WILL technology save us for reals?

[']['ear]

IBM was founded in 1896. Damned, they invented the fucking abacus, too! Pwned my ass, didn't you Rand?

Are you intentionally missing the point? At a certain level, guys in garages can't make major technological advances. It takes teams of highly trained experts years or even decades to come up with stuff that can be developed. Also, those same guys have to be able to bark up the wrong tree. Private enterprise will kick ass developing promising science, but they suck at finding the promising science. This didn't used to be the case, but has increasingly been so for several decades. It's why most of the budgets of the big boys aren't in discovering new principles, but extending existing ones. Government funding to increase the speed of a microchip 50% would be an utter waste. Government funding into quantum computing is a brilliant idea. You're not going to get many technological paradigm shifts from private industry any more.

[RandBlade]

IBM was founded in 1896. Damned, they invented the fucking abacus, too! Pwned my ass, didn't you Rand?

Are you intentionally missing the point? At a certain level, guys in garages can't make major technological advances. It takes teams of highly trained experts years or even decades to come up with stuff that can be developed. Also, those same guys have to be able to bark up the wrong tree. Private enterprise will kick ass developing promising science, but they suck at finding the promising science. This didn't used to be the case, but has increasingly been so for several decades. It's why most of the budgets of the big boys aren't in discovering new principles, but extending existing ones.

We're a bit beyond the guys in garages globally anyway. Most of the budgets go into existince ones because that's where most of the science is, always has been. Technology progresses primarily in an evolutionary not revolutionary manner.

Government funding to increase the speed of a microchip 50% would be an utter waste. Government funding into quantum computing is a brilliant idea. You're not going to get many technological paradigm shifts from private industry any more.

Any evidence for that claim? Probably because you simply wouldn't acknowledge anything as a paradigm shift rather than progress.

The budgets of private R&D - and the progress made from it - absolutely dwarf those of public R&D nowadays for a reason.

[Steely Glint]

It's about 70-30 in favor of industry, hardly private 'absolutely dwarfing' public, especially given how much government spending is basic research.

[RandBlade]

More than doubling is dwarfing. I'm 5'8", a reasonably average height, I'd call a fully-grown adult of 2'9" a dwarf.

Anyway, it depends how you defined your terms, Tear chose:
Annual NASA budget: 18.7 bn
Annual NIH budget: 31.2 bn
Annual NSF budget: <7 bn

That'd have a total of 56.7bn.

Toyota alone has an R&D budget of more than the NSF and corporate. I'm struggling to find US data for corporates or global data for public, but the top 1000 private corporations invest well over half a trillion a year on R&D.

[Steely Glint]

Yeah, but most corporate R&D is, fundamentally, just coming up with new types of widgets and much of what they actually produce will be fairly trivial. We're talking new types of fabric for car seats, better air conditioning and, of course, smaller iPods.

That's not to say that some of what they produce won't, indeed by genuinely new technology which benefits the human race, but you can't just take the raw number of corporate funded R&D and say "this is all going towards SCIENCE" when alot of it (most?) actually goes towards bullshit. Oh, and they couldn't do what they do without the basic research which is predominately, though not exclusively, funded by governments who, unlike corporations, actually make their results public for others, such as corporations, to benefit from.

[']['ear]

We're a bit beyond the guys in garages globally anyway. Most of the budgets go into existince ones because that's where most of the science is, always has been. Technology progresses primarily in an evolutionary not revolutionary manner.

Actually, I disagree with that, unless you're thinking "evolutionary" in terms of "punctuated equilibrium."

For example, see RNA interference.. One paper in 1998, then exponential growth.

Any evidence for that claim? Probably because you simply wouldn't acknowledge anything as a paradigm shift rather than progress.

Most in-house industry advances are incremental. Let's go with that quantum computing example. *IF* it works, then industry will run with it and develop it. But when/if it happens, it will be based on a couple of decades of foundational academic research, funded by the government.

In biotech/pharma, which of course I'm by far most familiar with, virtually no modern drug targets are discovered by industry. Virtually all are discovered and validated in academia, then targeted by industry.

The main exception to that is defense, but really it is the exception that proves the rule. The vast pots of money thrown at new technologies fuels massive research labs at defense contractors. Even there they are paralleled by massive gvmt defense labs, and also massive gvmt funding of academic labs. Heck, I got defense money for researching a bioterror target.

The budgets of private R&D - and the progress made from it - absolutely dwarf those of public R&D nowadays for a reason.

