Quick and fun read on this:
The Road not Taken by Harry Turtledove
The Road not Taken by Harry Turtledove
Makes one wonder if there were technologies that did something similar to humanity in the real world…
I wonder if all the investment in smartphones and LLM’s may have taken away from focus on other things…
I think if you went back in time you could pay some power loom engineers to build you a pretty decent 4-8 bit microcontroller operating at 1-5 Hz (comparable to power looms at the time) and computer-controlled textiles would have paid for the computer revolution 75-100 years ahead of time.
You can go down the wrong rabbit holes for a long while in peace-time (e.g. string theory), but war-time is a crucible for correct ideas.
I agree with you, though my own motivation is not centered on war, but (a long tail of) existential risks facing humanity, mostly centered around collective action problems.
I think if you went back in time you could pay some power loom engineers to build you a pretty decent 4-8 bit microcontroller operating at 1-5 Hz (comparable to power looms at the time) and computer-controlled textiles would have paid for the computer revolution 75-100 years ahead of time.
Would it? You have to remember that the further you go back in time, the cheaper labor is relative to machinery. In the 19th century, you could pay a person for a multitude of customizations and so the market for custom cloth might not have been what you imagined.
What you're saying might have been true in the 18th century or earlier, but things were highly mechanized by the 19th century, and there was a lot of motivation to keep the big expensive looms highly utilized and amortize investment in punch card sets across lots of production runs.