[dvwobuq]

What’s tech? I recently had surgery and the surgeon used a robot. I was an out patient the same day and had basically no pain without medication. Compared to a similar surgery I had roughly twenty years ago this experience was like science fiction. Does that count?

[lokimedes]

This. The appropriation of “tech” to mean web-first business has gone to our collective heads. Real tech is hard, expensive and mostly progressed by the interplay of science and blue-sky inventions. Not really something easily adaptable to the venture-startup model. We’ve seen a couple of attempts at funding fusion/fission energy along the same lines as SaaS, but honestly, it seems more like a tech-bro indulgence than real technological progress.

Meanwhile the conventional tech industries such as medical equipment, have seen decent progress at the incremental pace of the respective industries. Adding a voice interface to your car, or allowing remote surgery over the net is hardly something we should credit the “tech” companies for.

After 20-some years in the “tech” industry, hoping to get-rich-fast, and THEN do the real tech stuff with that capital, I’m feeling like an extremely well-prepared failure. By now I would do nearly anything for access to a physics lab and funding from a ROI tolerant source. Only problem is that academic funding agencies have been mimicking the “successful” VC model for decades as well…

Reckoning indeed.