9 ms·

- What if Google didn't have more money than god, and couldn't afford to bankroll Waymo ~10b? - Would TSMC have gotten as far if Apple couldn't reliably buy ou

- What if Google didn't have more money than god, and couldn't afford to bankroll Waymo ~10b? - Would TSMC have gotten as far if Apple couldn't reliably buy out months of capacity on the next node, bankrolling TSMC's tech development? - Would we even have >10B-param LLMs at all? There is something to be said for the concentration of resources, such that they can be deployed on projects with payoffs years or decades later. The same could be said for all the tech that came out of Bell Labs or PARC. Advocating for smaller businesses is advocating for shorttermism to some degree; even startups today are funded based on the premise that they could potentially capture an entire market in a few years.

thewebguyd 1y ago
Large projects need resources, but who decides how those resources are deployed, to what end, and who benefits from them is the important part. All of your examples are profit-driven, and not necessarily (even if we do benefit) done for the greater good of all or advancement of society. We can still accomplish big innovations without those innovations coming from, or being controlled, by nation-state private companies. We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects - Manhattan project, the space race & moon landing, ARPANET, etc. Waymo could still happen, only it'd be a publicly funded project and the societal benefit would be broader and not tied to a single company's market dominance.
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago
  > We can still accomplish big innovations without those innovations coming from, or being controlled, by nation-state private companies. We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects - Manhattan project, the space race & moon landing, ARPANET, etc. So you prefer nation-state nations over nation-state private companies. :-)
  - mstipetic 1y ago
    Yes of course
  - ghaff 1y ago
    Though two of your examples (not really Manhattan Project) had very significant private sector participants.
    - thewebguyd 1y ago
      I think that's unavoidable, but also not a bad thing. If we were to undertake any similar large scale public projects today, it would also have significant private sector participation. But, that drives job creation and positive effects on the economy (i.e., new deal). The main difference is, ideally, the project was voted on by the public, and is being steered as such. A public-private collaboration, with the public driving it rather than it being entirely the domain of a single private entity for their own profit.
  - radlad 1y ago
    I do, when citizens have the ability to steer their nation state (i.e. the ability to vote.) On this note, I've lived in a couple states with ballot initiative processes and while they are not perfect, I think they are absolutely necessary for citizens to truly be able to hold their elected representatives accountable (i.e. override them) and I wish we had them at a federal level.
    - aleph_minus_one 1y ago
      > I do, when citizens have the ability to steer their nation state (i.e. the ability to vote.) You can also vote in the shareholders meeting.
      - thewebguyd 1y ago
        You have to buy your way into voting as a shareholder. In a democracy, it's just your given right as a citizen.
        aleph_minus_one 1y ago
        > You have to buy your way into voting as a shareholder. In a democracy, it's just your given right as a citizen. In a democratic country, only the people who have citizenship are allowed to vote. In a shareholders meeting, only the shareholders are allowed to vote. You sometimes cam buy your way into citizenship. As a shareholder, it is your given right to vote in a shareholders meeting.
        Fraterkes 1y ago
        Even if you think there's no qualitative difference between the 2 (which I think is a deeply immature idea, but whatever), there's an obvious quantitative difference: In practice democratic voting power is much more socioeconomically spread and shared than shareholder voting power.
        radlad 1y ago
        Shareholders receive power proportionate to their buying power. Citizens get a single vote. > You sometimes cam buy your way into citizenship. As a shareholder, it is your given right to vote in a shareholders meeting. Maybe - depending on your jurisdiction. Just like whether you have citizenship or not.
  - tavavex 1y ago
    Is that a bad thing? Democracies, even if flawed, are accountable to their citizens at least to an extent. Their power structures aren't dictatorial, like in a company, and can be steered and course-corrected. Private companies are accountable to no one, their only motivator and reason for existence is profit. If they're allowed to run our society, the outcome that we're seemingly inching towards, there will be nothing to stop their inevitable abuse for the sake of value extraction.
    - aleph_minus_one 1y ago
      > Democracies, even if flawed, are accountable to their citizens at least to an extent. Stock corporation, even if flawed, are accountable to their stock holders at least to an extent; thus your point > Private companies are accountable to no one clearly does not hold. Corporations, of course, can also be steered and course-corrected (shareholders meetings).
      - _aavaa_ 1y ago
        Corporations are in principle and practice accountable to those with more money. For all its flaws our democracy is still one person one vote.
        potato3732842 1y ago
        >For all its flaws our democracy is still one person one vote. Which seems to just devolve to "the lizards listen to whoever/whatever has money" at the high levels where the number of voters is very high.
        radlad 1y ago
        Some governments restrict the extent to which "lizards" can use their money to gain air time, etc.
        actionfromafar 1y ago
  - modo_mario 1y ago
    Might I note that we're building down nation states at a rapid rate at least in the west trough migration. The vast majority of my capital is not comprised of belgian ethnicities for example and the same will start to hold trough for a number of the other biggest cities.
- deleted 1y ago
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- woah 1y ago
  > Waymo could still happen, only it'd be a publicly funded project You really think so? All of the examples you gave are military technology during wartime, which the government does tend to be able to do since the existential risk motivates the organization to root out graft and free riding. I could see some kind of alternate reality future government funded Waymo being spun out of drone tank tech from WWIII but we wouldn't have it today.
  - serf 1y ago
    automating logistics lines does have military potential -- a waymo doesn't have to be holding bob and sara on the way to mcdonalds, it could also be long-hauling thousands of pounds of troop equipment and logistics needs. the lack of public funding towards automated cars isn't due to a lack of potential, it's due to a lack of focus and lower-hanging-fruit.
    - philipkglass 1y ago
      As I see it, the lineage of modern automated cars started with public funding from DARPA, with the first signs of success appearing in 2005: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge After the DARPA Urban Challenge of 2007 I naively thought that commercial self driving urban vehicles were about 5 years away. It actually took until 2020 for Waymo to offer services to the public, and just in one city to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waymo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waymo That's a long timeline from "tech demo" to usable technology. I don't know how to maintain government funding for that long in a democratic system. No president, senator, or representative goes that long without fighting for re-election. Any technology that still isn't working after 12 years is likely to be considered a dead end and canceled. The big impressive government projects of the 20th century delivered results faster; there were only 7 years between Kennedy's "We choose to go to the moon" speech and NASA actually landing on the moon. Companies with large resources can behave more like "planned economies" that aren't subject to short term whims of the electorate. Of course they can also exhibit even more short-term orientation -- the notorious "next quarter's earnings report" planning horizon.
