I guess IC's might be a good example, but the air force was really the only buyer that could afford them.

I dunno, maybe we're moving to a new model. the 20th century way seemed to be to pour massive amounts of money into research at universities, then commercialize whatever whatever happened to work out.

Corporations do interesting work, but they're sooooo resistant to change, it seems like their inventions always die on the vine. Kodak digital cameras for example.

Are you thinking google would be willing to risk their ad revenue for a cool new tech? Or microsoft their os/office money? or apple and phones? etc.

Some do, others have been able to remain relevant for a very long time. Thankfully we have a societal mechanism to prune unproductive companies, it's called bankruptcy.

> Are you thinking google would be willing to risk their ad revenue for a cool new tech? Or microsoft their os/office money? or apple and phones? etc.

So far they have. Google for instance started its self driving car project in 2009, at the height of the recession. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to dismiss the project as wasteful spending when everybody else was tightening their belt.

And they of course started the project by hiring the DARPA grand challenge winners. Which, yes, corporations can refine original research, but it's very rare they try something new. And if they do try something new, it's incredibly vulnerable to being defunded. Google is exceptional, kinda. I hope they'll get more milage out of their special project than bell labs did.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312510...

edit

And more to the point, the kodak example is key. Kodak made money selling film. Digital cameras were a direct threat to selling film. Google can do some interesting things, but if anything useful is a direct threat to ad revenue, it'll be killed.

Google is great but I see them as an example of the public / private pairing working out well and generating far more new economic value than went into that foundational spending.

> Are you thinking google would be willing to risk their ad revenue for a cool new tech?

University and government research is also super important. Google publishes papers not code, whereas universities often publish their code and that's doing more to move AI forward than Google.

But Google is willing to make large research bets too.

That's basically the answer to that question: Google isn't risking their core business on this because so much of the foundation has been set. If, say, in 2003 they'd gone to investors and asked for money to fund AI research it'd have been seen as too risky, especially since the collapse of the 1980s AI bubble was still well within living memory. Once NSF, DARPA, et al. had continued to fund the scientists, however, things matured to the point where it has a more acceptable level of risk to get in on a huge field.

The idea that government funding is necessary for funding disruptive new technologies is not supported by historical evidence.

The jet engine case seems especially hard to claim as an exception since early development was predicated on military sales and, for example, a quick trip to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_jet_engine shows the origins of both the British and German programs being a RAF officer's patent-worthy idea.

Remember, I'm not saying that the government invents everything but that basic reasearch and major long-term development is hard to do when you need to show profits right now. The history of your example shows many examples of that process where the government funding allowed things to reach the point where they could be successfully commercialized for other purposes.

The US military even ordered Lockheed to stop working on a jet engine, and concentrate on piston engines. This changed after being faced with the ME-262.

The transistor, too. Airplanes. Liquid fueled rockets. Communications satellites (Arthur Clarke). Radio. TV. Einstein. C. C++. Java. C#.

And the glaring absense of defining technologies coming from communist economies, where it was 100% government doing the research.

The US government spends megabucks on R+D. It would be astonishing if that produced no results. But it is an error to thereby conclude that new technologies could not otherwise exist.

Google ~14B, Amazon ~14B MS ~10B Apple ~10B and FB ~6B for about 50B all together.

So, concretely, we should expect just the big five to produce roughly 1/3 as much as publicly funded science, assuming they're of equal quality. More like 2/3's if we exclude military research. Although you don't come out and say it, you're implying private is more efficient.

I dunno. I think the feds get a big discount by using grad student labor. Fundamentally, the perform different roles. Doctoral research is foundational stuff that corporations take and refine. Sure, i can quibble over each one of your examples. But that's not really the point.

I don't think any corporation was going to go looking for gravity waves, or Proxima B.

So many problems are a tradeoff between exploration and exploitation. Broadly, public funding tends to fill the role of exploration. Private funding tends to fill the role of exploitation. There's no crisp line. Corporations surely explore, and universities surely exploit. But again, broadly, i think the public exploration/private exploitation split is a good one, and i think it's how the 20th century worked pretty much worked.

This fallacious reason is obviously false, as FidoNET proves, but that doesn't deter the notion.

The cherry-picked examples are classic confirmation bias, and are non-falsifiable because nobody can go back in time and defund a government project.

