alt Hacker News> Operations research is technology, but Uber isn't Gurobi, [...]
Intel isn't ASML, either. They merely use their products. So what?
Presumably Gurobi doesn't write their own compilers or fab their own chips. It's turtles all the way down.
> Fraud detection is a Red Queen's race. If the amount of resources that goes into fraud detection and fraud commission grows by 10×, 100×, 1000×, the resulting increase in human capacities and improvement in human welfare will be nil. It may be technically challenging but it isn't technology.
By that logic no military anywhere uses any technology? Nor is there any technology in Formula 1 cars?
"So what" is that Intel is making things ASML can't, things nobody has done before, and they have to try things that might not work in order to make things nobody yet knows how to make. Just to survive, they have to do things experts believe to be impossible.
AirBnB isn't doing that; they're just booking hotel rooms. Their competitive moat consists of owning a two-sided marketplace and political maneuvering to legalize it. That's very valuable, but it's not the same kind of business as Intel or Gurobi.
Nuclear weapons are certainly a case that tests the category of "technology" and which, indeed, sparked widespread despair and abandonment of progressivism: they increase human capabilities, but probably don't improve human welfare. But I don't think that categories become meaningless simply because they have fuzzy edges.