How much human progress is hampered by the desire of some to profit, no matter the cost to the world?
(thermoelectric generators have pretty terrible efficiency, though)
what if ICE never took off and we spent 100 years developing electric vehicles ?
Mostly bc short term profit maximization can be thought of as a greedy optimization which is blind to long term gains. This is why the tragedy of the commons happens
Look at Musk’s electric car story: there were a variety of electric cars that companies killed off (like the EV1) years earlier than the Tesla was released. It’s unclear if anyone who had the capital would have seriously entered the space if Tesla as a company did not exist. Maybe we’d be exactly as far along, but there’s a good chance the lack of “electric car infrastructure” and internal company incentives would basically keep anyone from going far enough before killing their project.
When the path to profit is only a short journey from where we are now, you’re right that some other company will probably adopt it. But add two or three hard steps that they need to overcome first, and it’s pretty common for human progress to stagnate in a local maxima for a long time.
The issue here is resting that value judgment on a small number of people (in this example, one person: Edison) to determine if it's valuable to human progress. They could be malicious or simply wrong about their estimation.
But also, no, markets aren't efficient, so they won't necessarily be correct on value-for-human-progress.