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The Mediocre Returns of Extraordinary Technologies
- skmurphy 17y agoCore Observation: For all of its undeniable power, the printing press wasn’t the source of large fortunes for the engineers, investors, and businessmen involved in this industry. Profits were made, yes, sometimes significant ones, but nothing quite proportional to the influence of the technology. The bulk of the benefits came to the organizations that leveraged this technology for their own ends like modern states, which would have been logistically impossible without the printing press, or the myriad business that cannot be conceived without a superbly well-educated (for pre-modern standards) source of workers and consumers. The same pattern can be seen in many other technical advances, specially those that impacted society the most. Contraceptives, telecommunications, refrigeration: they are often overlooked foundations of the contemporary world, each of them enormously disruptive, yet none of them, over the long term, a gold mine of extraordinary returns.
- litewulf 17y agoThis is perhaps a sign that "dollar earned" is a very poor metric for impact. I find it very disappointing to see presentations of Cool Project X which have as their second or third slide Monetization, when I wish things could often be justified because they make the world epsilon better.
- eru 17y agoWe do not live to breath, but we do have to breath to live. Profit is necessary to make your projects sustainable. As you can see, as the article says often important inventions do not lead to a lot of immediate profit, but they have to make at least some money to survive.
- Eliezer 17y agoProfits aren't determined by how much value you create, they're determined by how much value you can capture.