R&D is fraught with risk, but some risks are more rewarding than others. These companies don't just sit on useless knowledge. Take Google who now sits as a "loser" in the current AI "competition"; their projects are far from worthless. Because they've built up expertise, they're now in a very good position to overtake Microsoft on AI, even though they currently seem a bit behind. (And frankly on many fields they're already far ahead.) So OK, perhaps the behemoth that is Google is a bad example, but I still think the same thing is true for smaller companies. If you just read the news, you would think that a technological race like this only has one winner, but that just isn't true. Even quote unquote "worthless projects" can help increase the understanding and expertise in quite important areas, that while not "worth" anything currently, may still have huge value in the future. The only way to know, is to stay in the race.

> I wonder if this is a bad as everyone thinks.

I think it is. If they actually do end up finding a problem to solve, that would be serendipitous but I imagine the vast majority of the time they find themselves in the business of trying to convince the rest of us to buy a thing that we don’t need. And while the latter may drive the economy to some degree as I get older I detest it more and more.

This appears to be the computing model of the past 20 years, from what I can tell?

There have been no real advancements since the desktop model of the late 1990s. We might have more animations and applications running in virtual machines for security purposes, but literally nothing new has come out.

Even all the web apps are reimplementation of basic desktop capabilities from the decades before, but slower and with more RAM usage. They might be easier to write (I personally don't think so - RAD apps from the 90s were quicker to write and use) but the actual utility hasn't changed; if anything it's just shoving all of your data from your microcomputer to someone else's microcomputer, and being tracked and losing control of said data whilst you're at it!

And we have easier access to videos on the Internet, I guess??

It all seems to be missing the point of actually having a computational device locally. There is no computation going on. It's all digital paper pushing.

No one actually needs anything - perhaps food and water but even survival is not strictly necessary.

The problem with “stuff we don’t need” arguments is they are fundamentally nihilistic.

Everyone needs a flying car so let’s get on with it.

The computer was always designed to be a computational machine. It didn't just appear and then someone thought "what could I actually use this for?"

Also the Internet came out of DARPA which was a method of sharing data between geographically remote military facilities. It wasn't like they wired up devices and thought "what could we use this for?".

Do you assert that we had a good understanding of all of the problems that a computer could solve before making it? This seems absurd to me.

GPs point is that the technologies you've mentioned solved real problems before they were adapted for different use cases. They didn't make Darpanet and then think "man, if only there was some use for this" until the Internet came along. They designed it to send signals between distant nodes while being resilient to individual nodes being nuked.

Only after DARPAnet solved that problem did it get adapted to some other problems (ex: how do I send cat pictures to people)?

Fair. Maybe let’s look at it a different way. The computer is a solution to N known problems and M unknown problems at the time of creation. I’d say the N/M ratio is vanishing small.

AI was developed with solid used cases - mostly image recognition or other classification problems. Remember when you couldn’t select text in an image file and paste it into a document? Well that’s a solved problem. The fact that AI has been overhyped and business struggle to find uses for it doesn’t diminish the cases where it does work well.

It might not be optimal if we knew the future but to me its just a natural organic process, organizations and factions inside of organizations are slime molds. A new value gradient appears in the environment and we all spread out and crawl in a million different out growths feeling blindly in the general direction of something that feels like a good idea until one of the tendrils hits actual value and becomes a path of least resistance and the other ones dry out and die.

> I'm pretty sure almost all technologies at some point were solutions looking for a problem to solve. Examples include the internet, the computer and math.

I think the opposite -- nearly all technologies came about as a result of people trying to solve existing real problems. Examples include the internet, the computer and math.