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The internet didn’t become the central piece of society and commerce until around 20 years ago, so partially it is explained by needing time to mature and adopt
by edmundsauto 3y ago
The internet didn’t become the central piece of society and commerce until around 20 years ago, so partially it is explained by needing time to mature and adopt.
Investments from the 90s onward have been more public-private partnerships, but things like the human genome project or a number of cancer treatments and pharmaceuticals have been developed in this manner.
Third, I’m not sure I would regularly expect something as big as the internet to be invented every decade.
Not necessarily disagreeing with you because I feel similar to your comment, but I wanted to dig in a little to see if it’s more truthful or more biased.
- nvm0n2 3y agoBy 2000 the military involvement in the internet was long since history. If you want to talk about the time when government investment was what mattered you have to go back ~35 years or more.
- edmundsauto 3y agoMy point was that large investments, especially in infrastructure, need decades of time to bake. So investments made this century could just be cooking. I also suspect the push by the uS right wing have impacted the number of great government innovations. The federal role nowadays seems to be to do the core research that is not directly profitable, then transfer control to companies to reap the rewards. (Because of the often incorrect “the government can’t do anything right” narrative pushed in the states)
- musicale 3y agoThis really seems to have worked out kind of OK on one hand, although sometimes I wish that the public had more ownership of the technology that we funded.