Giant Corporations and Governments = Death Spiral

It's very difficult to come up with genuine improvements to the technology toolkit of humanity. It's a slow process of trial and error. The road bicycle provides a great long term example of a piece of technology that's been honed and improved continuously since it was first invented. For every genuine improvement, there are dozens, probably hundreds of failures.

It doesn't take much capital equipment to make road bike components so there are many smallish companies that make bike parts or whole bikes. Similarly, it doesn't take much for an individual to buy some component and install it on a bike. Consequently, there's a constant froth of experiments going on with bikes.

Even though there are "scientific" methods for testing the improvements, for example, one can go to a wind tunnel and determine if a new handlebar offer improved aerodynamic efficiency. However, the real world efficacy of an improvement ultimately determines its fate. The real world efficacy is generally impractical to measure in a scientific/lab setting because the broad spectrum of real world scenarios can't be systematically tested.

This scenario applies to technology in general and really to life in general and is why central planning fails over and over, whether it's in the context of a government or a corporation. The road bike keeps improving because there's no controlling authority limiting the range of uses and experiments.

In scenarios where a controlling authority directs development of technology, or experiments that go on within an individual household, for example, to improve ways to get household chores done, or whatever, the range of options and possibilities that can be tried and tested is drastically reduced and the process can be entirely corrupt of course.