Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

phiwong t1_j1psg40 wrote

Reply to comment by ANOKNUSA in TIL Douglas Engelbart never received any royalties for the invention of the mouse. In an interview he said "SRI (Stanford Research Institute) patented the mouse, but they had no idea of its value. Some years later it was known that they had licensed it to Apple Computer for something like $40,000." by whoiskamalsingh

I suspect your thinking is incorrect. How does one measure "societal contribution"? Society will never benefit if ideas remain in the lab to be enjoyed by a small group of specialists. You have to connect these ideas to actual objects that society in general can use and create value out of.

This idea that profit is somehow evil is misguided at best. If no resources are allocated to design, produce, distribute, educate and utilize ideas, the ideas are generally not valued. The concept that these resources and processes are extraneous to societal contribution is illogical. Why would millions of people be employed today in technology industries without the logic of value creation and appropriation?

There is no magic wand that makes computers, write the software, understand the problems and creates solutions. The idea of it not being profit oriented is to completely miss the idea of how value is created and distributed in any human society in any era under any ideology.

−10

ANOKNUSA t1_j1qh6hf wrote

  1. Whatever the number of people currently working on making and developing IT for profit, it is deserted by orders of magnitude more people using it for its benefits.
  2. Indeed, R&D is necessary to develop the tech, and that requires resources. In most cases, the resources for the elements of computing tech that are fundamental—programming languages, human interfaces and the like—came from government and university research grants. Not hard to understand why, since business executives and VC “angels” aren’t big on the idea that, say, this little chunky thing you move around a desk with your hand will become essential to the way we do—well, everything, but not until a decade or two after you make the investment.
  3. Nothing in your argument demonstrates that treating information tech as a form of private property to be exploited for profit, first and foremost, is intrinsically necessary for its development. No sense in trying to force such reasoning, either, since we’ve already got several decades of history that prove otherwise. Indeed, to this day there are dozens of examples of tech you use every day that you probably paid a company to obtain, that consist of pieces that were and still are freely distributed to the public. The open research and exchange of ideas made profiting from these things possible in the first place. Profit is a basic function of commerce, and treating it as such is healthy enough. I’ve yet to see an instance where treating profit as a goal unto itself hasn’t corrupted an otherwise worthy human endeavor.
8

phiwong t1_j1r86j8 wrote

Government grants and open research etc are still subject to the distribution of resources. A government gets money by taxing income and profits. So it is taking from someone and giving to another. It is resource allocation by fiat that wouldn't be possible without excess generated by production and labor.

If everyone could only grow enough food to feed themselves and could not generate excess, then there is no excess to distribute. From whence then comes a "free" exchange or development of ideas. There is no "free" in this - only what one recognizes as more legitimate and less legitimate forms of distribution and allocation of resources.

Again, irrespective of ideology, societies only develop new ideas and technology when society generates excess. If a society produces more than enough for the basic needs of their society, then some people can explore other venues of value creation (again, being agnostic about what is value).

Profit isn't a goal into itself - that is a strawman. The problem is distributional both in the resources to create and develop the idea as well as the resources needed to bring the benefit to society at large. Otherwise we end up subscribing to magical thinking as far as how ideas can develop and how ideas either in the form of knowledge or products are distributed.

1