http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/05/us-air-force-looking-to-integrate.html Tom Clancy, eat your heart out.
With the stuff the navy is rolling out, sharks are freaking obsolete. I'll take my chances playing hide-and-seek in the open water with a shark over any single US navy ship with bad intentions. I am not a "rah rah" military guy. I think we have reached a point of fetishizing the military. There's no denying that the US military is entering yet another level of power though.
The problem is the US (and really much of the world rather they want to admit it or not) has always fetishized advancement of technology and power. Be it through space, lasers, drones, exoskeletal suits, whatever. Everyone sees those as the first real step to what we grew up with be it Star Wars or the MAC gun from Halo. And don't forget a whole mess of critical and useful civilian tech came from government, thought not all for military applications, research (internet, GPS, freeze drying, computers). Obviously, computers had to be redesigned on a personal basis, much of the R&D was done by the US Government and a big defense contractor at the time with IBM.
Ya, I'm excited about the rail gun and laser weapon stuff in terms for what it means for dealing with incoming asteroids and such.
May be a problem but the U.S. has been a front leader on many fronts of technology due to military spending. I wouldn't call that a problem.
I don't find it a problem but too much emphasis on military advancement and not enough on cultural/intellectual advancement is. Kind of like how the world needs engineers but not everyone can be one. The world needs cooks, musicians, teachers, etc. Too much focus on one discipline and it's folly.
That's a stretch. It started from Alan Turing's brain. The fact that he was working with the military (not US) when it came from his brain is merely evidence that military employment was plentiful during WW2.
You could pretty much make that argument for most complicated inventions, though. ENIAC displayed, in material, the fundamentals behind Turing's work. And you can't sell folks like Zuse and Babbage short. Mostly, the big role that ENIAC had was (with the IBM funded Harvard Mark I) showing IBM the feasibility of computers and launching an already giant industrial leader behind electronics. That was more-so where I was going. From the mid-40s and on it was the US that was leading the charge with the advancement of computers.
The physical implementation of the Turing Machine in usable form was inevitable. Well, it was inevitable after the invention of the transistor*. We don't give the construction company credit for The Guggenheim. *Most important invention in the history of the world
