Comment by linguae
1 year ago
Something that just dawned on me is the downstream effects of United States’ policy regarding science during WWII and the Cold War. The Manhattan Project, NASA, the NSA and all of its contributions to mathematics and cryptography, ARPA, DARPA, and many other agencies and programs not only directly contributed to science, but they also helped form a scientific culture that affected not only government-ran and government-funded labs, but also private-sector labs, as people and ideas were exchanged throughout the years. It is a well-documented fact that Xerox PARC’s 1970’s culture was heavily influenced by ARPA’s 1960’s culture.
One of the things that has changed since the 1990s is the ending of the Cold War. The federal government still has national laboratories, DARPA, NASA, the NSF, etc. However, the general culture has changed. It’s not that technology isn’t revered; far from it. It’s just that “stopping Hitler,” “beating the Soviets,” and grand visions for society have been replaced with visions of creating lucrative businesses. I don’t hear about the Oppenheimers and von Neumanns of today’s world, but I hear plenty about Elon Musk and Sam Altman, not to disrespect what they have done (especially with the adoption of EVs and generative AI, respectively), but the latter names are successful businessmen, while the former names are successful scientists.
I don’t know what government labs are like, but I know that academia these days have high publication and fundraising pressures that inhibit curiosity-driven research, and I also know that industry these days is beholden to short-term results and pleasing shareholders, sometimes at the expense of the long-term and of society at large.
I don’t hear about the Oppenheimers and von Neumanns of today’s world
Sadder still is the underlying situaiton behind this: the fact that there's nothing of even remotely comparable significance happening in the public sphere for such minds to devote themselves to, as those man did. Even though the current civilization risk if anything significantly greater than in their time.
Even if you don't buy that LLMs and the transformer architecture in particular will lead to AGI, and then artificial super intelligence (ASI), the quest to try and make ASI is far more significant than anything that's ever come before. ASI would be the last thing that humans need to invent.
https://youtu.be/fa8k8IQ1_X0
We'll see if it comes to anything, first.
Until then, it doesn't have the property of being significant.
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I feel like having access to instant high definition video communication and to the world’s repository of text, audio, and video information at a moment’s notice from a device in your pocket is of comparable, if not more, significance.
These innovations in LEDs, battery technology, low power high performance microchips with features measured in number of atoms is extraordinary, and seemingly taken for granted.
Then we also have medicines that can even bend one’s desire to over eat or even drink alcohol, not to mention better vaccines, cancer therapies, and so on and so forth.
And the smartphone is making sure you'll get plenty of access to the people who will prevent you from taking the vaccines or the cancer therapies (which, sadly, have _not_ been progressing as much as we would need.)
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> It’s not that technology isn’t revered; far from it. It’s just that “stopping Hitler,” “beating the Soviets,” and grand visions for society have been replaced with visions of creating lucrative businesses.
Any kind of societal grand vision we had has been falling apart since about 1991. Slowly at first (all the talk about what to do with the "peace dividend" we were going to get after the fall of the Soviet Union) And that accelerated with the advent of the internet and then accelerated even more when social media came on the scene. We no longer have any kind of cohesive vision for what the future should look like and I don't see one emerging any time soon. We can't even agree on what's true anymore.
> I don’t know what government labs are like
Many of these are going to be in danger in the next administration especially if the DOGE guys get their way.
> successful businessmen, while the former names are successful scientists
We’ve seen this before with Thomas Edison.
>It’s not that technology isn’t revered; far from it. It’s just that “stopping Hitler,” “beating the Soviets,” and grand visions for society have been replaced with visions of creating lucrative businesses
Universities are tripping over themselves to create commercialization departments and every other faculty member in departments that can make money (like CS) has a private company on the side. Weird that when these things hit, though, the money never comes back to the schools
The academic entrepreneur phenomenon is an absolute sink, but it exists for a reason and ought to wake people up,
Universities put a lot of pressure on faculty to win grants, and take 60-70% of the proceedings for “overhead”, which is supposed to fund less sellable research and provide job security but is, in practice, wasted.
You have to be a fundraiser and a seller if you want to make tenure, but if people are forced to basically put up with private sector expectations, can you fault them when they decide to give themselves private sector pay?