- billy99k 1y ago
  "All of your examples are profit-driven, and not necessarily (even if we do benefit) done for the greater good of all or advancement of society." Without profit as a motive, innovation would be decades behind (if not longer than this). Governments can barely afford crumbling infrastructure maintenance as it is. I seriously doubt they are going to invest in projects for the 'greater good'. "We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects - Manhattan project, the space race & moon landing, ARPANET, etc." Yes, for defensive or offensive military purposes. Not much beyond this. Even big pharma supplies the world. The rest of the world with socialized medicine create knock-offs at a fraction of the cost, because they didn't have to spend decades going through testing and billions of dollars developing it.
  - computably 1y ago
    > Without profit as a motive, innovation would be decades behind (if not longer than this). Governments can barely afford crumbling infrastructure maintenance as it is. I seriously doubt they are going to invest in projects for the 'greater good'. The reason that governments have such a restrictive budget in the first place is people are individually profit-motivated. Governments do invest in projects for the greater good - you yourself note "big pharma" research, and in fact historically the US gov provided more than half the funding of all basic research nationally. > Yes, for defensive or offensive military purposes. Not much beyond this. Shinkansen. Anyways, governments across the world are driven by incentives that do recognize long-term economic/strategic interests. You can see it with AI, with climate change, even with the broad desire to create a "homegrown" Silicon Valley.
    - elevation 1y ago
      > The reason that governments have such a restrictive budget in the first place is people are individually profit-motivated You've got the cart before the horse; the government would not have a budget at all if people were not individually motivated to generate taxable events. Profit is the practice of accumulating more resources than you immediately need in the anticipation of their future use and enjoyment. Without a government, a profit makes the bearer a target for anyone who can overpower you. So the essential purpose of a government is the preservation of profit by opposing the forces that would destroy or carry it off: criminals, scammers, foreign militaries. Governments did not command the invention of penicillin, powered flight, electric light, transistors, the blue LED, or the majority of software products that are essential to society today. But it protected individuals to invent with the knowledge that their work could be rewarded on some timeframe rather than being immediately destroyed by an interloper.
- vmg12 1y ago
  > but who decides how those resources are deployed The current system selects people that have allocated resources effectively in the past by providing them more resources to allocate. > We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects And what is stopping countries from doing this today? This isn't an either or thing, public projects can still exist, there is no law of nature saying that massive companies are the sole source of innovations but for some reason people treat it like they are mutually exclusive. You bring up projects from decades ago but are there any modern examples? Since when has throwing money at systems that haven't shown success worked? And you are suggesting that we take money from others to throw it at a system that doesn't work.
  - Daishiman 1y ago
    > The current system selects people that have allocated resources effectively in the past by providing them more resources to allocate. The current system selected people that have maximized shareholder value and financially engineered it into other financial assets that provide power under the capitalist system. This includes private equity services that have simply squeezed money out of consumers for no increase in quality of life, or companies that managed to avoid the consequences of the externalities of their economic activity. > And what is stopping countries from doing this today? This isn't an either or thing, public projects can still exist, there is no law of nature saying that massive companies are the sole source of innovations but for some reason people treat it like they are mutually exclusive. You bring up projects from decades ago but are there any modern examples? Regulatory capture and lobbying that attempts to force a profit motive behind every large government initiative when the profit motive substracts value away from society at large.
  - hansvm 1y ago
    "Allocated resources effectively" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your description. The current system also rewards large-scale cons and rent extraction with the political power to do more of the same.
    - jongjong 1y ago
      Yes exactly. Also, we should stop pretending that the money supply is fixed and that everyone exists on the same monetary playing field. Arguments about efficient allocation are laughable when you consider that someone who is socially 6 steps removed from an institutional 'money printer' lives in a monetary environment where money is 10 times more scarce than it is at the source (due to taxation between each hop). Few people are so far removed in practice but the effects are still very powerful even with less distance. Taxation brings all economic activities closer to the government and banking sector. In competitive industries were profits are paper thin, monetary asymmetry can fully determine business outcomes. The company receiving government contracts on the side has a massive upper hand over its competitors during a monetary contraction. Same can be said about companies which operate in environments where their customers have access to large amounts of credit by virtue of their highly valued collateral. Their success has little to do with optimal allocation and a lot to do with socio-economic positioning and monetary system design.
- nradov 1y ago
  Major weapons development (or dual use) programs — especially for weapons of mass destruction — probably have to be government run due to national security concerns. But the notion that governments can effectively manage technology R&D projects is ludicrous. Look at what happened when Japan's MITI tried to run a Fifth Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) project: total failure and waste of tax money. In general, economic central planning is a dead end. People keep trying to claim that it would be more efficient or benefit society but it just doesn't work. Bureaucrats and politicians can't be trusted with resource allocation decisions.
- inglor_cz 1y ago
  Greater Good of All is a bit nebulous, and quite often translates into rather concentrated good of a few well-connected players. When you mention the space race, you should also add that once the Moon landing was over, the government-supported part of space activity got mostly bogged down in cost-plus boondoggles (see: Space Launch System, also called Senate Launch System), and without a vibrant private sector with deep pockets, the US would be launching maybe some twenty rockets a year now, more likely twelve, each at an extreme cost and without much technological progress. And American capability of supporting human spaceflight would be tenuous at best, or possibly nonexistent. (NASA is not at fault here. The politicians which command it, though... they seem to love giving Boeing et al. expensive projects.)
- thegrimmest 1y ago
  > for the greater good of all or advancement of society I'm not sure we agree enough on the definitions of these things to justify a democratic redistribution of resources towards them. Tyranny of the majority is still tyranny after all. The nice part about private enterprise is that it's hard to argue they didn't earn their money. Google, Apple, et al provided some value to some folks who volunteered to pay for it in a free exchange. Their claim to use their earned wealth as they see fit is much easier to substantiate than a government intervention which is neither voluntary nor obviously providing value to the people who pay for it.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- astrange 1y ago
