Comment by godelski

This is a bit silly. It is equivalent to saying "most food will come from tractors, not land." There is some truth to this, but you really can't have one without the other. The whole system is interconnected.

The problem with all these jabs at R&D and science is not recognizing that R&D and science produce the very foundations that lead to the ability to do production in the first place. I'm certainly not saying we should dump all our money into R&D, but I do find it weird that others talk as if the ground you stand on doesn't matter. You literally cannot stand without it. The truth is that you need both. I suspect why we shy away from R&D is for 2 big reasons.

First, it has a lot of failure. The hardest thing about doing research is being able to stick with it when 90% of what you do doesn't work. It's fucking hard. But of course it is. If it was easy it would have already been done. So returns on the work can take a lot of time and the visibility of the failure is emotionally draining to those without enough resilience.

Second, we do not accurately capture nor ascribe the value nor of research. People who create ground breaking scientific revolutions that create the capacity for trillion dollar markets never end up with 1% of the result of their work. You don't see Tim Berners-Lee being a billionaire, nor Linus Torvald. You didn't see it in Einstein and cases like Turing are quite common through history. Certainly this is an alignment issue as we as a society should be encouraging such pursuits as their benefits vastly outweigh anything that has been done by Apple or Google. Not to diminish their achievements, they have both done fantastic and incredible things, but do they not sit on the foundations created by Turing, Burners-Lee, Hopper, and others. Or look even today, the work done by LeCun, Sutskever, Karpathy, Fei-Fei Li, Hinton, and yes, even Schmidhuber has created more than a few dozen multi-billion dollar enterprises. Yet as far as I am aware, not a single one of them is a billionaire. I do not believe (I could be TOTALLY wrong) their combined net worth is a billion. Even if it was, that would be a far cry from what many of the mogul we see today. Do we really think Zuckerberg has created more value than these people? Certainly this is entirely dependent upon your definition of value and I think most of use could agree that it would be incredibly naive to believe this exclusively means the money in their pockets. If you really do believe that, I will say that you're part of a problem. Money is a proxy, sometimes we need to stop and think "a proxy for what?"