Re: Japanese want a 30-year Robot Program

From: Rik van Riel (riel@nl.linux.org)
Date: Sat Aug 23 2003 - 22:16:45 MDT

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    On Thu, 21 Aug 2003, Mark Walker wrote:
    > ----- Original Message -----
    > From: "Anders Sandberg":
    >
    > > Real innovation cannot be planned, but you can try to set up a climate
    > > that benefits innovation.
    >
    > Is this a definitional claim or an empirical claim. When the American's
    > planned to go to the Moon by the end of the decade was this not a case
    > of "real innovation"? From what you say I guess not. Why not?

    It was real innovation, but not completely planned in advance.

    Arguably making available a large amount of money and telling
    people something along the lines of "just do it, I don't care
    how" would fall more along the lines of "setting up a climate
    that benefits innovation" instead of a planned thing.

    Letting companies send in their proposals for sub projects is
    something that I suspect has helped the Apollo project a lot.
    Imagine the current NASA bureaucracy trying to come up with
    all the components of the Apollo project, from the top down...

    Rik

    -- 
    "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
    Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
    by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan
    


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