I would also note: in spite of "novelty" requirements for publication, we tend to see many of the same ideas recycled over and over. Which makes sense, because they tend to be good and useful ideas that may be fundamental to the discipline.

Agreed about ideas being recycled over and over in academia.

Regardless, I believe that my point holds: it's very hard to judge "scientific progress" by looking at industry, because most of the time, you're looking at stuff that was discovered decades earlier.

So at the very least, bell labs was the direct result of regulation, and pretty arguably just an alternate form of taxation (AT&T was also legally bared from commercializing Bell Lab's research outside of telecom)

1. I will admit that there are exceptions :)

2. Clearly, I should have written "industry" instead of "companies".

Barring any error in my memory Bell Labs was a pure research lab at the time, wasn't it, i.e. not an industry research branch, right?

A big recent tech-focused one that started in academia and is now in the hands of large companies is self driving cars. It looks like it may work, but then every started hitting those 1% cases and realized they can't actually ship a fully self driving car (and driver-assist features can lead to worse issues as people think they can trust the tech more than they should).

[1]https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4103/ch2.htm

Edit: someone corrected me about nylon. It was invented between 1927 and 1938 my Dupont. But it was still a commercial Enterprise doing the r&d for it.

Looks like synthetic rubber and synthetic oil two major ones to come out of world war II https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/inventions...

The flip side of greater consumer safety is that there's less room to get things wrong, which in turn means it's harder to meaningfully innovate.

If my theory is correct, I expect the next paradigm shift will come from a country with less consumer/worker/civil protection. China (and to a lesser extent, India) are on my watch-list.

When I say this, people sometimes pigeonhole me as an anti-regulation nutcase, but that's not me. I don't know how I feel about this. There's a real Kantian dilemma, here.

It's having money without trying to optimize solely on future money.

However, while we do see this trickle back into civilian life, I imagine that if funding were directed towards solving civil needs instead (housing, food, water, environmental contamination, energy, community centers, schools, etc) we'd see very different things produced, and often more well suited for peaceful purposes.

For example, it's going to be pretty hard to get much innovation from academia in the area of operating planet scale networks/datacenters simply because they don't have access to such environments and the money to support it nor the day to day challenges of actually running something like this.

That said, much of innovation happening in companies is likely part of the secret sauce that makes the company successful so we're not going to see much of it make it out at the time the innovation takes place but over time companies and people working for them do open up about their solutions.