[keepquestioning]

At this point I'm convinced the only way industry can actually produce something game-changing is if the government spends a huge amount of R&D on it first.

On the other hand, scrappy SaaS startup could parse your logs and send alerts for cheaper, yes.

[panick21_]

I think you are underestimating the interplay between industry and government.

Government come in and sometimes push forward the technology industry already has, mostly by just given those industries more investment money.

But industry still invests gigantic amount of money to push technology forward and those innovations are constantly and consistently changing the game.

Government invests something in X and then for the next 100 years people in forum can say 'see this only happened because of X'. But that ignores a lot of the work before and after to actually make it game changing.

And what we also need to consider is that very often that huge government investment fails and goes nowhere. And at the same time large private investment can also fail.

To conclude from this no private investment can ever be game-changing doesn't really follow.

Starlink is a recent example that is pretty game-changing. Government didn't invest in it directly. Sure in the last 100s government invest in rocketry and electronics and antennas but so did private industry at a much larger overall rate (outside of rocketry).

So I think, at the end of the day, government will always have its fingers in almost every pie and will always talk about their success and never talk about their failures. If Boom isn't successful, well you can't innovate without the government. If Boom is successful, well Boom profited from government investment in supersonic military technology so they couldn't have done it without government.

So these kinds of arguments all circle in on themselves. At the end of the day, if you invest lots of money in something game-changing most of the time its gone go to shit, no matter who does it.

[MisterTea]

> is if the government spends a huge amount of R&D on it first.

This is how it has always worked.

[jeffreyrogers]

Only for a few industries, mostly the ones that took off around WWII.

[650REDHAIR]

Uh…

DARPA, In-Q-Tel, etc…

[jeffreyrogers]

I don't see how that is a refutation of what I wrote. For every example that people can point to of how government funding creates innovation you can point to a private example too. Heavier than air flight was mostly private money, jet engines were mostly government. The transistor was mostly private (Bell Labs) the IC was mostly government. In terms of energy the two most important things in the last few decades are solar and fracking. Solar got a lot of government subsidies, fracking improvements were largely due to industry.

Edit: and there are entire industries, like petrochemicals, where most of the advances came from industry.

[frozencell]

> The transistor was mostly private (Bell Labs)

Wasn't Bell Labs indirectly funded by the French Government?

[jeffreyrogers]

I think that's a pretty big stretch. I don't see a direct link between the award Alexander Graham Bell got in 1880 and the research output of Bell Labs in the 1940s. Bell Telephone existed as a corporation prior to the award from the French government. "Bell Labs" didn't exist as a separate entity with that name until the 1920s.

[oivey]

Even things like semiconductors benefitted massively from government research and funding. They’ve certainly taken off from there, though.

I’m trying to think of what industries this might not be the case for. Research thin industries like entertainment and media? Has the development of things like OLED mostly been by private companies? I guess finance? Seemingly if it involves engineering the government at least made the seed investment.

[jjk166]

Just because the government has at some point invested in something doesn't mean it had to for it to take off. Once something is already going strong, it's to be expected that everyone who might stand to benefit will want to hop on the bandwagon, especially once the utility is proven. For example the government was not particularly involved with aircraft development until WW1 when it proved to be of considerable military importance.

It's also worth noting that many developments are unintended spillover from other efforts. For example a lot of US government money went into producing high purity germanium, which would ultimately enable the development of the solid state transistor, but the government wasn't directly trying to produce solid state transistors, they instead were concerned with producing diodes for radars.

In either case, I would not describe it as seed investment.

[mrguyorama]

Government funded research being basically throwing money into the ether and hoping some entire brand new world of chemistry or physics or communications or anything like that is the whole point of government investment. Research into one area providing gains in other unexpected areas is a direct goal of the kind of research the government funds.

You know, like, the internet. The government wanted to make sure that nuking one air force base couldn't prevent the retaliation strike, so let's make a big network that is scalable, re-routable on the fly, and simple to put together. Creating a brand new sector of the economy and dominating the new sector with the likes of google and microsoft and apple was the exact outcome optimistic government employees would wish for.

[sdflhasjd]

Not sure I'd call OLED game changing in the same way the Internet or Jet Engines are.