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I don't feel that your comment respects the government funded origins of much of our technology. DARPA has quite an impact. Private companies tend to settle in
by anotherhue 4y ago
I don't feel that your comment respects the government funded origins of much of our technology. DARPA has quite an impact.
Private companies tend to settle into local-maxima, it takes a lot of cash to explore outside those bounds, i.e. apollo, ITER.
Regardless, control of the software and distribution channels that govern the effective online life of about a billion people is power, and if the shoe were on the other foot I'd bet there'd be USGov investment to rebalance it.
- eru 4y agoThe absolute impact of DARPA (nor sending a clown to the moon or ITER) doesn't say anything about whether the money was well spent. Opportunity costs are a thing. To bring up another example: in our timeline, government-funded militaries were an earlier driver of electronic computing. But IBM was hot on their heels. Similarly Konrad Zuse was starting to build computers in Germany. If there hadn't been a war to divert so many resources globally from the private sector into the militaries, these business driven efforts would have started the early computer age at about the same time (perhaps earlier even?). At no cost to the taxpayer.