You talk about pilot as a constraint and the obvious removal of the constraint (unmanned fighters). This is the opposite of a natural law: it’s an assumed constraint or a constraint within a model, not a natural law.
Yes, exactly; this is why natural laws should be explicit. When the assumed constraint was broken, this surprised a lot of people, and surprise is a bad place to be.
I think ” We have a good command of natural law at the scale where warmachines operate. ” is exactly opposite of what I believe
That’s interesting—would you be willing to describe this in more detail? Ships, planes, and tanks are all in the Newtonian mechanics and classical Maxwell’s Equations regime; it’s a lot of combustion engines, rockets, radios, and ballistics. Though weirdly we don’t have a good understanding of how explosions happen. Outside of GPS, we don’t even really use relativity; I’d be surprised if we had a better understanding of natural law at any other scale.
We have some hints as to natural law in those scales, but we’re nowhere near those constraints. There are a huge number of contingent constraints in our technology and modeling of the problem, which are very likely overcome-able with effort.
That’s the motivation in a nutshell. Following the example of transistors, we know what the physical constraints are and also that we are quite close to them now. We have a consistent experience of each step closer to those constraints being harder to achieve than the one before it, which I expect to generalize to other examples. Assuming I am correct, you can then estimate how difficult something is to overcome (and therefore how likely it is to happen) by seeing how close to the natural law constraint it is.
I feel it is similar to the low hanging fruit hypothesis for scientific progress. We use distance from the limits of natural law as the yardstick for how low the strategic fruit is hanging.
Yes, exactly; this is why natural laws should be explicit. When the assumed constraint was broken, this surprised a lot of people, and surprise is a bad place to be.
That’s interesting—would you be willing to describe this in more detail? Ships, planes, and tanks are all in the Newtonian mechanics and classical Maxwell’s Equations regime; it’s a lot of combustion engines, rockets, radios, and ballistics. Though weirdly we don’t have a good understanding of how explosions happen. Outside of GPS, we don’t even really use relativity; I’d be surprised if we had a better understanding of natural law at any other scale.
That’s the motivation in a nutshell. Following the example of transistors, we know what the physical constraints are and also that we are quite close to them now. We have a consistent experience of each step closer to those constraints being harder to achieve than the one before it, which I expect to generalize to other examples. Assuming I am correct, you can then estimate how difficult something is to overcome (and therefore how likely it is to happen) by seeing how close to the natural law constraint it is.
I feel it is similar to the low hanging fruit hypothesis for scientific progress. We use distance from the limits of natural law as the yardstick for how low the strategic fruit is hanging.