But look at the innovation that comes from both endeavors and leaks out into the rest of society. Arguably computer technology would not be where it is without the war machine driving the initial innovation.
And similarly, web technology, such as Javascript and just the ability to update a webpage without reloading it wouldn't exist without ad-tech.
Market based economies and state sponsored science are pretty solid at bringing about progress and the trillions in military spending that could have reasonably been saved since WW2 would have have lifted all boats and would have provided money for better education, telescopes, particle accelerators and many other things we can't even conceptualize, since so many ressources were squandered.
And regarding ad-tech: similar thing. All that money that goes into it is paid for by us through the products we buy, plus we are manipulated by it so our decisions are all worse. Do away with it and we would have better things all around.
Culturally, humans are short term focused. It takes a big abstraction tied to real core needs to get us to do anything long term. God(s), the tribe, survival, basically sex and death.
Ad tech is about tomorrow. Surveillance+capitalism was our only long term bet of late, but I think we're pivoting to systematic mass disinformation.
But those technologies are now used pretty widely across the whole tech industry, including in the hard sciences.
"the streaming video tech" integrated the player into the browser to control it and show ads. not much gained imo.
Compare Mapquest vs Google Maps to know why Javascript is important
If you don't know what Mapquest was, there's your answer
So you can tell me that Javascript is important, and I won't argue that, but it's like nuclear power. It can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you. (With apologies to Dilbert.) It seems like Brendan Eich is a nice guy, but if he knew how people would use JS to make the average top-100 site today -- and make page loads take several seconds over a gigabit ethernet connection on one of the world's fastest laptops -- would he do it all over again?
Google maps was better than Mapquest when Google first put theirs on line, and better than either one is any more.
Google has simply declined below the baseline by failing to be as useful as they once were.
Mapquest remains more performant if less popular by comparison.
A reasonable explanation is that Google engineers & business operators are not as advanced as they were 20 years ago, likely not as dissimilar to average employees elsewhere any more.
This kind of thing is more common than you think.
From what I understand of the 21st century hiring process that is expected.
I don't know what I find more depressing - that somebody thinks this is true, or worse, that somebody thinks this is a good thing.
But I think you'd be hard pressed to provide evidence that the web would be better without Javascript. Yes, people abuse javascript and make it do awful things, but think about all the good things Javascript enables.
On reddit, you can comment without reloading the page thanks to javascript.
There are ton of great games that are all in javascript.
Simple things like when you log into a webpage and it shows your username in the corner.
Status notification on webpages.
Being able to make a request and then continue working while the request processes.
Javascript is a tool, and I'd say it's a tool that makes things better overall.
If you comment on reddit, don't you watch the page to confirm your comment went up? So not necessarily a productivity gain through Javascript. Conscious reloading is nice as there is no distraction: You take an action to see new state like login, new messages and notifications. Again, totally subjective.
There were plenty of games made with Flash, so game dev tools were developed independent of ad-tech.
The modern versions of these use a lot more Javascript for countdown timers, and while that's nice the pages usually feel slower.
I suspect we'd have made decades of progress if we'd truly dumped all the funds spent on military efforts in the 20th century into research.
Not to mention the lost opportunity cost of making millions of people have the occupation of soldier, rather than something more productive.
You can always create a civilian training program with the same sort of structure as a military program if that's worthwhile.
But generally people don't seem to view it as the most effective form of education. The time spent on any military discipline or studies is time taken away from some other subject.
That's its job.
Excess preparation for war is resource distribution, with variable effects on perceived prosperity.
Stockpiling guns & ammo costs many people a lot but others make their money this way.
Not as much as actually deploying or fully waging a war though.
With military discipline and strategy another problem comes when the myth is perpetuated about this being the strongest form of discipline and best approach to overcoming objectives in other challenging pursuits.
The complete faultiness of a military-style chain-of-command for non-military purposes is often overlooked simply because when such a visible chain is in place aboard something like a corporation, it is recognizable and familiar.
Too bad.
If you want to get the most out of your resources you're going to need a lot stronger and more effective discipline than the military, and a whole lot different style chain-of-command, from top to bottom.
Preparing for exponential growth requires a naturally different mindset compared to preparing for exponential mutual destruction.
Some time ago, someone here posted about running the infrastructure for one of the main pr0n sites, and it was crazy cool.
It wasn't "cutting edge," but it was incredibly well-engineered and robust.
This might be it (not sure): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23976449
Also you say no ad-tech would mean a world without JavaScript like it’s a bad thing.
Inertial confinement drove development of short-pulse lasers, which are good for research into chemical reaction dynamics.
I've lost track, which is A now? Only Facebook and Google are adtech, Apple wants to sell hardware and Amazon wants to do retail, adtech/surveillance capitalism could be banned tomorrow and both the A's would not skip a beat.