  > or being controlled, by nation-state private companies You don't need to publicly fund something to "control" it. You can pass laws about it, you're the government! I always find this kind of rhetoric from Western socialists strange, it's like they've forgotten they aren't libertarians. The other issue being that they've forgotten there are downsides to owning something, because you don't always want to own all the risk. eg if you're a tech employee and paid in your employers' shares, you own some of your means of production. But you /shouldn't/, it's way too risky! You should sell it as soon as you get it and put it in an index fund.
- panick21_ 1y ago
  Adam Smith points out that it doesn't matter if things are done for the greater good or not. Them existing will improve lives for everybody either way. The problem with government funded large project is that they often monopolize. In the Soviet Union to much investment was flowing into the wrong stuff. And small scale innovation didn't get the resources to grow. While mistakes on a high level lead to total stagnation. For example NASA building the Shuttle crowed out almost everything else, and because the Shuttle was the wrong way to go the US has spent 50 years doubling down on that. If a large company makes a really, really big bet on something, they can pay a very large cost if they are wrong. And this has been historically the case, large projects that don't get anywhere are canceled. Governments can double down almost forever. So I think we do need everything, innovation from maverick individuals, innovation from smaller companies, large innovation form big companies, innovation from government project, innovation from private/government funded universities. There is no perfect 'this is the way to get innovation' that we have yet discovered.
dingnuts 1y ago
I'm not convinced LLMs are a net positive. They've been compared to railroads. Show me the new commerce brought about by LLM trains.
raincole 1y ago
Quite a lot of people don't want TSMC, Waymo and LLMs. They want a job market where one single breadwinner can support their house, spouse and kids. Is it a naive way to view the world? Yes. But it resonates with people more than "ChatGPT is going to replace you."
- bluGill 1y ago
  They say that, but when you point out that they could have that if they accept a lower standard of living they lose interest (and if possiple downvote or otherwise try to shout you down)
  - radlad 1y ago
    I think the problem is that you are proposing a false dichotomy: that if they do not want one consequence of the current system, they should eschew the entire system. But in actuality, I like some parts of how society is organized, and dislike some other parts. I don't want to leave society - I want society to be better.
    - lotsofpulp 1y ago
      Except this is impossible: >They want a job market where one single breadwinner can support their house, spouse and kids If society also wants women to be able to have the same income earning opportunities as men and hence have financial freedom. Animals compete and compare themselves to others, and so everywhere, dual earning households will outcompete single earning households, and so most market participants will be incentivized to be dual earning households.
      - radlad 1y ago
        First of all, I don't know where this specific example is coming from or how it relates to what I said exactly. Secondly, when you look at the distribution of wealth in the US, and realize that the top 50% of Americans own 97.5% of the wealth, or that the top 1% owns over 30% of the country's wealth, or read a headline about Elon Musk's $1T pay package, conversations about "dual-earning families" versus "single-earning families" look kind of inconsequential.
prasadjoglekar 1y ago
Sure, as long as they're not too big to fail. Those big banks should've gone bankrupt in 2008. They didn't because the taxpayer backstopped it. That is precisely the moral hazard we're now living with. Become so big that you can't fail and can't be disciplined.
afiori 1y ago
Then at worst progress on those would be slower. At best we would have less monopolistic global powers trying to rent us everyone of our freedoms
cs702 1y ago
Great response. Yes, in some cases concentration may be desirable. However, I'm not persuaded it was necessary in the specific cases you mention: * Waymo: EVs were repeatedly killed by corporations highly in concentrated industries that would suffer disruption by EVs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F * TSMC: Wouldn't we all be better off if the entire world weren't so dependent on a single company, located in a such a geopolitically sensitive territory? * 10B-param LLMs: Wouldn't it have happened regardless, once everyone realized that increasing the scale of early models like GPT-2 and GPT-3 was key to improving performance? I'd add that the model that launched the deep learning craze (AlexNet) and the model that launched the LLM craze and (the Transformer) were developed by tiny teams on the cheap.
- chermi 1y ago
  "Wouldn't it have happened regardless, once everyone realized that increasing the scale of early models like GPT-2 and GPT-3 was key to improving performance?" Notice how it was massive private spending that uncovered the power of scale in the first place. Would've been hard to say, get a federal grant for that. Would've probably happened gradually, with some gains from moderate scale justifying slightly larger grants for successively larger scale. As for TSMC, the counterfactual assumes such technology would've happened regardless. Just because technology seems to happen inevitably, doesn't make it so. We have evidence of one approach (private) giving incredible results. And also some examples of public (in wartime) giving incredible results. I don't know the evidence for peacetime public incredible results. Maybe warpspeed?
  - cs702 1y ago
    The cost of developing GPT-2 and GPT-3 was on the order of millions of dollars, well within the budget of most tech organizations. See https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165 https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165 for the total compute invested in them. OpenAI had raised only a few tens of millions in donations at the time, as a non-profit organization. The increase in performance of computation has been happening for so many decades now that it's been given names like "Moore's Law." People like Hans Moravec predicted way back in the 1980's that the cost of compute would continue to decline and become cheap enough for AGI by the 2020's or 2030's. That's half a century ago!
Tade0 1y ago
> - Would TSMC have gotten as far if Apple couldn't reliably buy out months of capacity on the next node, bankrolling TSMC's tech development? TSMC would have had other customers. And if not them, then e.g. Samsung or Intel would have something to offer. Sure, without this investment the pace of development wouldn't be as fast, but are chips from e.g. a decade ago already utterly useless? Of course not. Life would be largely the same, only somewhat slower. Perhaps without hardware updates we would finally start thinking long and hard about performance optimisations?
fmbb 1y ago
Reading your first three bullet points I thought you were dreaming about how much better the world could have been. But your main paragraph following them reads to me like you want Waymo, a powerful TSMC, and huge LLMs. If there is one thing concentrating power and wealth does it is preferring shorttermism. Growth in the next quarter trumps anything else. Humanity’s ecological niche is suffering long term. Civilization suffers as wealth inequality increases (which concentration of power makes happen).
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
biophysboy 1y ago
Bell labs also sat on a lot of tech that didn't align w/ their business
badpun 1y ago
All those things could still happen if private enterprises pooled their resources and did R&D together. This is already routinely happening in the car industry, where companies band together to develop new engines, to make the R&D expense hurt less.
deelowe 1y ago
I would gladly accept a bit of a slow down on progress if it meant my contributions to society were more meaningful. Additionally, I strongly believe this continuous dwindling of small organizations has resulted in an overall loss of community and a sense of belonging. In my opinion, this is what's causing the overall decline in health that we're seeing in developed nations. For many, life seems aimless. Your future is to simply contribute what you're told to some faceless multinational for which after 20 years your only recognition will be a small piece of canvas with a mass produced screen printed design.
