It’s almost become normal now that bureaucrats get to decide which social group to spend money on, or which region to renovate buildings in, but the arrogance of thinking you can spend your way to the most cutting edge of current technology is just the next level of bureaucratic arrogance.
That's how we got to the current cutting edge. Research of most important technological inventions of the past century was funded by beaurocrats. Market is only good at figuring out how to make things cheaper and in volume. Both very important things. But true scientific breakthroughs that push the business over next decades happen on taxpayers bill as distributed by beaurocrats.
It sucks a bit that it's this way but if you are profit driven, you can't gamble 140 billion of your own money in hopes of developing new tech.
Yep, this cannot be repeated enough. Government funding is how a lot of innovations happen, but it's not as visible as a private company bringing that innovation to market.
To put in optimization terms, private companies are good at following the gradient. Government funding is necessary to escape the well and find new minimas.
Very well put. Take AI as an example - foundational research in deep learning and reinforcement learning was first done in academia. Everyone knows the story of how long neural networks languished in the shadows, before its time. Even commercial research labs only really took note after the potential of these methods was discovered.
Government funding is a good thing, but it’d be even better would be if we could harness the free market. One solution could be to equip research institutions with the means to capture value from IP that follows on from basic research.
I was thinking in a similar direction. What about an adaptive patent law? Where the duration of the protection in a particular area of interest can be set by e.g. a committee (with a strict ruleset and a big time constant of course). So when there is not much progress in a certain area (e.g. cancer or nuclear fusion) the patent protection is increased to incentivise investments.
A problem with this approach are obviously the unknown unknowns, which might prevent this system from incentivising inventions like the transistor. So this approach can probably only help with problem driven areas and not in cases where the tech innovation gives rise to new problems/solutions
> Government funding is how a lot of innovations happen, but it's not as visible as a private company bringing that innovation to market.
A recent example of 'basic' research coming to fruition in a practical fashion (eventually):
> "S glycoprotein signal peptide (extended leader sequence), which guides translocation of the nascent polypeptide chain into the endoplasmic reticulum" - part of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine. I don't ever want to hear anyone question fundamental science again. 1/2
> The level of control and understanding we now have over our biology came from literally millions of person-years spent working on things that at the time were obscure and "useless". And now? We can leverage all this into a 95% efficient vaccine _at the first try_. 2/2
We have no way of knowing ahead of time what knowledge will be needed or "useful" in the future, so in some ways it is prudent to try to acquire as much knowledge of the natural world as possible and sort it out later.
Government funding is extremely wasteful and will generally go into the pockets of the well connected. The problem is this game has been played for a long time and it has diminishing returns. The players have had decades to get the exploitation down.
Yes sillicon valley exists because of government money. But that was like 70 years ago. The world has changed and corruption is more severe. You will get no such bang for your government grant buck now.
Well maybe because in government grants waste and fraud are the rule, while in private startups they are the exception.
And it is the investors problem when a startup fails, and they are aware of it. But with governments, it is OUR money squandered away by politicians and their friends.
Then by your own definition, and the statement issued by the EU commission, this is a bad investment.
I've worked for the large, sclerotic organisations that once put man on the moon. They will take your 100bn, crush it in to dust, and outsource the production of 1 million pages of documentation in 32 languages detailing the workings of something your never asked for. All in the blink of an eye.
Yes. It's bad investment for the one who pays. Possibly great for everybody else and humanity in general.
If efficiency is your thing go into business. The smaller the better. But if you want to have a chance at literal moonshot stay in your job and swallow inefficiencies that come from size, ample capital, and no expectation of monetary profit.
Even if I agreed with you, we are talking about the cutting edge of optimisation, of driving down costs, of doing things in volume. The exact things you also say a market is needed for.
We aren't talking about a military research project like packet switching, or getting to the moon for the first time.
Research of most important technological inventions of the past century was funded by beaurocrats
Important defined how?
The car wasn't. The mobile phone wasn't. Computers in their post-WW2 form basically weren't, for the last half decade if not more it's all been private sector. Yes, DARPA did some very early work on packet switching networks and their work became widely adopted mostly because it was free: nice. But the moment these inventions started to matter, all R&D was taken over by the private sector.
Governments spray so much money at things that I'm sure for almost any broad category of thing, you can find something they funded. But that's no evidence that stuff would never have been researched anyway, given the enormous and long term R&D efforts routinely mounted by non governmental entities. Look at AI: government funded institutions are constantly lagging behind.
