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.
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.