latexr 1y ago
All of the things you mentioned serve the primary purpose of making the rich and powerful more rich and powerful, not improving the lives of the majority. We could live without self-driving cars, and most of the world still does; faster chips are nice but not revolutionary when we’re using them to waste away watching six hours of ten seconds disinformation videos a day; LLMs are literally telling people to eat glue, convincing people to kill themselves, making cocky ignorant assholes more sure of themselves, and increasing the spread of lies and misinformation. Humanity would probably benefit from moving slower, not faster.
- astrange 1y ago
  Much of the world has, and our part of the world had, self-driving cars called horses. > LLMs are literally telling people to eat glue That's because Google forced theirs to summarize its search results and search results don't work anymore because we only have one website left.
- rangestransform 1y ago
  They all fulfill individual desires better than the next best alternative, and that's reason enough to have anything
  - latexr 1y ago
    > and that's reason enough to have anything I very much is not. That logic could be used to justify just about anything, from slavery to littering. You don’t live in a world populated by just yourself, there are people around you affected by your actions. Be respectful and mindful that what you do affects others. And yourself as well, even if you don’t immediately see it.
jayd16 1y ago
I'm really not sure the answer to any of these is "we would be worse off", let alone would someone be able to raise the funds. Did we have more telecom innovation when Bell was huge or after that?
PaulHoule 1y ago
Probably the best statement for "biggering up", at least in the case of Africa, was made in a recent editorial in The Economist https://www.economist.com/special-report/2025/01/06/africa-has-too-many-businesses-too-little-business https://www.economist.com/special-report/2025/01/06/africa-h... https://archive.ph/j5CJY https://archive.ph/j5CJY
tempestn 1y ago
That's sort of the problem, right? Large organizations have become dominant precisely because of reasons like this, and there are indeed huge benefits. But if the hypothesis is correct that the crowding out of smaller organizations is fraying the fabric of society, that's a pretty significant drawback.
balamatom 1y ago
>- Would we even have >10B-param LLMs at all? Would anyone even be calling for those, if their core purpose wasn't to facilitate the concentration of capital?
avmich 1y ago
I would compare "larger businesses" with "socialistic planning system" while "smaller businesses" with "free market economy". There are examples when centralized planning got good results - NASA's Apollo project is an example. There are also examples when market economy - eventually, in the long term, not short - prevailed: the Cold War is an example here. It's also quite possible the analogy is flawed though.
- bluecheese452 1y ago
  It is also very hard to separate “socialist planning system” from “Russian Empire”. It isn’t like things were going swimmingly in Tsarist Russia and then they reentered a golden age in the 90s. If anything this socialist system brought them to the height of their power and influence.
  - astrange 1y ago
    Much of that was due to foreign aid and lend-lease from the US. Of course, we also destroyed Russia and made it an oligarchy by giving them bad advice ("shock therapy") after it collapsed. Like basically everything else (including the existence of Facebook) this is Larry Summers' fault.
  - avmich 1y ago
    "Socialist planning system" can also be - approximately, of course - compared to modern, 2020-s Russia, and modern China (PRC, not Taiwan). The renaissance of economy by the end of 1990-s was significantly assisted by moving towards "free market economy". I would argue that "socialist planning system" had its successes, but in the long run didn't survive the competition, at least in the case of the USSR.
rpcope1 1y ago
You ask your questions rhetorically as though the answer would be bad if they didn't. None of those really have had a profound good impact on the population at large and it's not clear that they're all that truly impactful in a good way to the population at large. I think we wouldn't notice or care by and large, and it's just because some nerd somewhere is excited for next product is not a good reason for centraliZation.
- mgfist 1y ago
  Have you ridden in a Waymo? I'd sell my car if/when they become ubiquitous enough.
  - Sharlin 1y ago
    Self-driving EVs are not a solution to most of the externalities of personal automobiles. No means of transport is that requires twenty square meters of space and 2000 kg of matter to move 1.4 persons at a time on average. It’s not even clear as of now whether they have a net positive effect on the society, even if they ever become viable in climates that aren’t always sunny.
    - mgfist 1y ago
      > Self-driving EVs are not a solution to most of the externalities of personal automobiles. Why do you think self-driving cars are meant to solve automobile externalities? I don't view them in that way. I view them as solving personal problems with driving - attention, safety, comfort, utilization rate, cost, etc.. > It’s not even clear as of now whether they have a net positive effect on the society Why not? Personal automobiles have a utilization rate of around 5%. If Waymo can get that to even 40% that means you can reduce the number of vehicles by 8x (let's be conservative and say 4x to account for potentially higher use of them a la Jevon's Paradox). They're also infinitely safer and it's likely that they'll get to the point where there are no automobile related deaths. They'll replace the likes of Uber and taxis which have been known to be sources of assaults and other crimes. They'll unlock other opportunities too but regardless of how conservative you want to be with their effects, if they roll out to the point where one can forgo buying a personal automobile, it's very very hard to argue it won't be a huge net positive to society. I bet your reason against it is that you believe something like trains and metros and bikes are better. And to an extent they are, I live in a city and prefer to ride the metro when I can. But it's pure hopium thinking they can ever fully obviate cars.
kranke155 1y ago
Not a single one of those projects is preferable to a more equitable society. Maybe self driving, yes, but the impact of AI is highly dubious and uncertain at this point in time.
ckemere 1y ago
I think the key problem with this idea is taught in basic Microeconomics. A competitive market should have zero profit. The choice of the government to allow a non competitive market is a choice to transfer consumer surplus to producers, which is effectively a tax-by-regulatory choice. So the counter argument to “what about Bell Labs” would be that the democratically elected government (in theory) can more efficiently gather that tax and pay for research. Recognizing counter arguments about effective allocation of resources to useful research. But also recognizing that much R&D goes to future profits for the company rather than just societal benefit.
bigstrat2003 1y ago
It's not clear to me that anything of value would have been lost in this counterfactual world.
panick21_ 1y ago
Self Driving cars are very much unproven, and without google people would still be working on them. And so far its not clear that this investment was worth it. TSMC had many costumers willing to buy new chips. But I agree, sometimes, larger companies very much do make sense.
bccdee 1y ago
You're talking about large-scale hyperexpensive infrastructure research projects with uncertain payouts, which is something that the state already excels at. Public grants are responsible for bankrolling an enormous amount of the research that gets done, and infrastructure projects are money-sinks with a very long timescale. I don't really see how this is an argument functions in favour of big corporations and against big government.
aiven 1y ago
* assuming that we actually need all these technological advancements

