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No, Software Is Using AI To Kill Its Competitors
The helicopter door gunner’s orders were simple: Shoot all the guys in black pajamas.
Didn’t matter that – from a height of just 100 feet above the rice paddies – it was easy to see the men were unarmed, and wearing a common outfit for farm workers in that part of the Mekong Delta.
“The black pajamas are Viet Cong,” the commanding officer, Colonel Ira “Jim” Hunt, insisted. Enemy soldiers.
Once the pajama guys danced with a .50-caliber machine gun, it was kind of hard to prove otherwise...
And easy to add a fresh pile of corpses toward that day’s quota.
It was 1969, four years into America’s grueling involvement in the Vietnam War – and Hunt’s helicopter crew knew better than to complain. Just log the body count. That’s all that mattered.
Vietnam was an unusual war, because it was hard to know if you were winning. There wasn’t any territory to take over or take back – just a persistent Communist faction, the Viet Cong (“VC”) from North Vietnam, trying to spread Communism to their southern neighbors.
America, acting as the world’s policeman, waded in to beat back the VC. And U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara took it upon himself to helicopter-parent the military.
McNamara was a teacher’s pet in the Democratic administration of President Lyndon Johnson – which meant, in the words of one biographer, he was “a fool.” He was also a numbers guy, in the sense that, to him, numbers were all that mattered.
In order to get a concrete picture of how the war was going, McNamara fixated on one particular set of numbers: body count. In his mind, as long as we killed more of their guys than they killed of ours, we were winning the war. The precise moment at which our body count surpassed the enemy’s was expressed on a chart as the “crossover point.”
Top brass went all-out to get McNamara his quota. Harrowing war accounts – many of which were buried in classified Pentagon files until a few years ago – recall wholesale massacres of women, children, and old people just to inflate the all-important number. “Kill anything that moves,” Captain Ernest Medina instructed his men before a planned operation in 1968. That year, the official kill ratio was recorded as an unbelievable 134 dead Viet Cong per every dead American.
At the end of the Vietnam War, the U.S.’s officially recorded body count stood near 3 million. In terms of scalps on our belt, America won the war hands down.
In terms of our actual objective – preventing the North Vietnamese Communist takeover of South Vietnam – we lost.
It was mostly Robert McNamara’s fault, too.
Forest, Meet Trees
Poor Robert actually got a logical fallacy named after him: the McNamara Fallacy. The term was coined by social scientist Daniel Yankelovich in 1971, before the war was even officially over.
It’s the wrong-headed idea that any given situation can be accurately expressed by an equation – that numbers are all you need. The human factor doesn’t enter into anything, because why should it?
Incidentally, this is the same fatal flaw we see in Adam Smith-style classical economics… it elegantly expresses the idea of efficient supply and demand, but it fails to account for people being plumb crazy. The Austrian school of economics (my favorite!) acknowledges that markets aren’t a soulless equation and that irrational human behavior explains a lot about the way prices move.
As part of his quest to quantify everything about war, McNamara decided he needed logistics-tracking computers on the field in Vietnam. For that, he turned to ARPA – the Department of Defense division who put together the earliest version of the internet – and tapped one of their top engineers, Bob Taylor.
Bob – a mild-mannered nerd who was given an honorary rank of General for the duration of the assignment – was enthusiastic at first. He shipped out to Tân Sơn Nhất in 1967 and installed an IBM mainframe, and in the process, became horrified by the brutality he saw.
“We have no business being there,” he told his former boss at ARPA. A year into the mission, Bob bowed out and went Stateside – though he hung onto his little ID card that said “General” and used it to get into military bars.
Not long after Bob went home, the McNamara Fallacy tanked the entire Vietnam War.
Based on body count metrics, LBJ assured America that the Viet Cong were all but vanquished and victory was near. Then, during the infamous 1968 Tet Offensive, the VC sprung a massive surprise attack on five major South Vietnamese cities, occupying portions of the capital and the American embassy in Saigon, and killing or wounding over 12,000 American and South Vietnamese soldiers.
In terms of naked math, the U.S. and South Vietnamese forces won a military victory. Over the next month, they beat back the attack, topped the body count (reporting 60,000 dead Communists) and recovered the cities.
But the human factor wasn’t so simple. Americans back home felt lied to and disillusioned – turned out the war wasn’t “nearly over,” as claimed…
Public opinion turned swiftly against the Johnson administration and the conflict – LBJ did not seek reelection in 1968, and troops quietly withdrew from Vietnam in 1973, letting the Communists take over the whole country.
As for McNamara, he resigned and later took a position as president of the World Bank, where he refused to talk about his time as Secretary of Defense. He once exploded, “I don’t want to see it! Take it back!” when a Department of Defense study on Vietnam was brought into his office.
The McNamara Fallacy, though, lived on like a dormant virus, thanks to Bob Taylor, McNamara’s computer guy...
Graphic Violence And PARC
When Bob got back to the U.S., he accepted a job with Xerox, the photocopier company, and helped them launch a little think tank division called PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), in a flat-roofed office park in California.
PARC focused on computer graphics, then a new field. And the brilliant team there – including luminaries like David Boggs (who helped create Ethernet) and David DiFrancesco (who later co-founded Pixar) – invented almost everything you see on your computer screen today...
From PARC (not from Steve Jobs or Bill Gates)... we got the computer mouse, the stylus (then called a “light pen”), and “Alto,” the very first personal computer to include icons, drop-down windows, and folders. It was a PARC guy who unlocked the secret of depicting 3D objects on a computer screen, a PARC guy who invented the laser printer… and the list goes on.
By the mid-1970s, half of the world’s top 100 computer scientists worked for Xerox. This brain trust pioneered the entire concept of the graphical user interface (“GUI”), the idea that you could interact with computer screens not just with words or numbers, but with pictures.
But Xerox PARC torpedoed themselves with the McNamara Fallacy.
Following Bob Taylor’s lead, PARC focused on engineering and equations, not on humans. They had no idea how to market their inventions or make them appealing, and frankly, they didn’t want to. Alto, the mind-blowing PC with graphics onscreen, was never sold – only 2,000 units were ever built for internal use at Xerox.
Apple founder Steve Jobs was baffled by the way PARC dropped the ball:
Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry, could have been the IBM of the 1990s, could have been the Microsoft of the 1990s.
But they didn’t.
It fell to Jobs – who visited PARC one day in 1979 and swiped their GUI ideas for his own work-in-progress computer – to break through the McNamara sound barrier and bring computer graphics to the masses. The popular myth is that Jobs pulled a corporate espionage coup and stole the specs, but in reality, it was pretty above-board. The PARC folks didn’t mind sharing, because frankly, they just didn’t care.
Jobs’ Macintosh hit markets in 1984, via a flashy Super Bowl ad and an irresistible sales campaign… and just like that, computer graphics exploded into the mainstream market. It turned out that outside the ivory tower, humans loved playing with images on computers – as evidenced by the now $34 billion GUI industry, growing at around 11% per year.
PARC itself remained insular and hidebound, dwindling over the years and eventually getting donated to Stanford University as a research lab. (They did have one commercial home run with the laser printer, but even that almost got buried and only reached consumers thanks to the tireless efforts of Jack Goldman, PARC’s director of research.)
One by one, the best brains at PARC defected, often taking their ideas with them to start new companies…
The business we are recommending in this issue is one of those companies – a world-beating graphics software giant with a huge moat and an unbeatable tollbooth business model.
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