First, I don't think that most companies have even harvested the low-hanging fruit in their data. They need to do it before they worry about optimizing it. Sec

First, I don't think that most companies have even harvested the low-hanging fruit in their data. They need to do it before they worry about optimizing it. Second, there really are a lot of barriers to this. Your idea about improving prop design is cool, but it requires more resources than a few buddies can assemble: huge computational horsepower, as you note, as well as the ability to actually fabricate and test the props. Liability concerns will squash much of the innovation. Your traffic flow question is really interesting. But I don't think I'll be entering if there's any chance that some lawyer is going to add me to the list of defendants when someone gets killed by a driver running a red light. In some areas the government outright forbids private development. (I don't mean to turn this into a gun control debate; for good or bad, this is just an example) The USA used to be the world's innovator in firearms design. People like John Moses Browning are part of the reason that our military became the class of the world. But starting with the 1938 NFR, taxes and regulations made it impractical for private individuals. The result is that now improvements are really only the result of direct government funding (e.g., Armalite and the AR-15), or occur overseas, like in Israel. Similarly, I imagine that any biological or pharma work would wind up with the FBI at your door (assuming that you could get by without million-dollar hardware anway).