"If you build it, they will come" suffers from confirmation bias.
You can easily look back at things people have built and people have come to (computers, planes, cars, etc)... But there are far more things people built that no one came for, and which we don't even know of because no one wanted them.
Solar roadways is an example of something that was an infrastructure project that was built out in a few places, and by all accounts was a failure.
The concorde seemed like an obvious "build it, people will want it", but in reality people didn't come for it, so it was retired.
And there's countless other examples, from 3d movie theatres, to dotcom ideas to all the things we don't know of.
Weren't solar roadways just bullshit and rather thoroughly debunked from the engineering POV from the very start? Concorde also AFAIR was a victim of oil prices.
There is perhaps a bit of confirmation bias in this view, but I see people usually erring in the other direction. E.g. there's no such thing as "too fast Internet" today, people find new ways to suck up all available bandwidth.
Concorde was also a victim of something else getting built that people went to instead— widebody business class. It turns out that a lie-flat business bed for seven hours is more appealing to most people than a cramped, economy-style cabin for three and half hours.
Solar Roadways was also obviously going to be several orders of magnitude more expensive than traditional asphalt, even with very generous estimates in in Solar Roadways's favor, but people still dumped a few million into that scam. And several governments (i.e. France) even wasted money on larger implementations of it despite failing even the most optimistic back of the envelope calculations.
And the ""If you build it, they will come" suffers from confirmation bias" point-of-view comes from the myopic vision that most scientific minded folks have when it comes to engineering projects.
And the worst offenders of this narrow-mindset are, wait for it, no less but the trained scientists themselves (not all, but the ones who didn't have exposure to engineering thought).
When we (engineers) say: "If you build it, they will come", what we really mean is this:
- If you build it, and they come, great.
- If you build it, and they don't come, too bad. Let's try something else.
- No one predicts the future like an oracle, but we'll try our best to make our claims come to fruition.
Our audience (the investors) knows that. We (engineers) are not out there for the truth. We're out there to try things out based on an educated guess, give it our best shot, and see what happens.
The fact that many scientific breakthroughs were happy accidents is no coincidence. Luck favors the prepared mind, and one of the best ways to prepare yourself is to build a lot of stuff that doesn’t work. The only reason it’s so common for breakthroughs to be “stumbled upon” is because those who discover them were, while not realizing it, preparing themselves to be able to have the “that’s funny...” moment countless others missed.
Not quite, it’s “If you build it, they might come.” You only need to look to the history of railroad in the US to see how infrastructure frequently didn’t pay off.
Yep, but railroads were extremely overbuilt and huge swaths of companies went bankrupt. My point is that despite eventual usage, infrastructure is fraught with wiped out companies.
Look at the Alaskan Railroad for a more recent example.
Look to airships for an example of things that just completely fell out of use or trackless trains.
