Because 'we' want to. Who is this 'we' you are speaking about? Globalist authoritarian elite that you are somehow part of? Democratic voters? Communication application users? Whose this 'we'?
Profit has not been the goal. If profit is the goal, one'd start another eyeball catching internet application. As the joke goes, the way to make a small fortune in space, is to start with a big fortune. SpaceX is the exception, not the norm. It worked only because of the unwavering, perhaps maniacal drive of one man. The man being hated on all over the place here that shall not be named.
I'd suspect the space industry will slow down drastically again if somehow that man stops putting space as a priority (or at least one of his priorities). Currently I don't think there's any one or company that is able to push the envelope AND still turn an operational profit at the same time. Even Starship program is not. Making it work is the exception, not some inevitable norm as others are making it as. Aka - "just because of government money".
Wouldn't you wonder why then that it seems, at least according to you, society have went backwards and not forward in this time frame?
"We have to have a collective look at what 1st-world governments, the media, and most "ordinary" people have been focusing on since the late 60's." still applies. Fixing the everyday problem is part of the problem-set to get to the "civilization advancing" goals.
Also donors. They received a ton of donations when they were a pure non-profit from people that got no board seat, no equities, with the believe that they will stick to their mission.
Government is also extremely inefficient. To build the service it'll cost them 10x more than private companies doing it. How much do you want to pay in taxes? There will come a point that even if the government actually is trying, that even if the entire GDP is converted the taxes that it'll still end up with a worse quality of life for the rest of us. Governments is easily corrupt and extremely inefficient. Its almost never the answer.
Tesla cutting prices aggressively at the expense of both their own margins, but also of other automakers having their market share and revenue shrinking massively, puts this WSJ theory immediately to bed.
Because the ability to influence others is more important than 1 or 2 standard deviation in more intelligence.
However if we are talking about 10x more intelligence, then that'd be a whole different ball game.
Check Alpha Go -> Alpha Go Zero. Gaining orders of magnitude in capability only with slight change to the model, along with a lot of more resource (we can easily throw 100x more compute and data to these models if someone seriously wants to and don't care about ROI. Or maybe if AI starts to be hugely profitable, 100x in investment is almost a rational outcome) is not uncommon in AI research.
I think it makes sense to debate whether this pause can or cannot work and the game theory behind it.
But to those that trivializes the potential danger of AI and compare it to the likes of climate change is ignorant at best. AI has been consistently ranked as the highest potential cause for the extinction of the entire human race (by experts, a random survey of the population will likely say climate change, sadly). (https://riskfrontiers.com/insights/ranking-of-potential-caus...)
Human caused climate change at the worst potential possible outcome would not even make a dent to the human population at a multi-century time-scale. We also have a lot of solutions in place for climate change that merely requires time and investment for adoption. Climate change's impact to humanity is less than the alarming birth rate we are seeing today (which also, we have no solution for...)
We literally have no solution for AI Alignment, and this is with a lot of smart people working on it. From Bostrom to Eliezer and many others (check https://lesswrong.com). A lot of experts have give up because they see no way out and is only merely thinking about how should humanity end with dignity. We can't even figure a way out of the prisoner dilemma on doing a 6 months pause.
Comparing AI Alignment with Climate Change trivializes the matter and only illustrate the ignorance of the populace. Another reason why we will not solve AI Alignment and will likely go extinct.
Job displacement is a silly problem compared to the AI Alignment problem. One is some human misery (but a lot of societal benefit to other groups of humans at the same time).
The other one is all of us, the entire species and the future of it, gets f'cked.
And something that went orbital at supersonic speed
Is not even remotely the same universe
McDonell Douglas have done up and down since 1992
SpaceX is the only entity that have recovered and reused any rocket parts after sending payloads orbital
Wake me up when someone have done even a test that resembles orbital recovery
Until then all the EDS in here has zero power over reality