this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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I find it slightly sad that when our leaders talk of Technology and Innovation - they often mean these 'tech' companies that essentially work out how to better sell advertising and occasionally provide a useful service alongside this.
Where is the Bell Labs? The Skunk Works?
We have incredible problems facing us such as Climate Change and decarbonisation seems like it will be a very difficult challenge. And yet we focus on banal "innovation" in frivolous things.
America makes a lot more sense when you think of it as a corporation with nukes rather than a country with functional government.
I'm not sure when or how it happened, but Americans seem to have decided that everything has to be privately owned for profit, and making those private services into government services (health care for example) it's "socialism" and people would rather pay 5x as much for less care than our European cousins get with their taxes by default.
Yeah, those are examples of actually innovative private enterprise.
I don't have a problem with it being the private sector. But the problem is making a Twitter clone or a slightly better version of MySpace is barely innovating and certainly isn't going to significantly improve the world.
This may be better explained through the lens of different departments within mega corporations. Alphabet constantly changing their messaging platform is bullshit, but their aggregation and ui for viewing not just the entire world maps but creating timelapse views of the planet is quite innovative and just one of thousands of research projects going on under their umbrella. Meta creating yet-another messaging clone in Threads is bullshit, but the research and development in optics and other fields as part of their VR work is actually quite cutting edge. Outside of tech there are also massive research bodies working behind the scenes. The recent adoption of decades of work in mRNA is a huge leap forward in vaccine work, for example. Many large corporations have these internal groups pushing the bounds of physics, and the scale and specificity of research today is orders of magnitude beyond where we were in the early half of the previous century. As we look back at the turn of the next century, I expect there will be a laundry list of technological turning points which are credited to today's companies which just aren't apparent in the din of 24/7 news and information. OTOH, thanks to these mundane communications services, we no longer need just a couple of research centers and, instead, we benefit from a larger network of investigators scattered about the world.
Yeah, that is true. I haven't tried VR yet but I remember the world before Google Maps and that was a dark time.
Yeah, printing directions off of mapquest was a lot of fun (or alternatively asking directions from someone who doesn't understand cardinal directions)