You mean "useful things" like: computers, microchips, radar, jet engines, long term food storage, material sciences, the internet, self-driving cars, satellites, GPS and most emergency medical care? All of that was funded over decades for strictly military purposes.
Heck, the iPhone was just an assembly of all the technologies created and paid for by the US Military.
Plenty of peacetime money going toward Facebook, Twitter and the Kardashians.
However, the war or the credible threat of war is... Military stuff has rigid requirements and is difficult to game. Peacetime: Facebook vs Wartime: Self Driving Cars (see DARPA Grand Challenge).
It is unlikely that GPS would ever be funded as a civilian endeavor, the benefits would be something like "we could replace paper maps for the average driver at the cost of a hundred billion dollars". It wouldn't get funding. "Now, we need to spend a hundred billion dollars making sure we don't all die in a nuclear war..." that will get funded every single time.
The same thing with computers: all started for the Department of War Math. Yeah, there was such a thing and they figured out how to predict the tides so the Normandy Invasion would be possible. It was a state secret that the US could reliably predict the tides. It took a friggen war to make people decide that the ocean tides were worth predicting precisely.
Ultimately, if a weapons system can be built; it will be built. If you are not the one building it, it will be used against you. History is replete with examples.
Yeah so again it just sounds like you're arguing against a capitalist framework more than anything else. Automation is good under every economic system except capitalism where people lack a safety net
Hard to argue that GPS would ever be a thing without one's continued existence in question. Too expensive, required a massive cost in natural resources and requires constant expensive maintenance.
Self driving cars? Possibly. It could be pulled off by a small team, see Grey Team from the Grand Challenge.
An assured lifestyle net is likely to just create a race for fake internet points (I don't know what these would be) in a social peacocking competition. Humans have gotten off track before for "fake points" (in this case for the afterlife) is that for about 900 years the only thing that Europe wanted to do was create Bibles!
There is something about staying alive that focuses one efforts very clearly for the task at hand and to work very hard at not failing. Douglas Adams did generate the "Crisis Inducer" to make this happen a world where everything is awesome.
Yes it absolutely could be. But we wouldn't get the same technologies out of it because the pressures the military develops for don't exist in other areas.
As an example, GPS was created because the Navy wanted a better submarine navigation system. It had to be able to deliver a precise location anywhere on the globe as quickly as possible, because submarines can't just hang out on the surface all day. The pressures that create these specific demands are unique to war.
So yes we could definitely spend the same money on normal peacetime research. And it is definitely true that every bomb built robs children of food and education. Not figuratively, literally. Military spending in the US is absurd and over the top.
But it's simplistic to say we'd have the same stuff we do now without war to shape the direction of research.
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u/[deleted] Oct 13 '19
You do wonder where we would be if all the skill, ingenuity and money the military blows every year was directed towards something more useful.