Slashdot Mirror
Looking Back at 1984 Report On "Radical Computing"
An anonymous reader writes "The Department of Defense has just released a long restricted report (PDF) by the JASON group entitled Radical Computing. This 1984 study outlines a number of alternate computing methods that could 'result in a radical improvement in computing.' The study attempts to explain the paradox of how the Russian lag in developing VLSI chips curiously did not critically hinder their accomplishments in space missions, ICBMs and chess computation. The authors speculate that the Russians might have achieved breakthroughs in alternative computing methods such as residue arithmetic and symbolic computing. (More cynical types assume the Russians bought or stole US chips from the French or other too-helpful go-betweens.)"
"The paper, published by the Government Attic website, also mentions how, eventually, highly parallel computers could make use of these alternative computational methods. Also discussed are such things as functional programming, interval arithmetic, recursive machines, multiple processor concurrency, fast recurrence evaluation, DDA machines, data-flow, and hyper-column cortex model. Which of these ideas ever came to fruition?"
Umm. Crap.
I've got nothing.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
Being Russian, I always enjoy reading "In Soviet Russia..." jokes on Slashdot
The authors speculate that the Russians might have achieved breakthroughs in alternative computing methods such as residue arithmetic and symbolic computing.
Never propose a simple solution when exotic, impractical sounding one will do instead.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
...prefer US chips over French fries?
The Russians MAY have stolen Einstein's chronosphere and travelled back in time to develop residue arithmetic and symbolic computing, but probably didn't.
Please reword the summary for neutrality.
I think it's safe to say they didn't have any exotic computer technology. Of course, hindsight is 20-20. ^.^
THIS is VLSI: http://www.mycpu.eu/ ...ahem...just not all in one chip.
We spent an awful lot of time and effort in the area of efficient function design as well. The crucial problem was how to derive a precise 'enough' result in a given number of CPU cycles. We did all kinds of functional partial solutions in order to break down complex problems into 'do-able' chunks. The simple fact is that computers aren't that good at Real Analysis, Solid Analytic Geometry and multidimensional trigonometry. You have to crush all that down into composite problems that computers ARE good at.
how the Russian lag in developing VLSI chips curiously did not critically hinder their accomplishments in space missions, ICBMs and chess computation.
VLSI is not necessarily an advantage in space missions. You can do a lot of embedded computing just using low density, but radiation hardened parts. USSR had several chipsets that were suitable for military and space use. I can't find them on the Web right now (forgot their p/n). With regard to SWaP, one engineer told me "our rockets are powerful enough" :-)
Integrate *You*
For further reading, see Byte Magazine from April 1991. Surely all good /. readers have a copy somewhere?
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
most of there "insights" were over active imaginations.
Not quite. Sometimes, certainly, they just imagined the threat, but equally often they fell for some simple, yet clever, Soviet spoofs. Much was made in intelligence and in the popular press, for example, of those terrifying parade ground films showing division after division of Soviet infantry marching through Red Square, with air support flying over and armored divisions interspersed. It turned out at least once, however, that the hundreds of bombers flying overhead consisted of just a couple squadrons flying a continuous loop above the parade ground, circling behind the camera to pass by again and again. Very likely the same happened with the armor sometimes.
The Cold War was all about fear, and when analysts fell for something that seems stupid now it's not exclusively that they convinced themselves or became hysterical; the armed forces of both sides did a lot of work to keep up credible appearances of overwhelming force, usually without the actual hardware to back them up.
One of the main serious uses of computing, especially in the cold war, was solving partial differential equations. Whether these be for orbital calculations, stability analysis, EM simulation, etc..., solving partial differential equations is a critical part of any advanced engineering program.
The American approach really started in the 50s with the advent of programmable computers, and is very stereotypical: just find a decent approximation. Modern western engineering is all about using pretty advanced computers to find arbitrary numerical approximations to tricky PDEs. It's reached its culmination in modern engineering design, where most advanced products are designed and simulated in computers, and prototyping only occurs at the very end of the process.
The Soviets had computers.... some home built, some Western, but generally speaking they weren't very good. The Soviet approach was also very stereotypical: get an army of mathematicians and engineers to find exact analytic solutions to the problems you're trying to solve. You'd have armies of engineers and technicians designing things that in the west we'd give to a couple of engineers with some computer time.