thewebguyd 1y ago

Large projects need resources, but who decides how those resources are deployed, to what end, and who benefits from them is the important part. All of your examples are profit-driven, and not necessarily (even if we do benefit) done for the greater good of all or advancement of society. We can still accomplish big innovations without those innovations coming from, or being controlled, by nation-state private companies. We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects - Manhattan project, the space race & moon landing, ARPANET, etc. Waymo could still happen, only it'd be a publicly funded project and the societal benefit would be broader and not tied to a single company's market dominance.

aleph_minus_one 1y ago
> We can still accomplish big innovations without those innovations coming from, or being controlled, by nation-state private companies. We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects - Manhattan project, the space race & moon landing, ARPANET, etc. So you prefer nation-state nations over nation-state private companies. :-)
- mstipetic 1y ago
  Yes of course
- ghaff 1y ago
  Though two of your examples (not really Manhattan Project) had very significant private sector participants.
  - thewebguyd 1y ago
    I think that's unavoidable, but also not a bad thing. If we were to undertake any similar large scale public projects today, it would also have significant private sector participation. But, that drives job creation and positive effects on the economy (i.e., new deal). The main difference is, ideally, the project was voted on by the public, and is being steered as such. A public-private collaboration, with the public driving it rather than it being entirely the domain of a single private entity for their own profit.
- radlad 1y ago
  I do, when citizens have the ability to steer their nation state (i.e. the ability to vote.) On this note, I've lived in a couple states with ballot initiative processes and while they are not perfect, I think they are absolutely necessary for citizens to truly be able to hold their elected representatives accountable (i.e. override them) and I wish we had them at a federal level.
  - aleph_minus_one 1y ago
    > I do, when citizens have the ability to steer their nation state (i.e. the ability to vote.) You can also vote in the shareholders meeting.
    - thewebguyd 1y ago
      You have to buy your way into voting as a shareholder. In a democracy, it's just your given right as a citizen.
      - aleph_minus_one 1y ago
        > You have to buy your way into voting as a shareholder. In a democracy, it's just your given right as a citizen. In a democratic country, only the people who have citizenship are allowed to vote. In a shareholders meeting, only the shareholders are allowed to vote. You sometimes cam buy your way into citizenship. As a shareholder, it is your given right to vote in a shareholders meeting.
        Fraterkes 1y ago
        Even if you think there's no qualitative difference between the 2 (which I think is a deeply immature idea, but whatever), there's an obvious quantitative difference: In practice democratic voting power is much more socioeconomically spread and shared than shareholder voting power.
        radlad 1y ago
        Shareholders receive power proportionate to their buying power. Citizens get a single vote. > You sometimes cam buy your way into citizenship. As a shareholder, it is your given right to vote in a shareholders meeting. Maybe - depending on your jurisdiction. Just like whether you have citizenship or not.
- tavavex 1y ago
  Is that a bad thing? Democracies, even if flawed, are accountable to their citizens at least to an extent. Their power structures aren't dictatorial, like in a company, and can be steered and course-corrected. Private companies are accountable to no one, their only motivator and reason for existence is profit. If they're allowed to run our society, the outcome that we're seemingly inching towards, there will be nothing to stop their inevitable abuse for the sake of value extraction.
  - aleph_minus_one 1y ago
    > Democracies, even if flawed, are accountable to their citizens at least to an extent. Stock corporation, even if flawed, are accountable to their stock holders at least to an extent; thus your point > Private companies are accountable to no one clearly does not hold. Corporations, of course, can also be steered and course-corrected (shareholders meetings).
    - _aavaa_ 1y ago
      Corporations are in principle and practice accountable to those with more money. For all its flaws our democracy is still one person one vote.
      - potato3732842 1y ago
        >For all its flaws our democracy is still one person one vote. Which seems to just devolve to "the lizards listen to whoever/whatever has money" at the high levels where the number of voters is very high.
        radlad 1y ago
        Some governments restrict the extent to which "lizards" can use their money to gain air time, etc.
        actionfromafar 1y ago
- modo_mario 1y ago
  Might I note that we're building down nation states at a rapid rate at least in the west trough migration. The vast majority of my capital is not comprised of belgian ethnicities for example and the same will start to hold trough for a number of the other biggest cities.
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woah 1y ago
> Waymo could still happen, only it'd be a publicly funded project You really think so? All of the examples you gave are military technology during wartime, which the government does tend to be able to do since the existential risk motivates the organization to root out graft and free riding. I could see some kind of alternate reality future government funded Waymo being spun out of drone tank tech from WWIII but we wouldn't have it today.
- serf 1y ago
  automating logistics lines does have military potential -- a waymo doesn't have to be holding bob and sara on the way to mcdonalds, it could also be long-hauling thousands of pounds of troop equipment and logistics needs. the lack of public funding towards automated cars isn't due to a lack of potential, it's due to a lack of focus and lower-hanging-fruit.
  - philipkglass 1y ago
    As I see it, the lineage of modern automated cars started with public funding from DARPA, with the first signs of success appearing in 2005: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge After the DARPA Urban Challenge of 2007 I naively thought that commercial self driving urban vehicles were about 5 years away. It actually took until 2020 for Waymo to offer services to the public, and just in one city to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waymo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waymo That's a long timeline from "tech demo" to usable technology. I don't know how to maintain government funding for that long in a democratic system. No president, senator, or representative goes that long without fighting for re-election. Any technology that still isn't working after 12 years is likely to be considered a dead end and canceled. The big impressive government projects of the 20th century delivered results faster; there were only 7 years between Kennedy's "We choose to go to the moon" speech and NASA actually landing on the moon. Companies with large resources can behave more like "planned economies" that aren't subject to short term whims of the electorate. Of course they can also exhibit even more short-term orientation -- the notorious "next quarter's earnings report" planning horizon.
billy99k 1y ago
"All of your examples are profit-driven, and not necessarily (even if we do benefit) done for the greater good of all or advancement of society." Without profit as a motive, innovation would be decades behind (if not longer than this). Governments can barely afford crumbling infrastructure maintenance as it is. I seriously doubt they are going to invest in projects for the 'greater good'. "We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects - Manhattan project, the space race & moon landing, ARPANET, etc." Yes, for defensive or offensive military purposes. Not much beyond this. Even big pharma supplies the world. The rest of the world with socialized medicine create knock-offs at a fraction of the cost, because they didn't have to spend decades going through testing and billions of dollars developing it.
- computably 1y ago
