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Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

> There are no major advances left.

I think the problem is elsewhere. There's noone doing the advancing. People like myself (smart, educated, ambitious, technically-oriented) are way better of doing the unproductive things (finance or ad-tech) than the productive (research). And by "way better" I mean it doesn't even compare! Academia is fucked-up as well (chasing it's proverbial tail by encouraging young researchers to publish, not to, you know, actually research).

Simply said, everyone is looking to invest capital in equity, but nobody actually wants to pay people to do the work. Give me a living wage (i.e. not 40k when the tiny apartment I live in costs 600k) and freedom to decide the direction I'll go in, and I'll gladly research "useful stuff". Otherwise, I'd rather chase my own interest by doing the "useless" (but highly-paid) stuff.

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You nailed it. I've been banging this drum for a decade. There is currently no feasible career that involves advancing humanity forward. Only different forms of plumbing the digital infrastructure which pay well.

Everyone I know wants to do research. No one wants to do it in academia, and no one wants to live below poverty levels.

The Star Trek economy is here, and it's here now. Basic income, flat-tax and publicly funded research infrastructure (e.g. Bell Labs) is the way forward. Asset bubbles, financial crookery, and trickle up economics are the way of the past.

Time to choose now. Sadly, as a scientist, I know this decision has already been made. Human greed is insatiable, and the top 0.1% won't be satisfied till they're the top 0.01%, and then the 0.001%, and then...

> Academia is fucked-up as well (chasing it's proverbial tail by encouraging young researchers to publish, not to, you know, actually research).

I have to wonder how much of this phenomenon is due to genuine advances just being harder to come by. When others have already filled in the color between the lines in your field except for tiny bits in the corners here and there, what's left to do but fudge experimental results, salami-slice what genuinely novel results you do see, and take advantage of publication bias?

Maybe researchers wouldn't need to resort to these shenanigans if we weren't running out of things to discover.

Here's a partial list of things that could have had more funding over the past twenty five years, and which are ripe for game-changer advances without needing completely new science:

Renewable energy Social housing Aerospace AI Quantum computing Transport infrastructure Novel Internet distribution/5G SETI Biotech Fusion power Next-generation operating systems

There's been an uptick in momentum in some of these over the last few years, but they're easily at least a decade behind where they could have been if money had been dropped on them from a helicopter instead of being wasted on (say) invading Afghanistan, and keeping banks fed and watered with QE.

The real problem is Wall St. So many PhDs moved there when they could have been doing useful, original research. And Wall St cannibalised academia in other ways, pressuring universities to offer stupendous ROI at the expense of genuine education and research, and warping what used to be a productive culture into yet another hyper-competitive sweat shop.

Financialisation has a social reverse Midas effect - it looks like it's producing gold in the short term, but over longer scales everything it touches turns to shrivelled crap.

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