The end result is that some Soviet engineering is stunningly brilliant. And a lot is absolute crap. One of the reasons the west won the cold war is that we were just much better at solving partial differential equations. This report is unsurprising... the Soviet approach just seems so stupid to any Western engineer unfamiliar with it, that you'd have to assume they had some magic trick up their sleeve. But nope, just a lot of brainpower misdirected into a lot of horribly inefficient pursuits.
Appendix 1a - and I call myself a FORTRAN programmer!
FGD 135
"Shall we play a game?"
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
Knowing the parameters they have to meet now, amateurs have managed suborbital rockets with minimal computation. With the recent change in the upper bounds of amateur spaceflight (ie. when FAA says NASA takes over permissions) and the knowledge in hand, amateur orbital flight is a matter of time. NASA helped develop and made use of VLSI not because it made what they were doing possible, but because it made what they were already doing easier.
As for doing without, the Russians provided us with proof positive during the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. They flew first and we went up to meet them because we had better aim. Our guys used an HP 48 handheld for calculations and their clock was fed by the signals from the atomic clock at National Bureau of Standards. When we got there we saw they were using, respectively, slide rules, pencil and paper, and a stop watch. But our having the better technology did not prevent them from getting there. And their having lesser technology did not prevent them successfully participating in the several cat-and-mouse rendezvous practices that followed the first.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong on this, but aren't we still using processors designed in the 1970's on our space shuttles? High degrees of VLSI lend themselves easily to interference from solar radiation, so why would not having VLSI have impaired the Soviet space effort?
as far as technology development is concerned. With non-native introductions quite possible. My car reference is in the shop.
This is exactly what I was going to post.
Too late to the party this time ...
Or have I developed P.R.S.M.F.P.D. (Psychic Retroactive Slashdot Meme First Posting Disorder) ?
Maybe I did post this. My mind and I have been having some issues with each other lately.
Maybe that post isn't even there and I just think it is.
Then again Slashdot might be a total figment of my imagination. Nah, no-one could be that messed up.
The Americans spent billions fabricating chips that would work in zero G and high energy particle fields. The Russians just used pencils.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
A lot of people are dismissing this report, but the ideas of residual arithmetic may in fact be plausible for things like GPUs, which are good at doing parallel computations and where the magnitude of the results are finite and known (two things the report mentions as making a problem suitable for residual arithmetic).
One thing which caught my eye is when they demonstrate how to evaluate polynomials using table look ups. It might be conceivable that things like ray/surface intersections in a ray-tracer, for example, could be represented by tables in a GPU specially built for ray-tracing. Without working through the math (which would be quite a chore), it certainly seems like a fairly plausible idea.
(More cynical types assume the Russians bought or stole US chips from the French or other too-helpful go-betweens.)
Back in the early '90s, one of my professors had come over from the USSR to teach Comp Sci. The local ACM chapter, at least a couple of times if not more, had him give a talk on the state of computing in Russia. This was exactly what he laid out. That shell companies were setup in France to lease IBM equipment (all you could do in those days for this very reason). The shell would fly-by-night the IBM to Russia where they would part it out. Notably, iirc, Romania was where they reverse engineered the machine code of the OS back into a somewhat usable assembly language. This, he would explain, was why all the really nasty viruses for PCs came from Romania - because the writers could eyeball instruction code and tell you what it was going to do. They also knew every crevice of the system, which became the advent of viruses hanging out in BIOS's and system clock memory.
He eventually became uncomfortable giving the talks and stopped, to my knowledge.
Very important notice. Eu Curto Orkut
i like this notice because it's really...
Como para fazer, sem que os russos nos forneceu uma prova positiva durante a Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. Eles voaram primeiro e fomos ao encontro deles, porque nós tivemos uma pontaria melhor. Nosso pessoal usou um handheld HP 48 para os cálculos e seu relógio foi alimentado pelos sinais do relógio atômico do National Bureau of Standards. Quando chegamos lá, vimos que eles estavam usando, respectivamente, réguas, lápis e papel, e um cronômetro. Mas o nosso ter a melhor tecnologia não impedi-los de chegar lá. E a sua tecnologia que menor não impedi-los com êxito vários participantes no gato-e-rato práticas encontro que se seguiu ao primeiro.
Good!!
...government document...
...government document...
...government document...
