You really think so? All of the examples you gave are military technology during wartime, which the government does tend to be able to do since the existential risk motivates the organization to root out graft and free riding.
I could see some kind of alternate reality future government funded Waymo being spun out of drone tank tech from WWIII but we wouldn't have it today.
Could you remind me what war was going on when the CDC eradicated malaria from the United States?
Could you remind me what war was going on when FDR build our basic social safety nets?
Broadly speaking, people have 3 ways to organize large groups: business, government, and (organized) religion. Each has strengths and weakness. To say that only one can produce social good is a bit of a stretch.
The cold war. Putting a man on the moon was meant to demonstrate how easily we could put a nuke on Moscow.
[1] Rational subsection of the Background section (section I) in this pdf: https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/FOID/Reading%20...
The whole thing is worth a read too, it explains all the other military use tech that will arise from the self driving car ecosystem, further justifying the investment.
You cannot be serious, the whole thing was called the space race for a reason. Space tech has always always been primarily a military venture, and it remains so to this day.
> Malaria
Glad you asked, chloroquine was developed during WW2 for soldiers, and chloroquine resistance of soldiers in Vietnam drove the creation of mefloquine and artemisinin.
> Social safety nets
Not a science breakthrough
> To say that only one can produce social good is a bit of a stretch
I 100% agree. It's not "everything ever created was because of war". It is rather that "a lot of difficult amazingly unimaginable things i.e 'root node science' would have never been created had it not been for war, and this is what unlocked an exponential number of amazing things we have today". We would certainly have scientific advancement even without war, just exponentially less.
Also, we need to count derivative works of these works as primarily existing because of war reasons too.
This is not an American specific or 20th century specific phenomenon either. Science and war have always been friends, and to my point, with reciprocal benefits, not just war benefiting from science. For example, Fourier was part of napoleons egypt expedition. Euler worked for the Russian Navy, and even has a direct book "Neue Grundsätze der Artillerie" (“New Principles of Artillery”) (1745). Lagrange similar: a lot of his projectile analyses arose out of problems posed by the Turin artillery school.
Most crucially, Euler and Lagrange and many other household names were entirely funded by the military complex. Ecole polytechnique which employed Lagrange was a military engineering school[1], and St. petersburg academy which employed euler[2] was heavily supported by the navy and army.
That said, there are also examples of people creating science for purely fun -- most of gauss' work, galileo's work and a lot of 1300-1600 era indian mathematics arose purely out of astronomy studies, and, I suppose, rolling random crap down a slope for the funsies(galileo) and visions from a goddess (ramanujan). I'm sure there are a gajillion other examples too, of "root node" science being created for non-war reasons. But it's also true that a massively larger number of insanely cool things we have today only ever existed because of war.
[1] and it remains under the French defense ministry [whatever it's called] to this day!
[2] fun story, he was employed by both Frederick the great in berlin and by Catherine I in St. petersburg at different points in his life. He was even accused of espionage.
Multiple edits: looked through my notes and edited some inaccuracies.
> The book chronicles war and the use of space as a weapon going as far back as before the Ancient Greeks. [It] includes examples such as Christopher Columbus' use of his knowledge of a lunar eclipse, and the use of satellite intelligence by the United States during the Gulf War.
Much more science than people tend to realize is military-funded.
the lack of public funding towards automated cars isn't due to a lack of potential, it's due to a lack of focus and lower-hanging-fruit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge
After the DARPA Urban Challenge of 2007 I naively thought that commercial self driving urban vehicles were about 5 years away. It actually took until 2020 for Waymo to offer services to the public, and just in one city to start:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waymo
That's a long timeline from "tech demo" to usable technology. I don't know how to maintain government funding for that long in a democratic system. No president, senator, or representative goes that long without fighting for re-election. Any technology that still isn't working after 12 years is likely to be considered a dead end and canceled. The big impressive government projects of the 20th century delivered results faster; there were only 7 years between Kennedy's "We choose to go to the moon" speech and NASA actually landing on the moon.
Companies with large resources can behave more like "planned economies" that aren't subject to short term whims of the electorate. Of course they can also exhibit even more short-term orientation -- the notorious "next quarter's earnings report" planning horizon.
See how the DoD funds the development of the multitude of platforms on it depends on (land, air, sea or space), for decades at a time.
