In it, a multi-year project to link North America and Europe with a tunnel under the Atlantic eventually succeeds despite many setbacks. Unfortunately, by the time it is completed, transatlantic air travel is cheaper and faster, and so the tunnel is obsolete.
From this, I assert that any technology that takes more than a few years to develop will probably be made obsolete by something else in the meantime.
There is a similar lesson in the sci-fi short story Superiority. It describes a war between two futuristic civilizations where the one with better technology loses because the other side could build much greater amounts of simpler, cheaper, more reliable weapons.
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"Superiority" is a science fiction short story by British writer Arthur C. Clarke, first published in 1951. It depicts an arms race during an interstellar war. It shows the side which is more technologically advanced being defeated, despite its apparent superiority, because of its willingness to discard old technology without having fully perfected the new. Meanwhile, the enemy steadily built up a far larger arsenal of weapons that while more primitive were also more reliable. The story was at one point required reading for an industrial design course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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