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Comment by orthoganol | Hacker News Reader

IMO what would actually drive AI breakthroughs is to support people on a large time scale so they can quit their applied AI/ NLP/ Computer Vision jobs and focus full time on their moonshot research endeavor. For example, I work in AI, and this is not a useful proposal for me, in particular. But I do have at least a couple crazy AI ideas that might take > a year to develop, and I can imagine nothing better than a grant I could live on for a year and develop the AI. I know I'm not the only one. Someone mentioned a catch-22 with this idea, have to agree.

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You are definitively not alone in this. I know my ideas are kind of crazy, they can work but to validate the research at least one year would be needed. Another one to build a prototype, maybe more to create a commercial product. Which means the whole effort could be about 1M of USD or euro, whatever.

But nobody finances this. Maybe an investor reads this understands that AI is not the next social network or JS framework. It is the pinnacle of human invention and requires that amount of financing.

Single Payer Healthcare would accomplish this for a wide swath of the US population for sure. I have savings, our family is willing to use savings to pursue risky projects, but we are not willing to go for long periods of time w/o decent healthcare and we cannot self-fund any decent family plan for extended periods.

Are there any cryptocurrencies that have UBI built in?

Like groupcurrency.org?

Obviously I have no clue about your personal situation, but many people working in AI could afford to take a year-long sabbatical after a while. But sure, such a grant may be useful. Most current grants require you to work in academia.

Have you considered academia?

Oh God no. The last thing in the world I want is to all of a sudden have to be publishing a ton of marginally useful crap or spend time reviewing others' marginally useful crap being sold as contributions because they have to publish. Or working with students. Why? I already have my big ideas, I have enough education and experience in the field to do stuff on my own, I just need a lot of time to hack on stuff and experiment.

I know I'm not the only one.

Precisely this.

And let me use this opportunity to pull out this gem I found once from my quotes file:

  "What one wants is to be able to talk with a diverse club of smart
  people, arrange to do short one-off research projects and
  simulations, publish papers or capture intellectual property
  quickly and easily, and move on to another
  conversation. Quickly. Easily. For a living. Can’t do that in
  industry. Can’t do that in the Academy. Yet in my experience,
  scientists and engineers all want it. Maybe even a few
  mathematicians and social scientists do, too."

  -- Bill Tozier, Diverse themes observed at GECCO 2006

Due to the publication requirements/incentives, academia greatly favours those who take on short term low risk research that will likely result in a few quick easy papers. Furthermore, due to the limited positions available in academia, generally only those who are good at this will rise up in academia.

Getting to a point where you control your own research and have financial stability for research that could span 3+ years with very little output (paper wise) is something comparatively few academics achieve. Even fewer of those who have, did so by conducting longer term research. Most academics I know are just trying to produce as many papers per year as they can and do whatever research in their field they can do, to do it.

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