What this really underscores is that conventional capitalism provides little incentive for fundamental innovation.
All this stuff we're gluing together is the product of state-funded research, mostly from the cold war era. DARPANet, the web (CERN), DARPA research on "augmented human intelligence," etc.
Stuff like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY
(I bet you thought Xerox PARC invented that stuff, right? Or Apple? Nope. DARPA and SRI invented the entire modern user experience in the 1960s.)
Few companies ever fund that kind of thing. There's two reasons. One is risk vs. reward-- such projects are typically "high risk, high payoff" as DARPA likes to say. Most lead nowhere. The second reason is that there is no good mechanism for monetizing the result. Fundamental innovations are often too fundamental to patent effectively, and are easy to copy once understood. They're also often worthless in themselves. They are enablers of value that is built on top of them.
Fundamental innovation is a lot like infrastructure -- something else free market players seldom invest in.
This is a problem for today's generation of enthusiastic free-market proponents. Who is going to pay for the next generation of innovation?
It's also very unjust. Where were Douglas Engelbart's billions? Tim Berners-Lee, is he a billionaire? No, we have 17 year olds making quick millions gluing together the work of dozens of Ph.D's who will never see that kind of money in their lifetimes.
It's a big thing that turned me off the Ph.D path. I don't feel like taking a vow of poverty and toiling in the dungeons to develop some fundamental, difficult concept that someone else then takes, glues to something else, flips, and gets rich.
All this stuff we're gluing together is the product of state-funded research, mostly from the cold war era. DARPANet, the web (CERN), DARPA research on "augmented human intelligence," etc.
Stuff like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY
(I bet you thought Xerox PARC invented that stuff, right? Or Apple? Nope. DARPA and SRI invented the entire modern user experience in the 1960s.)
Few companies ever fund that kind of thing. There's two reasons. One is risk vs. reward-- such projects are typically "high risk, high payoff" as DARPA likes to say. Most lead nowhere. The second reason is that there is no good mechanism for monetizing the result. Fundamental innovations are often too fundamental to patent effectively, and are easy to copy once understood. They're also often worthless in themselves. They are enablers of value that is built on top of them.
Fundamental innovation is a lot like infrastructure -- something else free market players seldom invest in.
This is a problem for today's generation of enthusiastic free-market proponents. Who is going to pay for the next generation of innovation?
It's also very unjust. Where were Douglas Engelbart's billions? Tim Berners-Lee, is he a billionaire? No, we have 17 year olds making quick millions gluing together the work of dozens of Ph.D's who will never see that kind of money in their lifetimes.
It's a big thing that turned me off the Ph.D path. I don't feel like taking a vow of poverty and toiling in the dungeons to develop some fundamental, difficult concept that someone else then takes, glues to something else, flips, and gets rich.