Think about it. Capitalism is awesome if you’re the one who started it. 30-50 years later, its fuck everyone else.
All the great tech innovations happened early on and peaked many years ago. Anything innovative now doesn’t pay, so its onto the grift and theft of data, wages, etc.
In the last ~10 years humanity has developed:
New technologies tend to have long lulls while being developed, followed by a rapid series of developments when those technologies become viable and in turn provide the base for new technologies.
Yeah, there’s always grifters and technologies that turn out to not be useful, but there’s also always tons of people working really hard to create new advances for the benefit of mankind. Capitalism is definitely flawed (understatement) but relative to say, feudalism, continues to be a very efficient way to allocate resources when used in a well managed economy.
how many have had government funding?
You’re spot on here. The list there was heavily subsidized by government funding. NIH, DARPA, NSF, NASA, etc made those be discovered and initially refined. Many are still heavily subsidized by government funding.
There’s an initial investment stage that takes risk, but after that, it’s mostly about refinement and efficiency. Capitalism tries to exploit those government funds then spread the risk followed by retreading old ideas for new dollars. Capitalism invents few things because it’s risky. It’s really good at monopolizing existing things and eventually driving the efficiency of exploitation to the umpteenth degree.
What am I, rainman? Regardless, I’m not sure what that has to do with whether “technology has peaked”
Cool, managed to create all that and yet hasnt solved hunger, medical care, homelessness, or anything or substantive value. Any system where your priorities dont lie in improving peoples lives is a flawed system.
Even worse than that, our modern, high-tech capitalist civilisation, no matter its many ‘triumphs,’ has roundly failed to address what was obvious to anyone seeing the long view-- that without addressing the mechanisms of its own unsustainability, it will still fail, as all earlier civilisations did.
So we’re headed for a collapse, faster with every passing day, while overpopulation, overconsumption, and capitalism have arguably been the primary drivers of that. And the richest people and corporations in the world, being uniquely placed to make a huge difference on that front, instead only think of the next quarter’s profits, or their personal wealth and safety.
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I agree that there is an upside to capitalism,but by now it has overstayed its welcome and the downsides are starting to outweigh the upsides. To be fair though,we haven’t really got an easy alternative.