  > Without profit as a motive, innovation would be decades behind (if not longer than this). Governments can barely afford crumbling infrastructure maintenance as it is. I seriously doubt they are going to invest in projects for the 'greater good'. The reason that governments have such a restrictive budget in the first place is people are individually profit-motivated. Governments do invest in projects for the greater good - you yourself note "big pharma" research, and in fact historically the US gov provided more than half the funding of all basic research nationally. > Yes, for defensive or offensive military purposes. Not much beyond this. Shinkansen. Anyways, governments across the world are driven by incentives that do recognize long-term economic/strategic interests. You can see it with AI, with climate change, even with the broad desire to create a "homegrown" Silicon Valley.
  - elevation 1y ago
    > The reason that governments have such a restrictive budget in the first place is people are individually profit-motivated You've got the cart before the horse; the government would not have a budget at all if people were not individually motivated to generate taxable events. Profit is the practice of accumulating more resources than you immediately need in the anticipation of their future use and enjoyment. Without a government, a profit makes the bearer a target for anyone who can overpower you. So the essential purpose of a government is the preservation of profit by opposing the forces that would destroy or carry it off: criminals, scammers, foreign militaries. Governments did not command the invention of penicillin, powered flight, electric light, transistors, the blue LED, or the majority of software products that are essential to society today. But it protected individuals to invent with the knowledge that their work could be rewarded on some timeframe rather than being immediately destroyed by an interloper.
vmg12 1y ago
> but who decides how those resources are deployed The current system selects people that have allocated resources effectively in the past by providing them more resources to allocate. > We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects And what is stopping countries from doing this today? This isn't an either or thing, public projects can still exist, there is no law of nature saying that massive companies are the sole source of innovations but for some reason people treat it like they are mutually exclusive. You bring up projects from decades ago but are there any modern examples? Since when has throwing money at systems that haven't shown success worked? And you are suggesting that we take money from others to throw it at a system that doesn't work.
- Daishiman 1y ago
  > The current system selects people that have allocated resources effectively in the past by providing them more resources to allocate. The current system selected people that have maximized shareholder value and financially engineered it into other financial assets that provide power under the capitalist system. This includes private equity services that have simply squeezed money out of consumers for no increase in quality of life, or companies that managed to avoid the consequences of the externalities of their economic activity. > And what is stopping countries from doing this today? This isn't an either or thing, public projects can still exist, there is no law of nature saying that massive companies are the sole source of innovations but for some reason people treat it like they are mutually exclusive. You bring up projects from decades ago but are there any modern examples? Regulatory capture and lobbying that attempts to force a profit motive behind every large government initiative when the profit motive substracts value away from society at large.
- hansvm 1y ago
  "Allocated resources effectively" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your description. The current system also rewards large-scale cons and rent extraction with the political power to do more of the same.
  - jongjong 1y ago
    Yes exactly. Also, we should stop pretending that the money supply is fixed and that everyone exists on the same monetary playing field. Arguments about efficient allocation are laughable when you consider that someone who is socially 6 steps removed from an institutional 'money printer' lives in a monetary environment where money is 10 times more scarce than it is at the source (due to taxation between each hop). Few people are so far removed in practice but the effects are still very powerful even with less distance. Taxation brings all economic activities closer to the government and banking sector. In competitive industries were profits are paper thin, monetary asymmetry can fully determine business outcomes. The company receiving government contracts on the side has a massive upper hand over its competitors during a monetary contraction. Same can be said about companies which operate in environments where their customers have access to large amounts of credit by virtue of their highly valued collateral. Their success has little to do with optimal allocation and a lot to do with socio-economic positioning and monetary system design.
nradov 1y ago
Major weapons development (or dual use) programs — especially for weapons of mass destruction — probably have to be government run due to national security concerns. But the notion that governments can effectively manage technology R&D projects is ludicrous. Look at what happened when Japan's MITI tried to run a Fifth Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) project: total failure and waste of tax money. In general, economic central planning is a dead end. People keep trying to claim that it would be more efficient or benefit society but it just doesn't work. Bureaucrats and politicians can't be trusted with resource allocation decisions.
inglor_cz 1y ago
Greater Good of All is a bit nebulous, and quite often translates into rather concentrated good of a few well-connected players. When you mention the space race, you should also add that once the Moon landing was over, the government-supported part of space activity got mostly bogged down in cost-plus boondoggles (see: Space Launch System, also called Senate Launch System), and without a vibrant private sector with deep pockets, the US would be launching maybe some twenty rockets a year now, more likely twelve, each at an extreme cost and without much technological progress. And American capability of supporting human spaceflight would be tenuous at best, or possibly nonexistent. (NASA is not at fault here. The politicians which command it, though... they seem to love giving Boeing et al. expensive projects.)
thegrimmest 1y ago
> for the greater good of all or advancement of society I'm not sure we agree enough on the definitions of these things to justify a democratic redistribution of resources towards them. Tyranny of the majority is still tyranny after all. The nice part about private enterprise is that it's hard to argue they didn't earn their money. Google, Apple, et al provided some value to some folks who volunteered to pay for it in a free exchange. Their claim to use their earned wealth as they see fit is much easier to substantiate than a government intervention which is neither voluntary nor obviously providing value to the people who pay for it.
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astrange 1y ago
> or being controlled, by nation-state private companies You don't need to publicly fund something to "control" it. You can pass laws about it, you're the government! I always find this kind of rhetoric from Western socialists strange, it's like they've forgotten they aren't libertarians. The other issue being that they've forgotten there are downsides to owning something, because you don't always want to own all the risk. eg if you're a tech employee and paid in your employers' shares, you own some of your means of production. But you /shouldn't/, it's way too risky! You should sell it as soon as you get it and put it in an index fund.
panick21_ 1y ago
Adam Smith points out that it doesn't matter if things are done for the greater good or not. Them existing will improve lives for everybody either way. The problem with government funded large project is that they often monopolize. In the Soviet Union to much investment was flowing into the wrong stuff. And small scale innovation didn't get the resources to grow. While mistakes on a high level lead to total stagnation. For example NASA building the Shuttle crowed out almost everything else, and because the Shuttle was the wrong way to go the US has spent 50 years doubling down on that. If a large company makes a really, really big bet on something, they can pay a very large cost if they are wrong. And this has been historically the case, large projects that don't get anywhere are canceled. Governments can double down almost forever. So I think we do need everything, innovation from maverick individuals, innovation from smaller companies, large innovation form big companies, innovation from government project, innovation from private/government funded universities. There is no perfect 'this is the way to get innovation' that we have yet discovered.

