[defrost]

LLM or human,

  World War II did what it always does to materials technology: it accelerated it by decades.

is a clunker of a sentence. (NB: didn't say 'clanker')

Is it war in general that accelerates material technology, or simply WWII .. which is seemingly something that can be applied many times .. just add a dash of WWII to your tech.

[adrian_b]

Wars have accelerated technology for 2 reasons.

The first is that the governments were willing to allocate vast amounts of money and resources for the development of new materials that would give them advantages over the opponents.

During normal market conditions, it would have been impossible to secure so much money for research whose results were uncertain to generate financial profits.

The second reason is that during wars the global commerce routes were perturbed, so many materials that normally were cheap and easily available became expensive or impossible to procure, which could block the production or the usage of certain kinds of weapons and military equipment.

Therefore it became necessary to find substitute materials, which was the origin of many research projects, e.g. nylon instead of silk, synthetic elastomers instead of natural rubber, synthetic gasoline instead of gasoline extracted from fossil oil and so on.

[margalabargala]

Thanks, Claude.

The premise was never unclear, the complaint is about sentence structure.

[adrian_b]

You are delusional if you believe that you can distinguish AI-generated texts from human-generated texts, because obviously you can't.

[margalabargala]

I didn't try to, I just make assumptions about long walls of text that manage to entirely miss the point.

Assuming you actually put time into what you wrote would be the less charitable interpretation.

[Arainach]

> Is it war in general that accelerates material technology, or simply WWII

The reply did not miss the point, it was addressing a question directly posed in the original comment.

[defrost]

As the poser of the obviously rhetorical question in question ...

for many speakers of English as a first language seeped in the conventions of English conversation, storytelling, and literature it was a clear juxtaposition intended to single out the ridiculous proposition that technology advances during wartime are somehow tied to WWII alone.

Have a look at the original sentence again, it's absolutely a clunker, very probably the product of a clanker (or of an ESL human).

[margalabargala]

It didn't, though, the question you quoted is a rhetorical question posed to point out the awkwardness of the original piece's phrasing.

By taking the question seriously, you and the person I replied to both have missed the point.