Re: This famous science fiction short story seems to sum it up nicely...
I think an even more insightful old sci-fi novel would be Tik-Tok. In it there is a US military project that so much money has been sunk into (it's an aircraft carrier) that nobody dares to cancel it. So each successive head of defence ploughs even more money into it in an attempt to make it viable. Despite the fact that it's a colossal failure from a strategic point of view.
It's a good novel, albeit old. About a domestic cleaning robot that kills someone and from there follows the natural progression through crime, to business to politics. The details of the technology in the story have aged and become out of date, but the politics seems to have not changed a bit.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