This page is intentionally left blank.
-- Whoa, the authors of Star Fleet Battles worked for the DoD?!?
TFS reflects what US didn't know back then, not the current state of knowledge...
Apart from Setun mentioned by other posters (which, although interesting, didn't really influence much the race in technology; about which the pdf is all about) there's also, most importantly, this gem:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus_(computer)
Soviet domestically developed supercomputers. Multiprocessor superscalar RISC machine few years before the report from TFS was written; later VLIW long before the Itanium. Used specifically in "how the hell Soviets are keeping up" areas
(the man apparently responsible for them works for Intel for some time now...)
One that hath name thou can not otter
I may be wrong in my recollection but I think I have heard a Russian technician (I once worked a bit with him) telling me that some (?) space and ballistic engines were equiped with mecanical "computers". Highly radiation tolerant things, BTW.
He also told me how, during his military service, his team used the parabolic antenna of a truck-borne radar to capture and cook rabbits for their meals...
However, I have a lot of respect for the Russians. It is always fascinating to discover the logic behind their choices.
I worked in a college computer lab with a Russian expat
He was extremely familiar with DCL (Digital Command Language) and VAX architecture. Apparently, he had spent years working on DEC VAX clones in the old Soviet Union.
I also remember reading that DEC would etch stuff like "check six" in Russian onto integrated circuits to let the Russians know that they knew it was being reverse engineered
Wherever You Go, There You Are
But can it run Linux?
the shuttle uses old CPUs from the 1970s because it was designed in the 70s, eh? and you're not going to change a processor that works, just to be newer
Modern flight processors are things like the Rad750 (a Power PC) and various flavors of SPARC (V7 and V8), as well as a raft of microcontrollers (ColdFire, 8051, MicroBlaze)
And, for FPGAs, Actel and Xilinx are both popular (RTAX2000, Virtex II, Virtex 4)
Anybody remember Prograph? I actually owned it. Amazingly enough, it lives on in a product called Marten.
The simple fact is that you don't need much more than a slide rule and a room full of mathematicians to solve most cold war era engineering problems. Russia also didn't have much trouble importing anything they didn't make themselves via 3rd parties.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Not to mention that the Shuttle, and Earth-vicinity spacecraft generally, don't really need much computing power. You have ground-side machines to do the heavy lifting (which isn't all that heavy) and you transmit the plan to the orbiting craft. All it has to do is execute.
Apparently, he had spent years working on DEC VAX clones in the old Soviet Union.
That wouldn't happen to be Kremvax would it?
The report really does sound like a bit of sophisticated propaganda to convince Congressmen to fund nifty research mathematics. It is very strangely focused like a review article on niche mathematics and computer science.
The solution the paradox is simple: the USSR really was behind, but in the particular military areas mentioned (ICBMs, spaceflight), it is clear that advanced VLSI is not necessary. The USSR was not so far behind (or at all) in hard engineering like metallurgy, thermodynamics, rocketry etc, all the areas which are absolutely necessary for spaceflight.
Remember that the difference between the West and USSR was in economic efficiency. VLSI was just way too expensive---so Soviets had to make do when the West would use economical, high performing chips. The necessary computers embedded inside weaponry and rockets through 1984 simply didn't need to be that complicated. They usually had to run a simple control loop & switching system, which was designed and simulated off-line by large stationary computers in the lab. And more often in the USSR's case, analytical pencil & paper computations. The USSR had a much stronger applied mathematical understanding of nonlinear dynamics and chaos---in the USSR fluid mechanics wasn't shunted off as a boring part of civil engineering, but stayed with the high-level physics community the whole time. The West started recognizing the importance right about in the mid 1980's.
The deficiency in high performance semiconductors DID, in truth, hurt their military capacity in some areas: those areas where advanced semiconductor technology is essential, and not just an economically effective choice.
Primary examples are anything which involves combined analog/digital operations, for instance CCD imagers, and modern wireless digital communication devices. A critical example: high resolution spy satellites which transmitted the results by radio and not film canister.
For instance: despite great space flight experience, the USSR didn't come remotely close to having a capability in the 1980's like the Global Positioning System, or relatively cheap spread-spectrum communications (almost everything we have now is from original military developments), or fancy infrared imagers and image analysis software embedded in a warhead's targeting system. All those require advanced, embedded, launchable, semiconductor technology---a cloned VAX in a building won't cut it.