dingnuts 1y ago

I'm not convinced LLMs are a net positive. They've been compared to railroads. Show me the new commerce brought about by LLM trains.

raincole 1y ago

Quite a lot of people don't want TSMC, Waymo and LLMs. They want a job market where one single breadwinner can support their house, spouse and kids. Is it a naive way to view the world? Yes. But it resonates with people more than "ChatGPT is going to replace you."

bluGill 1y ago
They say that, but when you point out that they could have that if they accept a lower standard of living they lose interest (and if possiple downvote or otherwise try to shout you down)
- radlad 1y ago
  I think the problem is that you are proposing a false dichotomy: that if they do not want one consequence of the current system, they should eschew the entire system. But in actuality, I like some parts of how society is organized, and dislike some other parts. I don't want to leave society - I want society to be better.
  - lotsofpulp 1y ago
    Except this is impossible: >They want a job market where one single breadwinner can support their house, spouse and kids If society also wants women to be able to have the same income earning opportunities as men and hence have financial freedom. Animals compete and compare themselves to others, and so everywhere, dual earning households will outcompete single earning households, and so most market participants will be incentivized to be dual earning households.
    - radlad 1y ago
      First of all, I don't know where this specific example is coming from or how it relates to what I said exactly. Secondly, when you look at the distribution of wealth in the US, and realize that the top 50% of Americans own 97.5% of the wealth, or that the top 1% owns over 30% of the country's wealth, or read a headline about Elon Musk's $1T pay package, conversations about "dual-earning families" versus "single-earning families" look kind of inconsequential.

prasadjoglekar 1y ago

Sure, as long as they're not too big to fail. Those big banks should've gone bankrupt in 2008. They didn't because the taxpayer backstopped it. That is precisely the moral hazard we're now living with. Become so big that you can't fail and can't be disciplined.

afiori 1y ago

Then at worst progress on those would be slower. At best we would have less monopolistic global powers trying to rent us everyone of our freedoms

cs702 1y ago

Great response. Yes, in some cases concentration may be desirable. However, I'm not persuaded it was necessary in the specific cases you mention: * Waymo: EVs were repeatedly killed by corporations highly in concentrated industries that would suffer disruption by EVs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F * TSMC: Wouldn't we all be better off if the entire world weren't so dependent on a single company, located in a such a geopolitically sensitive territory? * 10B-param LLMs: Wouldn't it have happened regardless, once everyone realized that increasing the scale of early models like GPT-2 and GPT-3 was key to improving performance? I'd add that the model that launched the deep learning craze (AlexNet) and the model that launched the LLM craze and (the Transformer) were developed by tiny teams on the cheap.

chermi 1y ago
"Wouldn't it have happened regardless, once everyone realized that increasing the scale of early models like GPT-2 and GPT-3 was key to improving performance?" Notice how it was massive private spending that uncovered the power of scale in the first place. Would've been hard to say, get a federal grant for that. Would've probably happened gradually, with some gains from moderate scale justifying slightly larger grants for successively larger scale. As for TSMC, the counterfactual assumes such technology would've happened regardless. Just because technology seems to happen inevitably, doesn't make it so. We have evidence of one approach (private) giving incredible results. And also some examples of public (in wartime) giving incredible results. I don't know the evidence for peacetime public incredible results. Maybe warpspeed?
- cs702 1y ago
  The cost of developing GPT-2 and GPT-3 was on the order of millions of dollars, well within the budget of most tech organizations. See https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165 https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165 for the total compute invested in them. OpenAI had raised only a few tens of millions in donations at the time, as a non-profit organization. The increase in performance of computation has been happening for so many decades now that it's been given names like "Moore's Law." People like Hans Moravec predicted way back in the 1980's that the cost of compute would continue to decline and become cheap enough for AGI by the 2020's or 2030's. That's half a century ago!

Tade0 1y ago

> - Would TSMC have gotten as far if Apple couldn't reliably buy out months of capacity on the next node, bankrolling TSMC's tech development? TSMC would have had other customers. And if not them, then e.g. Samsung or Intel would have something to offer. Sure, without this investment the pace of development wouldn't be as fast, but are chips from e.g. a decade ago already utterly useless? Of course not. Life would be largely the same, only somewhat slower. Perhaps without hardware updates we would finally start thinking long and hard about performance optimisations?

fmbb 1y ago

Reading your first three bullet points I thought you were dreaming about how much better the world could have been. But your main paragraph following them reads to me like you want Waymo, a powerful TSMC, and huge LLMs. If there is one thing concentrating power and wealth does it is preferring shorttermism. Growth in the next quarter trumps anything else. Humanity’s ecological niche is suffering long term. Civilization suffers as wealth inequality increases (which concentration of power makes happen).

