Comment by no_wizard
8 hours ago
The internet and many adjacent technologies were all created and iterated on inside the DoD and other wings of government research.
The world really benefits from well funded institutions doing research and development. Medicine has also largely advanced due in part to this.
What’s lost is the recapture. I don’t think governments are typically the best candidate to bring a new technology to marketable applications, but I do think they should be able to force terms of licensure and royalties. Keeping both those costs predictable and flat across industry would drive even more innovation to market.
What happens instead is private entities take public research and capture it almost entirely in as few hands as possible.
In short, the loss of civic pride and shared responsibility to society has created the nickel and dime you to death capitalism we are seeing in the rise today. Externalization of all costs possible and capture as much profit as possible. No thought to second order effects or how the system that is being dodged to contribute back to gave way for the ability for people to so grossly take advantage of it in the first place
> The internet and many adjacent technologies were all created and iterated on inside the DoD and other wings of government research.
^ This is the secret sauce. For decades the arrangement was exactly that: defense projects would create new technologies, then once those were finished, they were handed to private industry to figure out how to make a $20,000 MIL-spec LCD screen cheap enough and in vast enough quantities that you can buy 3 of them for less than $1,000 while the manufacturer, distributor, and retailer make a solid profit each. That's not an easy thing to do and it's what corporations have historically been good at. And it makes things better for the defense industry too, because they can then apply those lessons to their own hardware where appropriate. Win/win.
But we don't fund research anymore, or at least not that sort of it. Or perhaps there's just not much else to find. I think it's a bit of both. But in any case nothing new is getting made which is why technology feels so dull right now. The most innovative products right now are just thinner, dumber, lighter versions of things we already have, and that's not nothing but it isn't very interesting either.