We liked the NOVA episode "The Great Robot Race" - it's about 10 years old now (but some of the technology has found it's way into the Google cars).
It's about a DARPA challenge with a $2 million grand prize - the challenge is to build a self driving car that can navigate this huge course in the desert.
There is a lot of failure that gets shown - the first year nobody wins - nobody makes it more than a few miles (even teams with huge budgets and lots of very smart and capable people). But out of this failure comes much better cars the next year. The competition makes everyone better - even the cars that don't win the big prize. I liked it because it shows the productive side of failure, particularly in an engineering context.
Sometimes in the media (books/TV etc) we only see the shiny finished product and not all failure and frustration that helped give rise to the final result.
Last edited by cmguy; 12/21/15 08:02 AM.
