Opinion: Should investment in technology be a bigger priority for governments?

Although advancements of technology are imperative to address emerging modern-day problems, boosting governments' investment in technologies has been involving several concerns such as high up-front costs, risk of political misleading and increasing financial backing for military purpose and is therefore unacceptable.

Rather than investing in industry, governments should prioritize investment in education and citizen's welfare since the benefits of doing so can resolve broader matters such as poverty, decline of children's ability in school, unemployment and lack of parental leave. As these issues are not lucrative themselves, securing budgets would be a real struggle if governments didn't take a moral responsibility to provide steady monetary support. Yet, technological areas can often combat financial problems and eventually pay off just with individual investors and finance from banks, so pumping a massive amount of money into industry is waste of budget.

Concerns of political leanings are another problem involving government-level investment. Although rates of health epidemic, such as coronary diseases and monkey-pox, continue to escalate, narrow-minded investment by blind governments in medical technology, for example, risks scarcity of sufficient research and prudential judgement. While vaccine invented without enough clinical testing has led to inexplicable side-effects, governments have never wanted to reveal the truth or fulfill their responsibility straightforwardly, so that almost citizens remain unaware of the political leaning behind the move.

Additionally, in the face of the worsening international dispute in recent years, several governments around the world have been attempting to intensify their investment in military technology. This could contribute to unstoppable military expansion threatening the survival of humankind. In the majority of cases, most of state-of-the-art arms, such as weapons of mass destruction and biological weapons, actually have been supported with governmental investment so governments can have exclusive right to use them in case of war.

Considering influential complications associated with budgetary, political and military problems, viewing governmental investment as invaluable for development of technology may be a mistake.