After seeing the results of the Gulf War in 1990 a Soviet general was very relieved that they never went to war with the West. The USSR was astonished at the capability of precision bombing from the F-117 et al and the necessary logistics & ground & airborne communication systems supporting such a campaign. Iraq didn't have the capability and certainly training of the USSR but 1990 Iraq had some decent Soviet hardware, which was nearly totally ineffective in combat.
It meant that in a war in Europe NATO could have smashed a Soviet armored assault without nuclear weaponry (, and the USSR strongly underestimated this conventional capability driven by technology.
One lesson is that the technological capabilities of Chinese weaponry today shouldn't be underestimated.
So that's what the JASONs were doing back then. All that stuff on "residual arithmetic", because they apparently thought that N-bit multiplication required O(N) cycles. By the late 1960s, high-end mainframes (CDC 6600, STRETCH, LARC, etc.) had multipliers that could beat O(N), by adding up the partial products pairwise as a tree. That approach is O(log N). This report was written in the mid-1980s, by which time that technology had filtered down to most larger CPUs. Today, of course, every serious microprocessor has it. "Residual arithmetic" just isn't needed. Most of the advantages of that approach were achieved, but by more straightforward means.
However, division using table lookup is widespread. Modern dividers have sizable hard-wired tables. See "Pentium Floating Point Bug" for details.
Data flow machines did catch on. They're just invisible. Inside the Pentium Pro/II/III and later machines is a data flow engine. That's part of how superscalar machines work. But, again, it wasn't necessary to export that painful paradigm to the programmer-visible level. (GPUs, though, are close to data flow machines.)
The paper on "automated programming" is amusing. This was written just when the "expert systems" fad was tanking, as it was becoming clear that "expert systems" just didn't do very much. The "AI Winter" followed.
I recognize too many names on the distribution lists for those reports.
...they didn't have PDFs in 1984!!!
A few years ago, I worked for a French computing company that was trying to make inroads into the US market. One of their older marketing guys used to tell stories about how he was recruited by the KGB to buy Digital VAX computers using a French puppet company, which would then reship them to Poland, and from there to the USSR. He was convinced that the US computer manufacturers knew about the deals, but were cool with it as long as they had "plausible deniability". When a company like Lock-Mart plays one of those bogus commercials where a US flag is waving and they recite their mantra "We never forget who we're working for..." I always picture a dollar bill instead of a US flag. These greedy multi-national corporations make their money supplying guns to both sides of any given conflict. Whose missiles do you think the Mujaheddin are shooting at US helicopters?
In the one hundred years before personal computers, literally thousands of mechanical devices were invented to perform all sorts of calculations by hand. These techniques are no longer taught these days, because computers are so easy to program and students are very weak in mathematics anyway.
It would have been totally conceivable to send people to the moon even if digital computers had not been invented. Alternatively, any mix of digital computing and hand calculation might have done the trick, too.
Yes, along with more modern aircraft. I believe that the B1 uses the same computers for its flight system. It really doesn't take a lot of computing power to control a spacecraft.
Most practical problems can be solved with marginally acceptable accuracy without computers. In "the old days," modeling efforts were utterly crippled by the lack of computers so we had to give everything a good margin for safety and hope it was enough.
Try to design an engine that meets modern emissions requirements without a computer.
Try to make detailed predictions about the behavior of any circuit containing multiple transistors without a computer.
Try to design a modern-scale bridge without a computer.
Your post Sir, is a fine example of brainwash. Anybody with a bit of background in remote sensing can tell you that in the beginning of the 90s satellite pics with a resolution of about 0.5 metres could easily be bought on the market, coming from decommissioned Soviet-Union satellites. And them pics surely weren't sent to earth by canister either (that practice ended in the 60s, thank you very much).
I won't make any remark about your admiration of the precision bombing from the F-117 and the associated cost/effectiveness comparison (at least not until I've visited Iraq and Afghanistan), but really, using the Iraqi Army, after 12 years of embargo, as an example force in comparing the effectiveness of the US military versus the Warschau Pact?
What I do wonder about, really, is that after your headlong demonstration of the inferiority of Soviet material, you come to the next conclusion: "One lesson is that the technological capabilities of Chinese weaponry today shouldn't be underestimated." Underestimated?
