Bruno Latour, Aramis, or the Love of Technology, PDF - Dss-edit.com

prototype, which is efficient and perfected, but not the 500 Concordesthat would, as a bonus, make the first one profitable.Parenthetically, M. Etienne doesn't agree with his collaborators.They say that they'd have pulled it off if they could have simplified.They don't claim they would have fulfilled the contract.[INTERVIEW EXCERPTS]In the Transportation Ministry office that deals with new research proiects,M. Hector is speaking. He oversaw the Aramis operation even though Aramiswas not viewed as a research proiect:"I remember, I wos there at the very beginning of Aramis. I had both of theproject heads in front of me, Cohen and Freque, with two fallback projects;one was the head of Aramis, the other head of VAL."Maybe the problems with VAL were overcome because the system wassimpler, more realistic-enough so to convince lille and the urban community.We never found that with Aramis, because we never had the technical proofthat it would work. The increased cost has to be justified, for cities, for financialbackers, by technological performance.""How do you analyze the technological feasibility of the proiect? Did theproblem of intrinsic security that Cohen was 50 insistent about play a role?""No. I think the system simply didn't succeed in overcoming the technologicaldifficulties well enough, fast enough, to attract financial backing easily.""But you're aware that your interpretation is not the usual one? The consensusis that it's technologically feasible but that there's no market. ""Yes, I'm aware of that, but it must still be soid that the technicians wereunable to deal with the problems in time; it's absurd to say that it's technologicallyperfected when the eET program wasn 't carried out successfully."I have to soy that there's something a little phony obout all of us; not you,because you're not in the field, but the rest of us. If we hear someone say, 'It'sa failure,' we say, 'Oh no, it's all been very useful, there have been advances,it helped with VAL.' There have been advances, I don't doubt that. But I can'tsoy that the system as a whole has been a technological success that advancedus toward the intended goal."Well, you have to know what you want. If you wanted a system, and theyget a few crumbs out of some of its components, you can't call it a success, inany case not a technological success.