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NancyLebovitz comments on Five-minute rationality techniques - Less Wrong
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I think "unknown unknowns" is a good one for this sort of thing. My attempt follows:
We know a lot of things, and generally we know that we know them. These are "known knowns." I know that 1+1 = 2, I know that the year is 2010, and so on.
We also don't know a lot of things, but generally we know that we don't know them-- for example, I don't know the hundredth digit of pi, I don't know how to speak Chinese, and I don't know what stocks are going to do well next year. All of those things are "known unknowns," or unanswered questions. However, because we know what the questions are, it's possible for us to solve them, or at least approach some kind of solution, if we anticipate needing one. If I knew I was going to be quizzed on the hundredth digit of pi, I could look it up or calculate it; if I knew I was going to have to speak Chinese, I could buy a course on it and at least learn the basics; if I knew I was going to need to make stock predictions, I could look at market trends and try to extrapolate what might happen in the future. The fact that I know that I don't know these things allows me to take action to correct that lack of knowledge. So while known unknowns can be bad, we can at least plan around them and minimize their potential impact on our lives.
However, there are also things that we not only don't know, we don't know that we don't know them. There are questions out there that we haven't even considered or thought about. Not only do we not know what the answers to the questions are, we don't even know the questions themselves. These things are "unknown unknowns," and they are very, very dangerous, because there's no way we can plan for them.
For example, Japan in late World War II had a plan for fighting the US if it invaded Japan with ground troops, and Japan also had a plan for fighting the US if it bombed Japan with conventional air raids. But Japan did not have a plan for fighting the US if it bombed Japan with nuclear weapons, because Japan did not know that nuclear weapons existed, much less that the US actually had them. Nuclear weapons, for Japan in World War II, were an unknown unknown.
(Factual correction) The US didn't have nuclear weapons when Japan started the war.
{Mulling the topic) Not only that, but I think "the other side won't come up with a superweapon" is generally the way to bet, though perhaps less so than it used to be.
I thought radar was invented for WWII, but it's not that simple.
Maybe I've missed something, but I don't think there's been anything but incremental improvement in war tech since WWII-- nothing really surprising.
It's close enough - as that page notes, what we know as RADAR was developed during the war. That's also when Norbert Wiener developed the first radar-integrated guns.
It really depends what you call "incremental", and what sorts of increments you're looking at. We have robots with guns!
If the standard is nukes and radar, then only things which leave the other side saying "how is that even possible?" or "that came out of nowhere" counts as surprising.
Robot drones are not surprising. I'm pretty sure invisibility tech would not be surprising. Anti-gravity would be surprising.
Decreasing frequency of surprising technology advancements are caused by faster and more frequent information of the general public about scientific advancements.
If the rate of news consumes grows faster than the rate of innovations produced, the perceived magnitude of innovation per news will go down.
How many people, even as smart as us, correctly predicted the sorts of wonder weapons that the intense research pressures that a world war would create in say, 1935? If we're talking about surprising sorts of weapons, I expect not to have been exposed to them, or if I have, to have rejected them out of hand.
It is difficult for me to conceive of military technology that is:
a) potentially surprising
b) powerful enough to make a big difference
c) near-future
"Rods from God" might count, if they exist, but they're not surprising. The best example I can think of is strong memetic warfare, but I'm not confident that will be developed in the near future (or indeed ever).