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Sunday, May 08, 2022

War and Technology

 Good piece on the topic and related implications. 

War and Tech (and ACM)

By Moshe Y. Vardi  Communications of the ACM, May 2022, Vol. 65 No. 5, Page 9  10.1145/3528570

As COVID-19 surged around the globe two years ago, I reflected on a fundamental lesson that we must learn from our pandemic unpreparedness. I quoted the economist William A. Galston, who asked: "What if the relentless pursuit of efficiency, which has dominated American business thinking for decades, has made the global economic system more vulnerable to shocks?" arguing that efficiency, which comes through optimal adaptation to an existing environment, can be at the expense of resilience, which requires the capacity to adapt to disruptive changes in the environment.

But in those early days of the pandemic, I grossly underestimated how much our obsession with efficiency came at the expense of resilience. At that point, the main symptoms of our fragility were the shortage of paper products and personal protective equipment. But by late 2021, we were all talking about the supply-chain crisis, described by the New York Times as "Ships stuck at sea, warehouses overflowing, trucks without drivers: the highly intricate and interconnected global supply chain is in upheaval, with little end in sight." A specific aspect of the supply-chain crisis was the global chip shortage—everything "smart" requires a chip, but demand outstrips supply. .... ' 

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