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If they can't identify the "missing enabler," then how are they to know it's missing? Breakthroughs don't just happen and change everything. In almost every c
by jlarocco 13y ago
If they can't identify the "missing enabler," then how are they to know it's missing?
Breakthroughs don't just happen and change everything. In almost every case there's a lot of background work, like this stuff, that builds up to the breakthrough.
- MarcusBrutus 13y agoThey don't have to identify it and they don't have to know it's missing. My whole point is that the breakthroughs will happen in some other technology tree, and they will most likely occur in the context of some more mundane, profit-seeking commercial endeavors, in much the same way that advances in metallurgy and machine tool technology enabled the steam engine although the basic principle and some crude prototypes were already available since classical antiquity. What's been happening since the 1950s in robotics (I am not talking Toyota car factory robotics) is simply a misallocation of taxpayer's capital and hurts science and technological advancement since it fails to allocate research capital in the way most likely to lead to sustainable, economically exploitable breakthroughs. Of course all that pales in comparison to money wasted in social "sciences" etc.
- pjc50 13y agoThis is not only unsupported assertion but moving the goalposts so far that one of them is in orbit.