DARPA is waaay before what's called "seed" level funding in the commercial sector. They are the pre-pre-pre-seed. Taxpayers fund a lot of military procurement for nascent technologies as well.
Again you make a false comparison. Nobody claimed that early stage investors are entitled to "all economic value". The statement stands that costs are socialized. Silicon Valley is greatly subsidized by early stage taxpayer investment.
> Are you really going to make someone else go point out the hundreds of millions in dollars of seed-level funding by Google, by Uber, etc., to demonstrate the obvious point that the DARPA Grand Challenge is terrible evidence for the claim "autonomous vehicle development was funded by taxpayers".
"Autonomous vehicle development was funded by taxpayers" is a factually correct statement. You again fundamentally misunderstand the distinction of when investments are made vs. quantity of investment. Earlier stage investments are riskier; Google et al did not start pouring money in until the technology started showing some promise after many years of taxpayer investment. As is commonly the case with our high tech system.
I guess we should credit Andrew Carnegie with pre^12-seed funding since he founded Carnegie-Mellon and a lot of relevant robotics research has taken place there.
Again, I am not discussing all of DARPA's activities, I am talking about the Grand Challenge you brought up, which I continue to maintain is minuscule compared to a million other sources and thus is terrible evidence that "autonomous vehicle development was funded by taxpayers" in any non-trivial sense.
> Nobody claimed that early stage investors are entitled to "all economic value".
You misinterpret my analogy. The point is that your approach, if taken seriously, would mean the government would have a claim on every single bit of economic value in the US, not that it would have full ownership of all of it.
> The statement stands that costs are socialized.
> "Autonomous vehicle development was funded by taxpayers" is a factually correct statement
Ha, yes, and we can also conclude that autonomous vehicle development was funded by Carnegie, Roomba, and my buddy Alex who runs a robotic delivery startup.
Once again you have confused the timing and thus risk of investment with quantity. Furthermore, and trivially, donations by private citizens such as Carnegie are not a socialization of costs.
The simple fact remains that taxpayers have made significant and critical investments in nurturing AV technology, like many other technologies that Silicon Valley has commercialized once they bore fruit. Your fundamental premise that investments that are "minuscule" in size are necessarily minuscule in significance is trivially wrong.
You've repeatedly attributed multiple claims to me I'm not making. I can't tell how much of that is willful, but either way I won't continue the discussion.
Again you make a false comparison. Nobody claimed that early stage investors are entitled to "all economic value". The statement stands that costs are socialized. Silicon Valley is greatly subsidized by early stage taxpayer investment.
> Are you really going to make someone else go point out the hundreds of millions in dollars of seed-level funding by Google, by Uber, etc., to demonstrate the obvious point that the DARPA Grand Challenge is terrible evidence for the claim "autonomous vehicle development was funded by taxpayers".
"Autonomous vehicle development was funded by taxpayers" is a factually correct statement. You again fundamentally misunderstand the distinction of when investments are made vs. quantity of investment. Earlier stage investments are riskier; Google et al did not start pouring money in until the technology started showing some promise after many years of taxpayer investment. As is commonly the case with our high tech system.