<story><title>Darpa Shows Off Some Things You Can Do with Distributed Electric Propulsion</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/transportation/advanced-cars/darpa-vehicle-technologies</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>black_puppydog</author><text>1st thought: wow, cool stuff!&lt;p&gt;2nd thought: too bad it&amp;#x27;s gonna be military use first. I&amp;#x27;ve often heard the argument being made that military applications (and even war itself) somehow drive innovation.
While that may be true to an extent, it always rang hollow to me as an argument. Why should civil life always just get the &amp;quot;crumbs&amp;quot; of science and engineering? Why not turn it around, spend most of the research money &lt;i&gt;and brain time&lt;/i&gt; on things that benefit everyone (in the US, and worldwide) and then see which of those technologies can be repurposed for the military, not the other way around?&lt;p&gt;DARPA alone has a bigger budget than NASA, and I just googled &amp;quot;us military research budget&amp;quot; and the numbers for all the arms of the US military are quite staggering, really.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ThomPete</author><text>Innovation doesn&amp;#x27;t work like that.&lt;p&gt;I normally think about it like this:&lt;p&gt;Government research:&lt;p&gt;Money spent here is the most abstract as it doesn&amp;#x27;t define a problem before it tries to solve it but rather looks for things we don&amp;#x27;t understand yet.&lt;p&gt;Military research:&lt;p&gt;The point of this research is maintaining power which means researching whatever might give you the upper hand. This is why AI is added to the research now. Whoever is furthest have the upper hand. Because getting the upper hand with regards to physical power can be a lot of things, whoever wants to be in power have to invest in a broad spectrum of areas.&lt;p&gt;Product&amp;#x2F;market research:&lt;p&gt;Solving problems perceptually or real, defined by the market itself or creating new markets but often using knowledge from what was created by governments and millitary (or ex. space travel). These are often accidental and byproducts.&lt;p&gt;Now here is the problem.&lt;p&gt;Just because you can define a market or a problem doesn&amp;#x27;t mean you can find a market for it. You have to find the customers who benefit from and who can pay.&lt;p&gt;If you took the money away from the millitary and gave it to solve &amp;quot;humanities problems&amp;quot; you would run the risk of loosing the monopoly of power because the problems of the humanity is not the same as those of the individual nation states.</text></comment>
<story><title>Darpa Shows Off Some Things You Can Do with Distributed Electric Propulsion</title><url>https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/transportation/advanced-cars/darpa-vehicle-technologies</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>black_puppydog</author><text>1st thought: wow, cool stuff!&lt;p&gt;2nd thought: too bad it&amp;#x27;s gonna be military use first. I&amp;#x27;ve often heard the argument being made that military applications (and even war itself) somehow drive innovation.
While that may be true to an extent, it always rang hollow to me as an argument. Why should civil life always just get the &amp;quot;crumbs&amp;quot; of science and engineering? Why not turn it around, spend most of the research money &lt;i&gt;and brain time&lt;/i&gt; on things that benefit everyone (in the US, and worldwide) and then see which of those technologies can be repurposed for the military, not the other way around?&lt;p&gt;DARPA alone has a bigger budget than NASA, and I just googled &amp;quot;us military research budget&amp;quot; and the numbers for all the arms of the US military are quite staggering, really.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>z3phyr</author><text>We have been warring before the dawn of civilization. I think it used to play a role in territorial resource usage&amp;#x2F;rights, evolutionary selection, population control and asserting your own set of morals.&lt;p&gt;I wish we all get over war, but realistically, as long as we differentiate between &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot;, there will always be some source of enmity to start wars..</text></comment>