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I'm struggling to think of any spillover benefits from adtech. Nothing at the scale of things like VLSI or teflon.

• xpe 5y ago
  There is no need to limit our thinking to hardware or materials. From where I sit, it is easy to find spillover benefits. First, think about all the tools and techniques used in building scalable adtech: infrastructure; architecture; inferential statistics; data science; machine learning; social experimentation; even hardware innovations to advance these things. I grant that not all of these are strictly necessary nor exclusive to adtech, but adtech's money certainly contributes to them. Second, think about the hundreds of thousands of people (software developers, academics, etc) who work in the field and get to practice their craft and deepen their experience and knowledge. Without adtech, the field would be much smaller. These people cross-pollinate the industry. Third, think wealth accumulation. Our time in history is special: when else have so many people have gained so much wealth so quickly? A sizeable chunk of these people want to take on non-adtech challenges and disrupt other industries.