There's plenty of non-government money being plowed into basic research - just look at the endowments of top universities like MIT. There would likely be much more if the government did not fund it, just like I'd not be willing to fund a road between A and B if there's a way I can get the government to do it for me.

I note that you dismiss the foundational technologies of the last century as cherry-picking but fail to present any data to support claims which are well outside the mainstream. Do you have any sources to back those assertions up?

Right, because there's much less point to private investment if you can get the government to foot the bill instead.

> Do you have any sources

The technologies I mentioned are well documented. Are you not aware of FidoNET?

Wall Street ultimately gets its money from American workers' retirement investments (whether personal 401k and IRA accounts, or institutional pension funds).

Point is: it's not like workers are all supportive of the VC decisions or anything. It's the concentrated power of the people who manage all the funds that matters, and not the fact that a bunch of otherwise disconnected individual workers have put their money in.

Of course, stuff like openinvest.co seem at least a good direction…

For a multi billion dollar infrastructure project, your capacity to contribute with either 50K or 50$ would still amount to less than a drop in a bucket. For a massive multi billion infrastructure project to succeed it would still rely on either a state actor or a very large number of investors, or, as is the case I'm making, a large amount customers.

If I opt for your company as my provider of a given service, and very large number of other people do too, we're enabling your company — via the pooling of our payments — for you to do further investments and improvements to your service.

If I am the only company in America that produces widget x, I have a de facto monopoly, but I am not guilty of anything until and unless I attempt to exert my monopolistic influence to prevent competitors from taking my market share. If I am a pure monopoly, then it's possible that just running a loss-leading sale could result in antitrust violations, but if I am not a monopoly, or if I am a minority provider of widget x, then loss-leading sales are a presumptively lawful activity.

Edit: I believe closeparen makes this point more precisely with his post in this same topic:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14528355

That's not what monopoly really means. Peter Thiel (for whom I have lots of criticism) makes these things really clear in the way he discusses them. You could open up a British Food restaurant somewhere and be the only one in town. That doesn't make you a monopoly because the actual market is for all types of dining. There's not specific British Food market that you've captured. When businesses want to taut their power and monopoly status (whether to delude themselves or to get investors or whatever), they will pretend that the market is as narrow as their particular product. When they want to convince regulators that they are just one in a competing market, they'll widen the market as much as possible…

Small businesses drive net job growth, and they are also more innovative, producing more patents per employee than large firms.

Not to mention, smaller businesses allow more people to own capital. I'm sick of economic discussions that focus on jobs and wages - ownership is what gets people out of serfdom.

But, little guys are feeling the squeeze. "The Goliaths of today are so big and so adept at protecting their turf that they leave few niches open to exploit."

So, this isn't only about privacy, or the false perception that "big is evil." It's about economy as ecosystem. "Biodiversity" in the economy creates robustness against hard times and distributes resources in ways that allow many participants to thrive. Monocultures are extractive, and ultimately fragile.

Edit: source - http://bit.ly/2rhPiXp

Patents are not correlated with innovation. Tons of innovative things are never patented, and the majority of patents are largely bullshit. The patent system mostly gives tons of money to patent lawyers and power to companies who know how to use their patents to threaten innovators.

It may be true that small businesses are more innovative, but we simply can't use patents as a measure of innovation.

I happen to agree with the rest of your comment.

Governments (US and Soviet) went to the moon. The Internet would not exist without massive military (i.e. government) sponsoring.

But yes, when I am looking at our governments right now, it's hard to find something as progressive as this, except that marijuana is on the rise, Macron has a 50:50 women government and invited scientists from the US to France. The other governments seem to be racing full speed in reverse for me.

Yes, it would be called FidoNET instead.

Just read any description from people who've worked at both normal government IT shops (really anywhere that's not 18F or the USDS) and private industry how they feel about governmental technology culture and processes.

Like okay, investing in infrastructure, like putting fiber everywhere? Sure, I'm down with that. Everything else, I think the private sector has shown itself to be plenty more capable. Let's let the government stick to its strengths, shall we?

Disclaimer: I work at Google

> Just read any description from people who've worked at both normal government IT shops (really anywhere that's not 18F or the USDS) and private industry how they feel about governmental technology culture and processes.

The governments brought us MP3. (Fraunhofer is funded entirely by their own patents and the German government).

The governments brought us many more technologies, standards, algorithms, etc.

Alone the projects funded by the German government have brought more to the tech world than Google ever has, or ever will.

Then look at the projects the US has funded.

