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This is one of my favorite (if not my absolute favorite) computer history lectures. It's pretty ironic watching all the anti-government comments on this site wh

• blfr 12y ago
  Universities were originally an outgrowth of the Catholic Church. It's often still reflected in their names[1]. Yet you hear anti-religious comments from academics all the time. It's pretty common. Do you feel like you owe any particular loyalty to Edison or Borlaug? Or the people who financed their work whose names I don't even know? [1] http://www.ox.ac.uk/about/colleges http://www.ox.ac.uk/about/colleges
  • bsbechtel 12y ago
    >Or the people who financed their work whose names I don't even know? JP Morgan
• swatow 12y ago
  "Know your history" is a very high handed phrase. History is very complex and subjective, so implying that people who disagree with you are simply ignorant of some facts is almost never justified. And in general one should be as specific as possible when arguing a point, rather than saying "you're ignorant and need to educate yourself". Marxists in particular get away with a lot more than they should simply because they use this tactic and no one can be bothered to read Das Kapital. If I could summarize your point in a more even handed way, it would be that the view that government is a slow moving, inefficient behemoth, is disproved by its role in stimulating progress in Silicon Valley. My response would be that, like NASA, the military are very good at developing the technology that they care about, and this can have spinoff benefits, but that as the world of technology has become larger and more specialized, they have lost their advantage in most areas of technology. Looking at the second video you posted, I didn't see anything amazing. It looked like a bunch of specific technologies with very obvious military applications (I only skimmed it so please point out something specific I might have missed).
  • dguido 12y ago
    > If I could summarize your point in a more even handed way, it would be that the view that government is a slow moving, inefficient behemoth, is disproved by its role in stimulating progress in Silicon Valley. I'll take it! > Looking at the second video you posted ... It looked like a bunch of specific technologies with very obvious military applications This is similar to the government's needs / investments in Silicon Valley that Steve Blank profiled. At the time, it's clear what they are needed for (missiles, planes, radar, etc). Later though...
    • swatow 12y ago
      The current batch of government sponsored technology seems different to me. With radar and transistor technology they were doing something that was fundamental (perhaps some hindsight bias here, but that's my opinion anyway). The new technologies are just putting together existing technologies. The fundamental research is things like the work on neural networks being done at Google, Baidu etc.
      • fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
        For all we know the NSA may have made some interesting advances in computing or mathematics, and the CIA have probably advanced optics and image processing by a few generations. Unfortunately for us, neither of them are sharing.
  • api 12y ago
    "government is a slow moving, inefficient behemoth" It most certainly is, but that's not relevant. The important thing here is that so far only governments have had the capacity to make investments that are both of: - High risk / high payoff - Long term payoff / broad payoff The second part is the catch. Private funding mechanisms can make investments that are high risk / high payoff as long as they are both short term enough to fit within private investment vehicle life cycles and narrow enough to allow value created to be monetized -- captured, in other words. Things like basic research and fundamental invention are long term and broad -- they add value across wide swaths of society and across generational time scales. As such they really can't be monetized using any known financial construct. Private funding vehicles simply cannot invest in such things as there is no potential for private return. Governments can make these kinds of investments because they are likely to be around long enough to see the return and because they can capture the return by taxing the entire economy -- in other words, they capture return by long-term economic growth and national strength/prestige. Until or unless someone invents a private investment vehicle that can do this, we are stuck with government as the sole practical financier of the first steps in the technology chain. It is indeed inefficient, but an inefficient financier and generator of invention is superior to none. Lately I've been leaning toward the view that "market fundamentalism" is partly responsible for the collapse of deep revolutionary invention after around 1970 or so. The timing is certainly right and the causal mechanism seems to be there. The symbolic point would be the cancellation of the Apollo program. By contrast anti-market fundamentalism is probably why the USSR invented a lot but never followed through on most of it. The ideal is to combine the systems. Fundamentalist dogmas are idiotic. Edit: Governments probably aren't that good at invention either. They just look great when compared against nothing. That being said, governments are terrible at every step after fundamental invention. That's why Engelbart/SRI had to be followed by PARC and Apple and such, otherwise what they invented would still be a lab curiosity. They just don't have the mechanisms or institutional culture to "ship" or innovate. Invention and innovation are not the same thing. Saying they are is arguing that all combinatorial fitness landscapes are smooth and "well behaved," and if that were the case machine learning would be a lot easier. Examples: Invention: discovery and harnessing of radio waves, an absolutely unprecedented step change in technology. First we had no ability to communicate both wirelessly and invisibly over great distances, and then we did. Inventions are qualitative changes that open vast new regions of the combinatorial space -- they're analogous in evolutionary learning theory terms to journeys across physical space to land on a new planet. Innovation: morse code radio -> voice -> high quality / FM voice -> television -> digital -> spread spectrum / TDMA digital -> ... Innovations are quantitative changes that are more akin to gradient descent in learning theory terms. The evolutionary analogy extends both ways. There are inventions in biology too, like the appearance of photosynthesis or eukaryotic cell structures. These are unlikely events and therefore do not occur very often in the fossil record. Innovation occurs constantly. Biology could invent more if there were a god who intentionally biased the system in ways that facilitated it, but as far as we know no such thing exists. But for cultural evolution -- the evolution of extended phenotype -- we are the gods and can indeed do that. Edit #2: I'm sure people will cite cases where independents or small academic teams operating on only small amounts of funding have invented world-changing things. Two things about that. One is that it was more common back when science was in its earlier stages -- as science has developed we have kept raising the bar in terms of how much capital is required to keep going. Today the capital and labor requirements to make fundamental inventions are (in most fields) far outside the reach of small funding vehicles or individuals. Second is that this is just plain uncommon. Even back then most of these folks had deep pocketed benefactors or were themselves wealthy. There are always exceptions but you shouldn't base policy on exceptions.
