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jhidetoday at 2:55 AM1 replyview on HN

On the topic of warfare, wars are fought differently now. Compute will be mentioned in the same breath as total manufacturing output if a global war between superpowers erupts. In highly competitive industries this is already the case. Compute will be part of industrial mobilization in the same way that physical manufacturing or transportation capacity were mobilized in WWII. I’m not an expert on military computing but my intuition is that FLOPS are probably even more easily fungible into wartime compute than widget makers, and the US was able to go widgets->weapons on an unbelievable scale last time.


Replies

andrewljohnsontoday at 5:18 AM

You could argue that compute was a decisive factor in World War II even (used in code breaking and designing nuclear weapons).