Kay may think that "American business is completely fucked up", but it's also undeniable that American business has been the greatest engine for technological progress the world has ever seen. Kay's anti-capitalism is showing, and it isn't particularly glorious to behold.
Looks like the industrial revolution had nothing to do with wars at all... strange, somehow stuff got invented anyway.
I'd be very careful about making such implications that "wars are good for technology". We have seen more advances in the past 20 years in technology than any time before, yet it was already the end of the Cold war. How do you explain that??
>wyclif: American business has been the greatest engine for technological progress the world has ever seen
>ekianjo: We have seen more advances in the past 20 years in technology than any time before, yet it was already the end of the Cold war. How do you explain that??
The US has kept itself pretty busy with warfare over the last 20 years[1]. The Cold War is ages ago and war has been waging for quite some time since the end of it.
"Defense spending" as it is now, probably doesn't require actual war. The whole "war drives tech" idea is fueled by the idea that war causes society to funnel cash towards a singular purpose... RADAR, Manhattan Project, NASA, etc. Nowadays we are still spending a ton of money on the military, but think of what that spending would be like if WW3 were to break out (barring nuclear holocaust). That's the generic idea behind the 'war <=> tech' relationship.
I disagree. Wars focus only on how to make destruction faster and more effective and deadly. It's not focused on saving people or making lives better.
The necessity from War is to stay alive and beat your foes. To this purpose, you burn your own economy to the ground (and the rest of the world with it) by going into massive spending and carnage.
WHatever innovation you actually get is from a massive, unnatural diversion of resources that were in the pockets of free people before the war. So, of course, innovation can happen at an accelerated pace, but compared to innovation during peace-time, it is way more costly and less effective during war-time, because you do not focus on the quality of your investments, and decisions are not taken on economic, rational grounds.
The cost of War is huge on society, and that's not a surprise the US were almost bankrupt by 1944 (remember the pressure of war bonds?) and wanted to end it as soon as possible.
I'd be more interested to make a rationale on the missed opportunities of technology BECAUSE of war. There are numerous cases of scientists who were disturbed by war events and who had to drop their works in order to save themselves. There are things that you see and things you do NOT see.
There are lots of side benefits to the things that aren't directly weapons (e.g. RADAR). I'm definitely not encouraging war, but I think it's a fallacy to imply that the only thing that come out of 'war research' is weapons. There are plenty of ways to make "destruction faster and more effective" without developing an actual weapon (e.g. making the supply chain more efficient, finding better fuels to power vehicles, etc).
Also examples of some of the greatest human meatgrinders and public-private war profiteering the world has ever seen. As a society we shouldn't remember the sweet without also remembering the sour.
I would be curious to know what makes you think that technological progress is happening because of competition. It might as well be despite competition, I see no rational way of telling for sure, as there are too many interdependent factors at work.
But I will say this: the academic world as I've been witnessing it is a world built on cooperation, and it seems to me to be the real driver of strong innovation. Another lucrative social website is not "strong innovation", but a new research algorithm that pushes the boundaries of what we can do, is. One is driven by profit, the other by curiosity. One happens because of competition, the other because of cooperation.
Academia is rife with competition. As they say, the battles are so fierce because the stakes are so small.
The open source community and Wikipedia are great examples of cooperation.
The biggest advances in business are usually by people who are completely focused on customer needs and ignore competition (google up until their google+ fascination, Elon musk, apple prior to android's success. Note how google hasn't made any advances from their competition with Facebook, and how Apple hasnt advanced the iPhone much since they started competing with Android).
I don't believe that competition is the primary driver of innovation either. But competition is an inevitable consequence of comparability. If you cannot compare outcomes of different approaches to the same problem you cannot improve the solutions. I also think that competition mitigates some social developments that lead to stagnation, like cronyism and lazy establishments holding on to resources without delivering any results.
But at the end of the day I think you are right to dispute the popular notion that somehow a cut throat environment that pits everyone against everyone else is the most conducive environment for innovation. It just causes fear and fear makes stupid.
There's capitalism in general, and then there's our particular implementation. And just because we've (mostly) done well thus far, doesn't mean we've done nearly as well as we could, or that our manner of making progress is economically/ecologically sustainable. (Disclaimer: I believe culture trumps both economic and political systems in measuring long-term societal success.)
