That's true, but if it weren't for Google's monopolist position, I doubt they'd have the money to throw at the wall for random research. For every AI transformer they revolutionized, there's a self-driving car project that's dragging on for decades.
Had Google operated like a normal company, the risk/reward of this kind of research would've looked completely differently.
Google's monopoly helped research along in the same way totalitarian countries like China are developing infrastructure at break-neck speed: if you don't need to care about pesky rights and regulations, you can do things that would otherwise be impossible.
I don't think Google's monopoly is worth having the current generation of lie generator bots around, but I don't think generative AI would be where it is right now had Google been forced to comply with antitrust regulations ten years ago.
It's funny that you use self driving cars as a negative example. We have a perfect natural experiment to look at to compare the slower research-driven approach (Waymo) to the "normal company" short term profit driven approach (Tesla).
From where I'm sitting it's pretty clear which approach has been more successful.
My first thought was Bell Labs here. The lack of time pressure for research results sounds like a big reason why so much innovation happened—people could pursue projects that may not have immediately benefitted the company's bottom line, because Bell had money to throw. I think UNIX was an example of this, because MULTICS was a failure and Bell was wary of similar projects, but I might be wrong.
According to Kernighan in UNIX: A History and a Memoir, the Unix team was constrained with regards to hardware capital at the time of Unix's creation. The Multics team got to use a fancy GE-645 (36-bits!) while the Unix team had to beg for "cheaper" systems like the PDP-7 and eventually an 11. Thompson has a great quote about how ultimately he was thankful they didn't have as much money to play with as the Multics team did but at the time he was annoyed he had to beg for a PDP-11. Fun book!
Most of the Bell Labs fundamental breakthroughs had no path to commercialization at the time of their discovery. The transistor was discovered 12 years into Shockleys research on fundamental properties of semiconductors.
If commercialization had been considered before funding, the project would have never been approved.
Instead, Bell management took the view that they could find everything, and some of it might become a new market, maybe.
> You certainly have a point. Places like google and bell labs have pushed innovation, apparently enabled by monopolies.
I've heard this argument before (and recognize that you aren't defending it), but telecommunications, network and technology innovation has hardly suffered since Bell was dismantled in 1982.
Telecommunications is still led by small groups of companies. Giant backbone providers stitch the internet together. Telecoms providers within a country, the ones that actually have hardware in the field, can often be counted on one hand, and often in one hand after a fireworks accident. 5G/6G/7G research is led by a small handful of companies that actually build the switches, transmitters, and modems. Cell tower frequencies are sold to a tiny group of carriers that sublet their network equipment to smaller companies they eventually buy up (if succesful) or disappear from the market (if not succesful).
Fiber rollout in countries where a government funded phone line rollout has already succeeded is laughably slow, taking decades and many billions with little to show for it. Even in countries where no phone lines were rolled out back in the day, fiber is more and more being skipped as 5G allows for cheaper (though less reliable and less capable) deployment.
I'm not saying monopolies are good or anything, and I think our problems would be even worse had we stuck to the monopolist systems that brought us telecoms as we know it, but I wouldn't consider the industry one where there's enough competition to drive innovation, especially since at least half of the entire sector is competing against Chinese government-controlled companies with seemingly endless coffers.
Right, but there other, real, negative impacts of monopoly, whereas the positive impact of R&D funding seems to be at best a maybe as to if it's better than the alternative.
This is debatable, I think. What I've read is that, whereas Bell Labs did foundational, groundbreaking research that radically altered the course of human history, technological innovation since then has more often followed the lines Bell Labs, and their ilk, laid down. Giving the world a faster computer or faster network is fine and nice but pales in comparison to the consequences of giving the world modern computers, Unix, and C.
I might not have explained my position adequately. I am not commenting on how Google became immensely successful, but just looking at it today in its current state.
It seems like the end result of unchecked capitalism is monopolistic practices. Companies want to make as much $$$ as possible. The most effective way to do that is to become a monopoly and avoid/destroy/inhibit any amount of competition as possible.
I really see it as an unstable system. Which is why we need society to put laws in place to keep the system in check, so it doesn’t turn sour.
Basically there’s a “healthiness” scale of capitalism. I want healthy capitalism.
This is debatable and probably a US centric POV, I think you could argue that much of the world is better at public / private partnerships and so no, their position is not due to capitalism, even if their continued existence is.
I’m not an expert on the economic history, but you could probably argue that the last big public / private partnerships in the US were in the railroad days. Defense spending I would not count in this category either. Although it builds whole ecosystems it is too insular and incestuous compared to something like transportation, or deliberately nurturing any other budding industry in a cooperative rather than competitive fashion
Had Google operated like a normal company, the risk/reward of this kind of research would've looked completely differently.
Google's monopoly helped research along in the same way totalitarian countries like China are developing infrastructure at break-neck speed: if you don't need to care about pesky rights and regulations, you can do things that would otherwise be impossible.
I don't think Google's monopoly is worth having the current generation of lie generator bots around, but I don't think generative AI would be where it is right now had Google been forced to comply with antitrust regulations ten years ago.