Semiconductors, solar panels, the internet, lithium ion batteries, computers, rockets, satellites, jet airplanes, modern tires, SIRI, liquid crystal display and multi–touch screen, MRI, radar, wind energy, GPS, Google, LEDs, and AI all originated through government funding – long ago.
Government funded supersonic jet aircraft developed in San Diego and first flown in 1956. A time when the wealthy were taxed, and society’s capital was used for innovation, and not simple monetization, through government funding.
From Science, “A new data-rich report by the National Science Foundation (NSF) confirms China has overtaken the United States as the world’s leader in several key scientific metrics, including the overall number of papers published and patents awarded.” Beginning in the 80s under Reagan, we saw the “government is the problem, not the solution” ideology take hold in the vast number of undereducated people in the USA. Morons loved this moron. And many of the wealthy loved that a moron could be president and be told what to do in order to make the wealthy, wealthier.
The leadership in science and engineering that Eisenhower and Kennedy had developed was under attack. Reagan had done this as governor of California. By 1963, the University of California, Berkeley had more Nobel Laureates than did Harvard. As Governor of California, Reagan saw to it that the world’s greatest public university would be harmed, thereby weakening the upward mobility of the lower and middle classes, and slowing the world’s greatest innovation center. And now as President, he was on the tear throughout the USA. His hands-off policies that didn’t support the building of new semicondutor fabs in the USA, led to the efflux of the industry to Japan starting with memory chips. That knowledge base and know-how shift would lead to Asia becoming dominant in semiconductor manufacturing as we now see. Things were better in the USA before Reagan, but he was unknowingly Asia’s best friend. NAFTA was his baby, and sending jobs and industry know-how overseas is his legacy.
In the 1950s, before the privatization and deregulation of the neoliberal cultists took over the US government where, for example, the capital of the US is used to launch crypto bros into space for a joyride, we had a generation of government supported scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers with the concept of artificial intelligence (or AI) formalized in their minds. Alan Turing, a young British polymath with a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University, who explored the mathematical possibility of artificial intelligence, was key to AI’s beginnings. From 1957 to 1974, AI flourished. Government funding would develop computers that could store more information and they became faster, cheaper, and more accessible. Machine learning algorithms developed at our universities also improved and people became better at knowing which algorithm to apply to their problem. Early demonstrations such as those by Drs. Newell and Simon’s General Problem Solver and Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA at MIT showed promise toward the goals of problem solving and the interpretation of spoken language respectively. These successes, as well as the advocacy of leading researchers (namely the attendees of the DSRPAI) convinced government agencies such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to fund AI research at several institutions.
During these times, government funded research at UC Berkeley led to the integrated circuit, the software to analyze integrated circuits called SPICE, the new RISC computer architecture, and the 3-dimensional transistor. All of these were major advances in the computers we use today.
By 1986, all of us involved in computers and cognitive science had to read, “Parallel distributed processing : explorations in the microstructure of cognition,” a seminal book from UCSD professor, Dr. David E. Rumelhart, Ph.D. and Stanford Professor, James L. McClelland, Ph.D. John Hopfield at Caltech and David Rumelhart at UCSD popularized “deep learning” techniques that allowed computers to learn using experience. But government funding began to drop and more of the R&D was happening at companies. Market incentives aren’t always aligned to long-term, capital-intensive R&D efforts. And goal directed research at private companies doesn’t lead to big innovative changes, just incremental change. For example, no company would have invented the transistor. The market wouldn’t know what a transistor is, and wouldn’t have told the companies there is a need for one. Rather, the market was demanding better vacuum tubes.
Where does innovation arise? Government funding, mostly at our universities. Back when presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy recognized the power of government to innovate through supporting science and engineering at our universities. Reagan killed that – first as governor of California, then as president of the USA. Exemplifying Reagan’s conservative bent was his ripoing-out of the solar panels that Jimmy Carter had implemented at the White House. Carter, a nuclear engineer, graduate of Anapolis, one of Admiral Rickover’s key nuclear engineers in the new nuclear submarine fleet, looked to the future. Reagan, looked to the past.
Reagan began killing the middle class, and everything that supported it, including education. Taxes on the wealthy and the corporations were obliterated, but increased on the middle class. Now capital would flow into the private sector, a private sector that he deregulated, leading to the great monetization paradigm. The government created the internet, for example, but in Reagan’s privatized, deregulated structure, it would become the rich man’s social media, espousing the rich man’s libertarian values and selling all kinds of worthless junk, like the supplement du jour. Elon Musk, who took over Tesla using hostile tactics on its founders, would use the internet to poo-poo government funding of R&D – this, of course, after he had received billions of dollars from the US government. The people’s money had made Musk a fortune. And, as Dr. Dacher Keltner, Ph.D. at Berkeley teaches us in the Power Paradox, when people become rich and powerful, they often become stupid – they lose contact with the world and think they are king shit – witness Elon Musk. Self aggrandizement becomes their game as we see in Bill Gates. And society’s capital that Gates accumulated would be mispent of dumb projects, such as his education iniative. Money and power = hubris. Often.
Who benefits from this Reaganomics nonsense? The billionaires and millionaires who are extracting capital from society, without having created anything. This is a big part of the downfall of the USA; why we are becoming what the UK is now, a hollowed-out shell of its former self, and why the Chinese have now taken the technolgical lead. The Chinese use the old USA playbook that Eisenhower and Kennedy gave us. Government funds R&D.
Those were exciting times in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. A new field had started. Much progress has been made since, but we also see the monetization schemes backed by gobs of VC money, society’s capital, creating useless dross. For example, Sam Bankman-Fried’s attempts to influence A.I. stem from his involvement in “effective altruism,” a philanthropic movement in which donors seek to maximize the impact of their giving for the long term. Effective altruists are often concerned with what they call catastrophic risks, such as pandemics, bioweapons and nuclear war. It’s all a private enterprise scam to convince the public that billionaires are altruistic. Sam and his VC-backed firm, FTX, a rip-off scheme in the Bahamas, is an example of the billions of dollars (FTX wasted $2 billion in “investment”) being wasted by non-governmental “innovation” schemes. Capital was extracted from society by Brinkman-Fried, and no innovation resulted but the capital that could have led to innovation was wasted. The same goes for Elizabeth Holmes and her rip-off scheme, Theranos. She is the daughter of an executive at the Houston, Texas-based Enron, another rip-off scheme that bankrupted many a small business in California.
Current rocket technology was developed in Germany through government funding, which continued when the US government began funding those German scientists and engineers here in the USA. Government funding would lead to the Atlas rocket being developed in San Diego at Convair (you can see it here in a Route 66 episode)and carry the first US astronaut into orbit. Later, Dr. Werner von Braun’s team would put the first man on the moon, in 1969, through JFK’s directive. Compare what we had in the 60s to Musk’s privatized exploding Starships.
It’s time to rid ourselves of the corporate shills running the USA, such as Donald Trump and Joe Biden (although Biden has been much, much better than Trump or any Republican since Nixon in funding R&D), and vote for people who support the middle class and the education of the people – vote Dr. Cornel West, Ph.D., professor at the Union Theological Seminary, affiliated with Columbia University.
Stem Cells, Health, Technology 