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biophysboy 1y ago

Bell labs also sat on a lot of tech that didn't align w/ their business

badpun 1y ago

All those things could still happen if private enterprises pooled their resources and did R&D together. This is already routinely happening in the car industry, where companies band together to develop new engines, to make the R&D expense hurt less.

deelowe 1y ago

I would gladly accept a bit of a slow down on progress if it meant my contributions to society were more meaningful. Additionally, I strongly believe this continuous dwindling of small organizations has resulted in an overall loss of community and a sense of belonging. In my opinion, this is what's causing the overall decline in health that we're seeing in developed nations. For many, life seems aimless. Your future is to simply contribute what you're told to some faceless multinational for which after 20 years your only recognition will be a small piece of canvas with a mass produced screen printed design.

latexr 1y ago

All of the things you mentioned serve the primary purpose of making the rich and powerful more rich and powerful, not improving the lives of the majority. We could live without self-driving cars, and most of the world still does; faster chips are nice but not revolutionary when we’re using them to waste away watching six hours of ten seconds disinformation videos a day; LLMs are literally telling people to eat glue, convincing people to kill themselves, making cocky ignorant assholes more sure of themselves, and increasing the spread of lies and misinformation. Humanity would probably benefit from moving slower, not faster.

astrange 1y ago
Much of the world has, and our part of the world had, self-driving cars called horses. > LLMs are literally telling people to eat glue That's because Google forced theirs to summarize its search results and search results don't work anymore because we only have one website left.
rangestransform 1y ago
They all fulfill individual desires better than the next best alternative, and that's reason enough to have anything
- latexr 1y ago
  > and that's reason enough to have anything I very much is not. That logic could be used to justify just about anything, from slavery to littering. You don’t live in a world populated by just yourself, there are people around you affected by your actions. Be respectful and mindful that what you do affects others. And yourself as well, even if you don’t immediately see it.

jayd16 1y ago

I'm really not sure the answer to any of these is "we would be worse off", let alone would someone be able to raise the funds. Did we have more telecom innovation when Bell was huge or after that?

PaulHoule 1y ago

Probably the best statement for "biggering up", at least in the case of Africa, was made in a recent editorial in The Economist https://www.economist.com/special-report/2025/01/06/africa-has-too-many-businesses-too-little-business https://www.economist.com/special-report/2025/01/06/africa-h... https://archive.ph/j5CJY https://archive.ph/j5CJY

tempestn 1y ago

That's sort of the problem, right? Large organizations have become dominant precisely because of reasons like this, and there are indeed huge benefits. But if the hypothesis is correct that the crowding out of smaller organizations is fraying the fabric of society, that's a pretty significant drawback.

balamatom 1y ago

>- Would we even have >10B-param LLMs at all? Would anyone even be calling for those, if their core purpose wasn't to facilitate the concentration of capital?

avmich 1y ago

I would compare "larger businesses" with "socialistic planning system" while "smaller businesses" with "free market economy". There are examples when centralized planning got good results - NASA's Apollo project is an example. There are also examples when market economy - eventually, in the long term, not short - prevailed: the Cold War is an example here. It's also quite possible the analogy is flawed though.

bluecheese452 1y ago
It is also very hard to separate “socialist planning system” from “Russian Empire”. It isn’t like things were going swimmingly in Tsarist Russia and then they reentered a golden age in the 90s. If anything this socialist system brought them to the height of their power and influence.
- astrange 1y ago
  Much of that was due to foreign aid and lend-lease from the US. Of course, we also destroyed Russia and made it an oligarchy by giving them bad advice ("shock therapy") after it collapsed. Like basically everything else (including the existence of Facebook) this is Larry Summers' fault.
- avmich 1y ago
  "Socialist planning system" can also be - approximately, of course - compared to modern, 2020-s Russia, and modern China (PRC, not Taiwan). The renaissance of economy by the end of 1990-s was significantly assisted by moving towards "free market economy". I would argue that "socialist planning system" had its successes, but in the long run didn't survive the competition, at least in the case of the USSR.

rpcope1 1y ago

You ask your questions rhetorically as though the answer would be bad if they didn't. None of those really have had a profound good impact on the population at large and it's not clear that they're all that truly impactful in a good way to the population at large. I think we wouldn't notice or care by and large, and it's just because some nerd somewhere is excited for next product is not a good reason for centraliZation.

mgfist 1y ago
Have you ridden in a Waymo? I'd sell my car if/when they become ubiquitous enough.
- Sharlin 1y ago
  Self-driving EVs are not a solution to most of the externalities of personal automobiles. No means of transport is that requires twenty square meters of space and 2000 kg of matter to move 1.4 persons at a time on average. It’s not even clear as of now whether they have a net positive effect on the society, even if they ever become viable in climates that aren’t always sunny.
  - mgfist 1y ago
    > Self-driving EVs are not a solution to most of the externalities of personal automobiles. Why do you think self-driving cars are meant to solve automobile externalities? I don't view them in that way. I view them as solving personal problems with driving - attention, safety, comfort, utilization rate, cost, etc.. > It’s not even clear as of now whether they have a net positive effect on the society Why not? Personal automobiles have a utilization rate of around 5%. If Waymo can get that to even 40% that means you can reduce the number of vehicles by 8x (let's be conservative and say 4x to account for potentially higher use of them a la Jevon's Paradox). They're also infinitely safer and it's likely that they'll get to the point where there are no automobile related deaths. They'll replace the likes of Uber and taxis which have been known to be sources of assaults and other crimes. They'll unlock other opportunities too but regardless of how conservative you want to be with their effects, if they roll out to the point where one can forgo buying a personal automobile, it's very very hard to argue it won't be a huge net positive to society. I bet your reason against it is that you believe something like trains and metros and bikes are better. And to an extent they are, I live in a city and prefer to ride the metro when I can. But it's pure hopium thinking they can ever fully obviate cars.

kranke155 1y ago

Not a single one of those projects is preferable to a more equitable society. Maybe self driving, yes, but the impact of AI is highly dubious and uncertain at this point in time.

ckemere 1y ago

I think the key problem with this idea is taught in basic Microeconomics. A competitive market should have zero profit. The choice of the government to allow a non competitive market is a choice to transfer consumer surplus to producers, which is effectively a tax-by-regulatory choice. So the counter argument to “what about Bell Labs” would be that the democratically elected government (in theory) can more efficiently gather that tax and pay for research. Recognizing counter arguments about effective allocation of resources to useful research. But also recognizing that much R&D goes to future profits for the company rather than just societal benefit.

bigstrat2003 1y ago

It's not clear to me that anything of value would have been lost in this counterfactual world.

panick21_ 1y ago

Self Driving cars are very much unproven, and without google people would still be working on them. And so far its not clear that this investment was worth it. TSMC had many costumers willing to buy new chips. But I agree, sometimes, larger companies very much do make sense.

bccdee 1y ago

You're talking about large-scale hyperexpensive infrastructure research projects with uncertain payouts, which is something that the state already excels at. Public grants are responsible for bankrolling an enormous amount of the research that gets done, and infrastructure projects are money-sinks with a very long timescale. I don't really see how this is an argument functions in favour of big corporations and against big government.

aiven 1y ago

* assuming that we actually need all these technological advancements