On: Do patents kill innovation? The US patent office i...

[ModernMech]

In the robotics community we've been working on self driving wheelchairs for decades. You're definitely not the first one to think of it, so no loss there: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=autonomous+whee...

[kbenson → ModernMech]

I think the issue is not that he would have made the best/only chair and now isn't, but that it stifled any innovation that he might have provided by putting a high legal/monetary bar on any commercial endeavor. That is a loss, but we'll never know if it was vanishingly small or extremely large.