentiment that redundancy seems wasteful, but it seems to me a necessary evil as a driving force in development, as with the right to private property in general.

jacquesm 7y ago
I'm reminded of the Manhattan project and I don't think they would have succeeded in their goal if they had tried to run 10 of those at once. There just aren't that many really great scientists in a space this narrow.
- arketyp 7y ago
  Fair point. And the moon mission. Autonomous driving is such a consumerist issue though, seems quite well suited for a free market dynamic. I'd rather see a great joint effort on fusion energy or something.
- tim333 7y ago
  It's kind of a different class of problem. With self driving you can have someone like Hotz or the Cruise guys knock up a system with limited resources and have it work quite well. You just can't do that with developing nuclear weapons. Also self driving is not a problem where you can put a bunch of geniuses in a room and have them calculate the correct design. There are too many unknowns. It needs experimentation and trial and error.
- iguy 7y ago
  They built complete factories for three different technologies, and finally delivered two totally different bomb designs. Which is a sign they were pretty worried about choosing to put all their smart guys on one path, and picking the wrong one. And the number of smart guys they had was certainly a real constraint. Even under their very stressed circumstances, exploration and competition were important.
  - mattrp 7y ago
    This is correct - read the fantastic “making of the atomic bomb” - the planners kept competition alive for as long as possible because no one really knew which path was going to work. In contrast the nazi project, among other reasons, failed because it focused nearly exclusively on heavy water and didn’t have internally competing projects.
- hgoel 7y ago
  Talk about twisting the argument. The Manhattan project was in competition with the Soviets and the Nazis, it was less a result of some unified front of all the smartest scientists in the world, and more of a result of "if we don't succeed first, someone much worse probably will". Your logic of "if there were 10 of them simultaneously, it wouldn't have worked out" is flawed and self serving in that if you ignore all competition and just divide a single competitor into any number of smaller entities, of course at some point they'll be too small to be viable.

jacquesm 7y ago

I'm reminded of the Manhattan project and I don't think they would have succeeded in their goal if they had tried to run 10 of those at once. There just aren't that many really great scientists in a space this narrow.

arketyp 7y ago
Fair point. And the moon mission. Autonomous driving is such a consumerist issue though, seems quite well suited for a free market dynamic. I'd rather see a great joint effort on fusion energy or something.
tim333 7y ago
It's kind of a different class of problem. With self driving you can have someone like Hotz or the Cruise guys knock up a system with limited resources and have it work quite well. You just can't do that with developing nuclear weapons. Also self driving is not a problem where you can put a bunch of geniuses in a room and have them calculate the correct design. There are too many unknowns. It needs experimentation and trial and error.
iguy 7y ago
They built complete factories for three different technologies, and finally delivered two totally different bomb designs. Which is a sign they were pretty worried about choosing to put all their smart guys on one path, and picking the wrong one. And the number of smart guys they had was certainly a real constraint. Even under their very stressed circumstances, exploration and competition were important.
- mattrp 7y ago
  This is correct - read the fantastic “making of the atomic bomb” - the planners kept competition alive for as long as possible because no one really knew which path was going to work. In contrast the nazi project, among other reasons, failed because it focused nearly exclusively on heavy water and didn’t have internally competing projects.
hgoel 7y ago
Talk about twisting the argument. The Manhattan project was in competition with the Soviets and the Nazis, it was less a result of some unified front of all the smartest scientists in the world, and more of a result of "if we don't succeed first, someone much worse probably will". Your logic of "if there were 10 of them simultaneously, it wouldn't have worked out" is flawed and self serving in that if you ignore all competition and just divide a single competitor into any number of smaller entities, of course at some point they'll be too small to be viable.