So acedemical research isn't relevant to new technologies anymore? Then one might conclude that most technology driven research is done in private companies rather than in public academia.
Deep learning is beyond what VLSI was for the transistor, for example.
But even STEM research itself wastes too much time with costly self-serving objectives, rather than shooting for breakthroughs that lead to actual applications. Take CERNs large hadron collider, which has produced preciously few new insights, despite costing a fortune in taxpayer money. The Higgs boson is all well and good, but it’s hardly a new finding.
Or take mathematics’ famous millennium problems, where only a subset (eg. P vs NP) would lead to practically useful new insights. By contrast, solving some obscure numbers theory problem would benefit humanity how exactly?
For a few decades, the prevailing school of thought in public administration has focused on justifications. You must always justify how the public will benefit from the proposed use of money. Then you must report that you used the money for justified reasons. The administrators will also audit you to ensure that you didn't use the money for frivolous purposes.
As a consequence, you can't get funding for studying something you find interesting. Instead, you must always justify how your research will benefit the public. If you manage to get funding, you must spend a lot of time reporting how you used that money and what it did enable you to do. Those reporting requirements are also one of the major reasons for the administrative bloat in the academia.
The general public does not want to fund BS research, and science stagnates largely as an unintended consequence of that.
Having a position that doesn't require me to peg everything to a practical deliverable has done wonders for my ability to actually chase down ideas.
The focus is quite different in private companies and research institutions.
It is not obvious that fundamental research does not “increase our collective wealth of lead to some useful application”. Just not in the short term, usually. Despite a lot of economics theories, companies being directed by their self-interest or that of their shareholders does not lead to good outcomes over the long term. Someone needs to do it, who’s not going to be limited by ROI over the next 5 years. In practical terms, this can only be public funding.
Taxpayer-funded institutions justify it by pointing out that if there are short-term applications, companies tend to already do the R&D themselves, therefore public money is not needed to have good outcomes. The alternatives are:
- research in private institutions with public money (the big pharma model), which has obvious ethical issues when said private institutions make billions off of publicly-funded research.
- public institutions funding short-term research through things like patent licensing, which is quite impopular (there is a strong argument that public institutions’ output should be public; governments are not corporations).
- governments not funding research at all, which quickly leads to countries falling hopelessly behind as you cannot count on corporations to give a fuck about public good.
Overall, it seems like a good idea to let everyone do what they do best: corporations focus on bringing stuff to market and applications developments, whilst institutions with a longer outlook focus on things that could be used in applications 20 to 100 years from now.