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Like the distinction between 'hard tech' and consumption driven service sector tech, and the quote by Dan Wang about the necessity of industrialization. Remind

Like the distinction between 'hard tech' and consumption driven service sector tech, and the quote by Dan Wang about the necessity of industrialization. Reminds me of the article about the Metaverse a few days ago. Of course consumer tech also produces hard technological innovation in the sense that it creates demand for that tech, but I don't see at all how a lot of the stuff we're currently calling tech is actually driving innovation in the sense of improving the scientific or productive capacity of a society in and of itself. There's lots of sectors like quantum physics, AI, bioengineering, geoengineering, construction, communications tech, semiconductors, space, and even social sciences in a way where it's trivial to see how we could advance society in a direct way, yet instead so much energy is spent on crypto currency or games, entertainment and stuff that basically looks like the logical endpoint is the Wall-E society.

dhdudyx5vt 5y ago
"Society would be better if instead of investing in popular things we dictated what should be popular to invest in"
sempron64 5y ago
You mention in passing that consumer demand is important, but it's hard to overstate how important it is. This fact is regularly ignored by communist systems because it seems immoral. Consumer demand for stupid video games led directly to the development of fast GPUs and AI. Demand for porn drove video encoding. Demand for stupid music players allowed massive innovations in storage, displays, batteries and led to the smartphone revution. Not every technological innovation is led by virtuous academic research funded by a staid and patronizing government, or even by needs of health or warfare. The "energy" generated by consumer demand cannot be productively and efficiently redirected by policy. Either the market drives innovations or those who want to enrich themselves do so by less positive means.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  The last part is a pretty strong claim. Yes, communist governments have historically often failed to discover mechanisms for innovation because of that lack of signals and discovery by spontaneous demand, but China is not the Soviet Union. Centrally planned running shoes get you shoes that look like the boxes they came in, to paraphrase Stephenson but there's a difference between that kind of rigid system and steering demand into directions where consumption is aligned with the public good or say, scientific progress. What killed innovation in communist governments in my opinion wasn't the focus on social ends as a goal by the state, it was killing almost all forms of entrepreneurship or spontaneous organisation to get to those ends. The sort of dogmatic market thinking denies that such ends should even exist or that activity can be redirected with little basis for that claim.

dhdudyx5vt 5y ago

"Society would be better if instead of investing in popular things we dictated what should be popular to invest in"

sempron64 5y ago

You mention in passing that consumer demand is important, but it's hard to overstate how important it is. This fact is regularly ignored by communist systems because it seems immoral. Consumer demand for stupid video games led directly to the development of fast GPUs and AI. Demand for porn drove video encoding. Demand for stupid music players allowed massive innovations in storage, displays, batteries and led to the smartphone revution. Not every technological innovation is led by virtuous academic research funded by a staid and patronizing government, or even by needs of health or warfare. The "energy" generated by consumer demand cannot be productively and efficiently redirected by policy. Either the market drives innovations or those who want to enrich themselves do so by less positive means.

Barrin92 5y ago
The last part is a pretty strong claim. Yes, communist governments have historically often failed to discover mechanisms for innovation because of that lack of signals and discovery by spontaneous demand, but China is not the Soviet Union. Centrally planned running shoes get you shoes that look like the boxes they came in, to paraphrase Stephenson but there's a difference between that kind of rigid system and steering demand into directions where consumption is aligned with the public good or say, scientific progress. What killed innovation in communist governments in my opinion wasn't the focus on social ends as a goal by the state, it was killing almost all forms of entrepreneurship or spontaneous organisation to get to those ends. The sort of dogmatic market thinking denies that such ends should even exist or that activity can be redirected with little basis for that claim.