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

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.

24 billion in the bank (cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities), revenue up 2 billion ~10% from 2008. So brave [1]

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...

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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 making tremendous strides in AI research, they're betting the company on it.

This is the same Google which was started to commercialize the NSF-sponsored work that Larry Page and Sergei Brin did? The same one which hired many of the DARPA grand challenge winners to work on self-driving cars? The one whose AI efforts are being performed by a number of prominent researchers whose work and training was significantly supported by federal research grants?

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.

I was responding to this particular question:

> 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.

Yeah, I'm definitely not saying Google isn't doing important work. I just think this highlights the key role government funding plays in ensuring that businesses don't have to pay for all of that basic research and training.

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.

Yeah so awesome that the whole world can coast to success now that DARPA derisked the future.

“derisked” is [willful?] misrepresentation. This isn't a hard argument: board early research requires a lot of speculative work which doesn't pan out for everything which does, not to mention tons of basic training and equipment investment. Companies have a hard time justifying that and, unsurprisingly, the record shows they largely don't. Government funding operates with different incentives and timescales and has a lengthy track record of success getting ideas to the point where companies are willing to foot the remaining development costs.

On the other hand, jet engines were developed by private concerns and only when flying jets were demonstrated were governments interested in it.

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

Most of the 20th century's defining technologies started that way, from microchips and the internet to biotech. You don't need to get everything to say that the model can support a few misses.

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 financing of Whittle's and Ohain's jet engines did not come from the government, nor did government finance their incorporation into working, flying aircraft. Whittle's idea he had on his own, not as part of a government research project.

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.

Concretely, us spent 150B/ 70B non-defense.

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.

My argument is with the notion that if government didn't fund X, X never would have happened. The existence of the internet is the epitome of this kind of thinking. It's like saying if someone paid by the government had an idea to connect two towns with a road, therefore nobody would have ever had such an idea otherwise.

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.

It's not a claim that things would never happen but that it'd take much longer. Yes, private investment exists but it's so much smaller — MIT is legendary, one of the top schools in the world, has a full-time development office getting donations, etc. but the bulk of their research is federal by a large margin.

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?

> but it's so much smaller

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?