It sucks a bit that it's this way but if you are profit driven, you can't gamble 140 billion of your own money in hopes of developing new tech.
Alphabet alone spends something like $21 billion on R&D per year. It doesn't take many years of that to reach $140 billion, and Alphabet is not the only company doing basic research.
Having spent many years reading research papers coming out of both academia and industry, my conclusion has been that the best papers are always those with corporate funding - some academic teams receive partly corporate funding and these tend to be in the middle, pure corporate labs tend to do the most exciting work. The bureaucrat-distributed money often gets allocated for decades to intellectual dead ends nobody cares about, purely through inertia and lack of institutional incentives to maximise ROI.
I don't think that's true. If you look at the computing industry, virtually all basic research is done by companies or academics who are grant funded by companies.
AI? Basically all funded by the private sector and has been for a decade. Universities try to keep up but complain they can't.
Chip design? When was the last time academia contributed much to that? Probably RISC in the 80s? There have been tons of breakthroughs in basic research in silicon throughout my entire lifetime, all of them privately funded. For example look at the recent Optane DIMM tech (based on new chalcogenide chemistry).
Compilers? No, the most advanced compiler in the world is Graal, which is more or less funded by grants from Oracle. The second most is LLVM, which was originally written by Chris Lattner as his master's thesis i.e. he paid for it with his own student debt. Apple pretty quickly saw that it was good work and took over the funding of it.
PL design? Here, academia has indeed done a lot of basic research into various ML derived languages like Haskell. But this has largely been reviewed carefully and then ignored by the languages people actually use - it was basic research into ideas that didn't work well and not many people really care about. All new languages that have got popular for real-world usage in the past 10 years are imperative languages that trace their heritage all the way back to C i.e. Bell Labs (Rust, Kotlin, Swift, Go, etc).
The reality is, the computer industry demonstrates that you don't need government funding of basic research. Industries will certainly accept such research if it happens to be useful because they were taxed to pay for it regardless, but they don't need it.
Companies do plenty of research, just not basic, since they don’t need to: the government funds it instead. With money taxed from said companies, so...
Just like the NASA bureaucrats thought they could make a dent in rocketry - how foolish of them.
Seriously though, some projects are just too expensive and risky for a privately funded venture. That's why public-private partnerships are created - it's always been like this and there doesn't appear to be an alternative.
The US recently spent their way into a cutting edge private space launch provider industry, and that seems like a roaring success. What makes you think it doesn't work?
How much of that was really private? My guess is the NASA launch facilities, former employees, and potential for future contracts were a big part of the picture.
While that's probably correct that without NASA support SpaceX may not survive 10 years ago, on the way to becoming the innovator it is today. Financially speaking however NASA has spent less to buy launch capability from SpaceX than it would have to otherwise.
From the R&D perspective NASA doesn't really have any say in how Starship/Superheavy are developed, which is the cutting edge of space launch. Nor does it dictate the timeline or milestones of the program. Not the same compared to the EU's initiative.
In fact, SpaceX's success shows a different path: let the private sector innovate, provide support in terms of know-how, credibility and potential contracts.
Seem's like though we're still stuck in the Goddard age and most of the resources go towards pursuing such techniques (with a few private orgs that have the lions share of support with public funds that even go towards such ends) of getting into LEO as if there couldn't possibly be any other way worth pursing… how long will we be stuck optimizing Goddard paperclips above all else?
It's also quite funny considering that Goddard himself had to do a lot of work alone, fight public opinion and face the lack of support from the American government, military and academia, all failing to understand the value of the rocket to study the atmosphere and near space, and for military applications, over I'm sure other public-private endeavors that had the blessing at the time (perhaps all the atomic research that provided more strategic benefits?)
SpaceX was almost completely privately invested and private risk. Once they had shown that they were serious, NASA awarded them contracts, because it was a great deal for NASA, compared to what they would pay otherwise.
Its sad to see these kind of attempts to trash talk the SpaceX achievements.
And of course the market. The supply contract for the ISS gave SpaceX the necessary money to grow, without public money no ISS, and as a consequence, no supply contract.
This isn't trash talking the SpaceX achievements but stating the fact that government money played a huge role in developing a space industry which was the base for SpaceX becoming reality.
It's always been normal in the EU. There is little innovation here based on private risk taking, almost no venture capital, and huge barrieres for banks to lend money to innovators.
