The war machine brought about some tangible technological achievements (although of course in an incredibly wasteful process), but even more, the arms race was driven by technological progress in civilian economy: all improvements and inventions of civilian economy had to be put into military equipment and forced new generations of planes, tanks, guns.
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.
There are many things which the US brought into being, which could not have been achieved commercially, as the ROI is too far away and dilute. The military has long term objectives and spending priority like nothing else -- except perhaps NASA in the 1950-1970 period, and even that was tied up with the space race and the military. We certainly would not have GPS, 20cm satellite imaging and many other things.
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.
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.