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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

> How would the car industry change if someone made a 3D printer that could make any part, including custom parts, with just electricity and air?

The invention would never see the light of day. If someone were to invent Star Trek replicators, they'd be buried along with their invention. Best Case it would be quickly captured by the ownership class and only be allowed to be used by officially blessed manufacturing companies, and not any individuals. They will have learned their lesson from AI and what it does to scarcity. Western [correction: all of] society is hopelessly locked into and dependent on manufacturing scarcity, and the idea that people have to pay for things. The wealthy and powerful will never allow free abundance of physical goods in the hands of the little people.

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I don't know. Today it's extremely expensive to start new manufacturing competitors. You have to go and ask for tons of capital merely to play the game and likely lose. Anyone with that much capital is probably going to be skeptical of some upstart and consult with established industry leaders. This would be the opportunity for those leaders to step in and take the tech for themselves.

So to solve this problem you need billions to burn on gambles. I guess that's how we ended up with VC's.

> Western society is hopelessly locked into and dependent on manufacturing scarcity, and the idea that people have to pay for things.

How do you reconcile that with the fact that Western society has invented, improved, and supplied many of the things we lament that other countries don't have (and those countries also lament it - it's not just our own Stockholm Syndrome).

Most of what gets invented either 1. relies on its scarcity to extract value or 2. if it's not naturally scarce, it gets locked behind patents, copyrights, cartels, regulations, and license agreements between corporations, in order to keep the means of its production out of the hands of common people. Without that scarcity and ability to profit from it, it wouldn't be invented.

I'm curious if this is true.

Are there specific historical examples of this that come to mind?

The closest real-life thing (and probably what a lot of believers in this particular conspiracy theory are drawing on directly) is probably the Phoebus lightbulb cartel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

It’s rather hard to imagine even something like that (and it’s pretty limited in scope compared to the grand conspiracy above) working today, though; the EC would definitely stomp on it, and even the sleepy FTC would probably bestir itself for something so blatant.

It only worked at the time because it benefited the public at large.

And that’s not really the same thing. Did someone invent the LED bulb in 1920 and that cartel crushed it? Not really.

In reality, the biggest problem was they had no incentive to invest in new lighting technology research, although they had the money to do so. It takes a lot of effort to develop a new technology, and significantly more to make it practical and affordable.

I think the story of the development of the blue LED which led to modern LED lighting is more illustrative of the real obstacles of technological development.

Companies/managers don't want to invest in R&D bc it’s too uncertain and they typically are more interested in the short term.

And it’s hard for someone without deep technical knowledge to identify a realistic worthwhile technical idea from a bad one. So they focus on what they can understand and what they can quantify ().

And even technical people can fail to properly evaluate ideas that are even slightly outside their area of expertise (or even sometimes the ones that are within it )

There are plenty of examples of good things being unavailable due to market manipulation and corrupt government.

But I don't know of anything nearly as extreme as destroying an entire invention. Those tend to stick around.

You're asking for historical examples of great inventions that were hidden from history. I only know of those great inventions that I've hidden...

There are a number of counterexamples though. Henry Ford, etc.

Just wondering if you’ve actually hidden inventions you would actually consider to be great?

>The wealthy and powerful will never allow free abundance of physical goods in the hands of the little people.

Then there would be a violent revolution which wrestles it out of their hands. The benefits of such a technology would be immediately obvious to the layman and he would not allow it to be hoarded by a select few.

Only if someone can make money from it. If the people who have it can't do that (or won't) then it won't happen. E.g. there's no private industry for nuclear bombs selling to any bidder in the world. But anything else you just need to let people make companies and that'll get it out there, in a thousand shades of value to match all the possible demands.

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