A friend at work forwarded this article to me after a lunch time discussion about QA testing, and whether it should be integrated within the development team activities or operate as an independent effort.
The author's viewpoint is that there is value in a separate team and effort.
I think there’s a parallel to scientific method, too, which makes QA as a separate process valuable. Review by a different team, that corroborates readiness through their own effort, is important for overall confidence, too. Not to say that’s infallible, but it demonstrates an important watermark.
Pretty big stuff! Nine years of observations produce
evidence that subliminal imprints of gravitational waves from the Big Bang are present in the free radiation of space, as Einstein predicted
should be the case. Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity working at
the same scale, possibly a step forward to a real Unified Theory.
The military is one front where disruptive technologies (such as the Internet itself) first appear and "proof of concept" is established. So, it's rather sobering to see how fast plans for deploying robotics in the military are progressing - likely starting with supply couriers.
In my opinion, it's just a matter of time before orchestrated platoons of robotic soldiers become feasible. There are already significant strides being made in environmental sensors and muscle emulation, which will help such units to integrate with human troops while becoming a real pain in the posterior for opposing forces.
Such platoons are scary. They might become sold and leveraged into essentially unassailable mercenary forces, highly efficient killing units, for better or worse. And, there is the approaching singularity where robots (and possibly AIs) will start building robots, too, making easy proliferation another challenge. Hmm, are Terminators and SkyNet on the eventual horizon? Let's hope not!
