Have you heard of how in the late 1960s US military officials fed a computer with loads of data to predict the outcome of the Vietnam War being waged at the time... only for the computer to claim that the USA should have won in 1965?
🟢 Is this story true?
Well, sort of.
🟢 This article from 2017 about the truth behind this Pentagon computer scenario provides a cautionary tale of what can happen if we rely too much on computers and fail to take the overriding and heavily unpredictable human aspect to everything into account, not to mention the huge expectation for all this effort to provide the desired result.
🟢 Considering the current hype surrounding AI, it's noteworthy that the failures faced in the 1960s, i.e. how computers can't do context and culture ("calculating the incalculable"), are just as relevant today. Not everything can be "measured, quantified and computerised".
"In a world besotted by data, the apocryphal story about the Pentagon computers reminds us that the model is not the world, and that ignoring that reality can have terrible consequences."
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