Another case DoD didn't know shit about what was going on in another country of which they were supposed to have intelligence.
Nothing to see, please go on.
I once attended a historical conference about soviet computing in Russia. There were a lot of talks about symbolic computers, ternary computers, modular architectures, etc developed mostly for military use.
Albeit that the Soviet Union was lagging behind what the USA and Europe might have considered cutting edge technology at the time. One thing stands out most about efficiency and approaching things with a sombre mind. Whilst the USA and NASA where spending millions of taxpayers money to develop an ink pen that could write upside-down and in 0-gravity (space), the Russian simply used a pencil. Enough said about superiority sometimes confused with idiocracy. :P
Even made worse by the anti-French bullcrap.
One lesson is that the technological capabilities of Chinese weaponry today shouldn't be underestimated.
Chinese reverse-engineering of western and russian military hardware gave them a pretty good start, also developing advanced metallurgy and such. While still lagging in some areas, their missile tech is probably pretty close of western capabilities and could even surpass in some areas (unique design features to overcome specific threats, for example in SAM missiles there may be russian derivated IR-systems to counter stealth aircraft).
Indeed. If we lost our computers (say a nearby supernova went off), the result wouldn't just set us back to the equivalent of the 50s, but I fear we would be back to the middle ages. Definitely pre-Victorian, due to the electicity system's reliance on working computers.
And the recovery would not be quick; there would be few people who actually understand what the computers do for them that they could do the same tasks without computers, no matter how much time and non-computer resources they were given.
For some unfathomable reason, schools no longer teach students the theory of and working of a technology before that technology was allowed to the students. They have allowed magic to enter the classroom (if you don't know how something works, and can't replace it, it effectively is magic).
Sci-Fi writers have often used a technological breakdown apocalypse scenario. I feel that most of them have been way too optimistic, and haven't factored in both our utter reliance on silicone technology and our astonishing ignorance.
You are wrong here on both accounts, though somehow close to truth. I was one of those engineers who worked with PDE at and through the end of the Soviet Union. Finding "exact solution" nether was a priority or purpose of research, it mostly impossible anyway. Actual approach was to find more efficient and stable algorithms, that is to compensate lack of computational power with better usage and understanding of underlying math. That was causing emphasis on different multiresolution and adaptive methods and application of stability theory. Not that it was much different from western approach. But I have seen many times books on bifurcation theory and topological dynamics sold by street vendors.
Well the fact is until relatively recently, the Soviets/Russians were still enamored of Stalin's observation that "quantity has a quality all it's own". Since we did have to face the fact the Soviets had a large advantage in bulk equipment and manpower, we put some effort into countering it. An attack plane that can consistently take out one target with one munition is better than 10 planes that need to drop a lot of dumb bombs to accomplish the same thing etc. etc. And it turns out that Soviet planners WERE concerned about the large numbers of A-10s we had deployed in Europe. Those were designed to make armored units cease to exist and we very much had hordes of tanks coming in over the Urals in mind when we made the things. Though I really think they respected the thing because it was one of the few weapons we built they way they did: simple, robust, and massively armed.
None of this means that victory was assured or that we regarded the Soviets as weak opponents. But it does mean we could credibly counter sheer bulk and manpower with fewer but more effective weapons.
Well, China is manufacturing most of the electronics used in the West nowadays, is it not? If shit hits the fan and international trade stops, it's us who'll be without, not them.
I guess that makes offshoring a form of treason...
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Perhaps you don't realize this, but there were two Iraq invasions. The Gulf War refers to the one in 1990, and Iraq was NOT under embargo leading up to that invasion.
I'm not sure that residue mathematics would be useful in a GPU. However, pages 83-91 describe a modern GPU feeding results between ALUs.
> 2) do the maths : Ternary logic values on binary wires :
>
> - either you use 2 wires to encode 3 values and you lose 1/4 of the coding space (as in any base conversion)
>
> - either you use the 3-wire 1-hot encoding and... well, you win nothing.
False. It is trivial to negate a balanced ternary number using two or three wire encodings.
> Now imagine you have binary memory : you lose 1/4 of the capacity.
False. If I have eight bits of memory and a two wire encoding then I can store 81 values. That's the real problem. Any non-binary computational system doesn't make optimal use of binary memory density.
