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>That an incumbent with substantial influence uses their position to suppress a disruptive technology that's an emerging danger of erroding their business model
by ksk 10y ago
>That an incumbent with substantial influence uses their position to suppress a disruptive technology that's an emerging danger of erroding their business model?
That's already been happening since the industrial age, and since we haven't plateaued, your fear of a local maxima doesn't look convincing. Would you agree that it is only fair that the onus is on you to explain what is different about this scenario?
I see it as a good thing because by the time the disruptive tech does take over, the new tech has undergone a cycle of refinement to the point where it goes from being "great", "oh this is nice" to being simply unavoidable.
Also, why is the incumbent suppressing a disruptive tech necessarily a bad thing? Since they're an incumbent they could also be in a position to evaluate the tech and know that there are certain downfalls to that approach. I'm fairly certain that as a reasonable person, you would agree that most disruptive tech never pans out and the companies die out.
> You have to get to the point of "Is it likely this new thing will be more beneficial to society when equivalently developed?"
Well but the the government picks winners and losers and uses tax payer money for that. What if there is this other great tech that even better and it gains some prominence 4 years after the government decided to subsidize EV? Do we now abandon all EV subsidies? Subsidize both?
- ethbro 10y ago> since we haven't plateaued I'd argue ICE is the ultimate example of that. I'll toss in monoculture, fertilizer/herbacide-powered farming; centralized banking (in the sense of Chase, not the Fed); commute-mandating urban planning; hydrocarbon-powered grid energy production; von Neumann architecture; electrical computing; and nuclear reactor designs to the list. My argument is not that these things aren't efficient. Indeed, I'm saying they're so hyper-optimized that they're nigh impossible to unseat. Maybe fusion power production is feasible, maybe it isn't. But where is the very substantial investment to see going to come from if it can't immediately compete against existing solutions? And barring that investment appearing, we (as a planet) end up stuck on a technology that's globally suboptimal and impossible to improve further. > Also, why is the incumbent suppressing a disruptive tech necessarily a bad thing? Since they're an incumbent they could also be in a position to evaluate the tech and know that there are certain downfalls to that approach. I feel history is definitely on my side that large companies with a focused product are more likely to attempt to torpedo viable alternatives than incubate and help them. (E.g. MS/Lotus, MS/Netscape, MS/OSS, GM/Streetcars, GM/EV1)