Not the OP and I hadn't put them in the noble class category, but until a few years ago I had truly believed that the innovation that was still coming out of the US (and out of the West more generally) was in no small part thanks to SV startups (and hence thanks to the VC industry supporting them).
The whole crypto fiasco plus a few other things (these SV people going from worshipping Musk to hating him in a very short period, for example) have convinced me that I was a holding a view that was not based on anything of substance.
Which begs the question: where does real innovation come from in the US (and the West more generally)? The SV start-ups are not providing it, ditto for the FAANGs, what's left?
> where does real innovation come from in the US (and the West more generally)?
Chinese-style surveillance tech, unironically. The next great experiment after social media is the increasing use of tech to control people with an personalized granularity that free-market capitalism (or even MMT) could never dream to achieve.
In other words, the plot of MGS2.
For obvious reasons all this is unpopular here. But regardless of feelings, it is the next logical step.
Yeah, now that you mention it the one thing at which AI is really good at is image recognition.
There was this drone video [1] of a busy intersection posted on my country's sub-reddit recently, and from second 0:11 or so the way that the software is able to "recognise" and assign an unique ID to each and every car from that intersection is very Minority Report-y. What's scarier is that this looks like consumer-level stuff, not some fancy state-run surveillance thingie.
I assume the drone is Chinese-made, most probably also the software that made that identification possible.
The whole crypto fiasco plus a few other things (these SV people going from worshipping Musk to hating him in a very short period, for example) have convinced me that I was a holding a view that was not based on anything of substance.
Which begs the question: where does real innovation come from in the US (and the West more generally)? The SV start-ups are not providing it, ditto for the FAANGs, what's left?