For fucks sake, the US Government gave us the Internet!

:)

We've seen the state infiltrate encryption standards to deliberately weaken them. We've seen the state deny and attempt to suppress dissident truths. We've seen the state spy on its citizenry using loopholes and non-standards. We've seen the state fund drug cartels, collude with the media to influence the public, pass cronyist legislation to benefit campaign donors, etc.

Why should their agenda be considered any less self-serving than that of a corporation's?

In the US at least I don't think it is so much the government doesn't represent the people than 2 centuries of usurpation have established a system to produce enough brainwashed drones to the will of power that they can act with the facade of democracy while actively harming the indoctrinated. It seems not to actually take a majority to create an environment where the state acts against the interests of the people, just enough of a minority to give voice and legitimacy to regressive ideology.

I think this century might be the time when all us intellectuals have to come to terms with how, in the same way you cannot get everyone into STEM to handle automation eating the economy, you cannot get everyone into enlightened politics where voters inform themselves with fact and evidence. At best, a minority, and today, a majority of people are either naturally or nurtured (often intentionally) to be incapable of participation in science and rational debate. And as long as you have this uninformed, illogical portion of the population (and of course the smaller it is the more functional your society is) it will erode democracy and liberty through powerful people taking advantage of that weakness.

What we see in the US right now is that weakness in Democracy instead being a gaping wound that has been bleeding - probably since the founding of the country, made worse by many events in history (the civil war, great depression, 9/11) that make the wound bleed greater, yielding the state from being a democracy to an oligarchy ruled by ideological indoctrination and exploitation rather than good will for ones fellow man.

That was long winded, but my point is don't throw out the notion that nations can act to improve the circumstances of their people in the general case - the US is demonstrably not doing that for observable reasons that could be fixed, but would require everyone to want to fix it.

Yes, remember that time General Motors sent humans to the moon?

In regards to "moving goal posts", I have not, and will not ever do such a thing, as to me a debate is not about winning anything, but clarifying points of view. If I wanted to move your own "goal posts" I would point you back 200-100 years, and talk about the Industrial Revolution, Railroad construction in the US, Telegraphs and Phones, invention of flight, among many others all but initially driven, built and financed by private money.

Fantastic credentials.

> I'm sorry but I disagree with your approach of making sweeping statements of economic theory but limiting them to the timeframe of a single generation.

Given that we're discussing the impact of a specific set of companies that brought societal/economical issues that are new — such as data privacy/control —, and have no other examples in history to guide us in dealing or discussing them, we must focus on this period. Regarding "sweeping economic theory", I do not hold to such presumption.

> I know your original comment was not meant to be exhaustive, but I found the economic analysis superficial.

Reading comprehension. I should probably have added an emphasis in "a _certain class_ of investments". I find your analysis of my comments superficial, and clearly you do not want to discuss and clarify points of view but to "win an argument". That's a game I won't play, so by all means, consider yourself victorious.

If "large" means "rich", then you are right.

However, if "large" means "comprised of many employees", then this is not necessarily true.

So perhaps a first good step is to put a limit on the number of employees. This also enforces a "modular" style of working, where companies can more easily be swapped for other companies, and more reuse of "company-modules" can happen.

Also no politician would ever support this.

Why don't we have a "government YC" (yeah, I don't mean DARPA-like, or the other mechanisms for finding funding from the government, which requires way too much navigation f bureaucratic paper-work and hoop-jumping) - an office of the government that can allow any individual to apply for seed funding for ANY idea in ANY industry that they can see through - make the process nimble and quick. Ensure that there is infrastructure/systems to allow for accurate tracking and reporting on the spend of monies given - think an EDD card that the startup entity gets and all expenses are tracked via the transactions on the card. Integrate it with banks and other private and public sector services with credits, like compute credits from amzn/goog etc... tax services, payroll etc...

And when you apply - it effectively sets-up an individual LLC in your name as the defacto entity to track your startups progress with giving you an EIN etc...

Heck, this should be a simple thing to architect if everyone in the business/startup world were truly supportive of, and willing to actually be, the "innovation" unicorn they all claim to be.

It's true that private investment was also important but that generally only enters the picture when something is developed enough to the point that investors can see an eventual payoff. As a simple example, Google, Yahoo, and Lycos were all direct results from people like Larry Page getting NSF research grants:

https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100660

That story repeats all over in every high-tech industry.