• staunch 12y ago
  Anti-government corruption is not anti-government.
• Htsthbjig 12y ago
  "It's pretty ironic watching all the anti-government comments on this site while most people here are ignorant about where Silicon Valley came from." The fact that one of the biggest investment of resources of all time created silicon valley, or the nuclear bomb, does not mean that if a similar amount of resources have been spent privately a bigger advance could be made. In fact, the fact that the nuclear research was directed to the creation of a bomb, and not towards energy creation, is a huge problem today, when alternative fuel research that did not created plutonium were severed. The creation of Silicon Valley has more to do with the emergency of the situation that with being public or private. In peace it is very difficult both for public or private institutions to agree on a single place to centralize everything. Only China have done it, in Shenzhen, because it is a dictatorship, but when Germany wants to do it in Berlin, France wants to do it in Paris, and UK in London. They could not agree on a single place to centralize everything for all Europe. The same happens in South America with Chile, Brasil, Argentina, Ecuador, they all going on their own makes them weak.
  • SapphireSun 12y ago
    I think the difference between private and public capital is that 1) public capital is far larger and 2) private capital needs quick turn around. I can't see private industry inventing the nuclear bomb. Any time you conceive of a start up, the mantra is always MVP, fastest time to positive ROI. It's hard to do research like that. I think I could accept that you could have motivated a sufficient number of brilliant people to work on nuclear energy instead of the bomb, but the economics are still suspicious. There are a few fusion startups in the valley, but the common question is why they think they can create something salable in a reasonable amount of time, which I assume in turn injures the amount of talent they can pull.
  • setpatchaddress 12y ago
    This might be a failure of imagination on my part, but I'd love to know how you think private enterprise would have been able to find a way to spend the money to accomplish the same things. Say the US government didn't fund these things. How would private enterprise have done it? Write me the alternate history.
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• walshemj 12y ago
  Yes hat made me smile - though I would have said that elint started in ww1 and came of age in ww2. And doesn't mention the beam wars in the early war where the Uk was attacking the bomber targeting systems the Germans where using.
  • sblank 12y ago
    Agreed, I left a _lot_ of interesting stuff out for the sake of a narrative that could fit into an hour. Reading through the bibliography covers much of what I left on the floor.
    • walshemj 12y ago
      ooh will have to have a look - some of the declassified CIA docs on the U2 and a12 make fascinating reading. Though I suppose growing up in spook county in the UK made those of us going into tech aware of some of what went before 1/2 of my college course peers where RAE or ARA - though I am sad I never got to go round Cranfield Universitys black museum of tech
• refurb 12y ago
  I don't think any of those anti-government types (conservatives, libertarians) are really against defense spending. Those on the left (big government types) are another story.
  • justatdotin 12y ago
    I'm not against defence spending, but I do oppose spending on unnecessary, illogical, illegal invasions.
• acjohnson55 12y ago
  The fantastic book Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy [1] digs a lot into the roles of the market, the government, and the financial industry in the western economy. It's a challenging read, but a fantastic book if you can make it through. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Doing-Capitalism-Innovation-Economy-Speculation/dp/1107031257 http://www.amazon.com/Doing-Capitalism-Innovation-Economy-Sp...