However, some EEPROMs and Flash memories store two bits per cell. So, contemporary, high-density, ternary memory is more developed than you think.
There have been clever scientists in the former Soviet and in other places in the world. Several have developed promising technologies and fewer have productionized them. This is not unlike the "smash Moore's Law" posts in Slashdot every month: 9 of 10 you never hear from again.
Don't get me wrong: computers have their place and it is inconceivable to stop using them, but they are not necessary for solving engineering problems well. They are simply extremely convenient, so much that engineering practice has evolved towards using methods that are well adapted for computer implementation as opposed to earlier methods which were well adapted for human use.
Your examples could be created without the use of digital computers, there's no mathematical reason that they couldn't, but it would be silly to do so now. The tools available and the techniques used for modern design and simulation make use of computers, and today's engineers are trained in them. Refusing to use them would be highly uneconomical, and that's assuming you had the means of retraining great numbers of people in the earlier methods and evolving the older design tools.
hi,
False. It is trivial to negate a balanced ternary number using two or three wire encodings.
Computer design and architecture is not just about trivially dealing with negation.
Now, if you're so sure, show me the design/layout of the logic gates in CMOS.
However, some EEPROMs and Flash memories store two bits per cell. So, contemporary, high-density, ternary memory is more developed than you think.
Right, to a limited extent. Informations are represented by an electric charge that is stored in a floating gate, and this principle has been used 20 years ago by voice-recording chips (the ISD series that is now mostly discontinued).
You don't take into accounte that, because of the high noise probability, ECC is very complex, hence slow. The increase in density brought by multi-level coding (MLC) is compensated by more complex and delicate analog sense buffers, wear-leveling algorithms, Reed-Solomon FECC, and many other niceties. So the chip has a 2x more capacity but it slower. This is not the benefit that people claim about ternary logic so where is the mismatch ?
well, different times, different technologies, different constraints and different solutions.
Remember : SRAM is not MLC Flash, because the charges are stored differently.
If you want a SRAM cell that is ternary, you end up with a binary a "flip-flap-flop" (instead of a flip-flop) and this adds 50% of die surface (more wires, more transistors) but with no increase in information storage density.
And a ternary CMOS SRAM cell using 3-level is asking for electronic troubles.
The Setun was designed with vacuum tubes, the electronic constraints were very very different. Today, CMOS is the king and it imposes its new conditions.
That's actually, an anarchist slogan, not Marxist, but it will do here.
(More cynical types assume the Russians bought or stole US chips from the French or other too-helpful go-betweens.)
Doesn't take much cynicism to infer that the Soviets bypassed import restrictions whenever they could. But could they smuggle enough chips to actually keep even a single electronics factory running? I doubt it. Make more sense to rely on homegrown technology, even if its grossly inferior. Having your space program or your military dependent on such an undependable supply chain would be a recipe for disaster. Not that Soviet supply chains were ever anything to brag about, but they'd still be better than that.
And indeed, Soviet military and space electronics featured vacuum tubes (not even discrete transistors!) until the very end.
(another anonymous here)
Thanks for the great link, this confirms what another post below writes.
I don't see why you were modded -1 :-/
The thing you are missing is that if it had came down to a NATO/Warsaw Pact war, when our "superior" conventional units wiped the Warsaw Pact units off the battlefield, pride and fear would had lead to the USSR launching nukes. And even with their sad state of nuclear weapon launching abilities (liquid fueled anyone?)our response alone would have seriously fucked up the planet, not to mention some of theirs would have it our country and fuck-up major swathes.
but they are not necessary for solving engineering problems well.
No real engineer would claim that in the 21st century you could design *any* piece of complex machinery w/o the help of computers.
Thus Occam's razor demands that this statement comes from someone who is not working in this field himself.
Free will is the illusion that our wits could compensate for our brain's faulty circuitry.
For all practical purposes we DID send man to the moon without computers as we know them. The massive clanking and whirring things NASA used back in the day were less capable than today's handheld game.
Well, China is manufacturing most of the electronics used in the West nowadays, is it not?
Not exactly, no. Advanced chips and PCB's are mostly made in Taiwan. China does make a great deal of electronics but it is older, simpler tech.
I don't think our reliance on silicone technology is all that important. I mean in Hollywood maybe, but most of us do fine without it, well, except for maybe weather-stripping.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.