Ah, I see your misconception. You are conflating research with development. For most private companies, their research consists of working on things characterized by public research. In pharma, for example, they'll take a new target identified in academia, screen hundreds of thousands of compounds to identify a pharmacophore, then chemists will bash on it, making hundreds of variants and running them through assays developed in academia. You could call it research, but it's mostly monkey work. And the foundation originates outside of pharma.

For example, consider the cancer drug Gleevec. It targets the tyrosine kinase Abl. First paper on molecular identity of Abl? 1982 First paper on the drug? 1996 That's right, 14 years from target discovery to actual molecule, another 5 years to clinic (2001). Of course the transforming virus was discovered in 1970.

Now, what do you think was done between 1982 and 1996? By whom? And even so, Gleevec was discovered in collaboration with Novartis with a number of academic labs. What did Novartis do? Development. Almost all pharma these days is massive screening of academia-defined targets, folowed by very expensive development. Academics even run the clinical trials.

And for what its worth, pharma was doing huge amounts of cancer screen in the 70s , 80s and 90s. They found a few drugs on their own, but the overwhelming volume were discovered in academia and developed in pharma. Consequently, pharma has radically cut oncology, and instead just has massive biomolecular screening setups.

You don't have to believe Rand, but it's a fact. Scientific academia is great at discovery, industry is great at development. There's a reason that the US is dominant in computer technology and biomedical, and that's because the government has been plowing money to innovate in those areas since the 50s and 60s. Europe and Pacific rim countries have taken the hint and have massively ramped up their government funding of science in the last decade (especially Asia). They want that same economic windfall.

Mark my words, the US will NOT manage to do this in alt energy, because our competitors are going to beat us in the foundational science race. It's going to be China, and your country and mine will pay dearly for that oversight (which is really a political agenda).

[']['ear]

More than doubling is dwarfing. I'm 5'8", a reasonably average height, I'd call a fully-grown adult of 2'9" a dwarf.

Anyway, it depends how you defined your terms, Tear chose:
Annual NASA budget: 18.7 bn
Annual NIH budget: 31.2 bn
Annual NSF budget: <7 bn

That'd have a total of 56.7bn.

Toyota alone has an R&D budget of more than the NSF and corporate. I'm struggling to find US data for corporates or global data for public, but the top 1000 private corporations invest well over half a trillion a year on R&D.

See what Steely says. Car companies are a great example: most of them are doing incremental work, designing a better cupholder, a brake pad that is 5% more efficient. Who is developing that batteries that will transform the auto industry, hmm? Classic example. The auto industry leaped onto that one late, and consequently the groundwork was done in academia, with small startups (many of them academic-derived) leading the way. Oh, and China. Detroit is buying battery companies, not developing them itself. the discontinuity there has come from outside. Again, thanks for proving the point.


Edit: And I want to make perfectly clear that industry is great at that transition research and the extensive development that they do. I'm not knocking industry. It would be idiotic for government to fund that. On the other hand, government-funded academic research excels at digging through sciences of all types to find those nuggets worthy of development. Those nuggets are rare, and their payoff is too far away to justify capital investments. Then there's also the training angle.

Granted, things are somewhat different with engineers, which makes your car example probably the single strongest point you could have made. Engineers often don't even have post-bac degrees, so you can churn them out. You can't churn out qualified chemists, physicists and biologists in a BA program. We hire college grads to do monkey work. The real research requires dedicated doctoral students, and those are the people who populate industry R&D facilities.

[Lebanese Dragon]

I would agree that government ought invest in the very long term pay off projects that those are the more risky exploitations that even a large company cannot undertake while also maintaining their current competitive edge.

Totally new ideas, going back to square one. I think it does happen, they're going to explore their options, at the same time they will perfect the technology that they know. I think both will happen, but perhaps left to it's own devices advances in the revolutionary departments will be slower, and more reactive.

As the need becomes more pressing though industry, competition, innovation, will respond to the pressure. If population begins growing and our current food can't satisfy them then there will be a lot of money to be made, and a lot of need driven pressures in investing thought, time, and money into more efficient production, and distribution of food. The consumers will become more efficient at saving food, storing food, eating sufficient amounts of food, recycling etc... both ends work to satisfy needs. So it does happen both revolutionary and evolutionary progress. However, I admit the revolution of progress may best be done by government pools thinking directly about the long term benefit toward society.

Properly incentivized the private sector will, and does contribute as well.

[Lebanese Dragon]

Detroit is buying battery companies, not developing them itself. the discontinuity there has come from outside. Again, thanks for proving the point.

Funding their research is funding their research whether or not you were the start of it or not. So I would count that as investment toward advances in batteries, not sure on the nature of the companies they bought exactly in regards to batteries.