Comment by hatthew

20 hours ago

I love that their justification for this study is robots. I think science for the sake of learning is good and justification isn't always necessary. But it's so funny that we've moved beyond search and rescue as a justification for cool robots, to cool robots as a justification for studying octopi.

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hatthew

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alsobrsp  20 hours ago

We lost that with the decline of the corporate research labs. PARC, Bell Labs, Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, and such are shadows of what they used to be if they are even still around. Those facilities used to look at long range ideas and we are still reaping the benefits. Most research now is product centric, looking maybe 2 years ahead. I blame the tax cuts of the 80s and 90s.

  • Amorymeltzer  19 hours ago

    Well, that and the faux-/manufactured outrage from US Congress. Things like Coburn's waste book were designed to lampoon and degrade seemingly silly or wasteful basic-science research from just a cursory overview of the title or cherry-picked facts. That's part of a larger agenda alongside cutting basic research for cuts-sake, but it means that everyone in science is searching for a justification for even the most meager of funding. Human biomedical health is a good target—if you can come up with any plausible link, your odds of funding are better (maybe)—and I suppose robots aren't a bad one either.

    The NSF has a list of responses to various such things: <https://www.nsf.gov/about/congress/wastebooks>

  • GuB-42  17 hours ago

    These labs had one thing in common: they were funded by monopolies. Xerox with copy machines, Bell with the telephone, General Electric is also known for its monopolistic practices.

    And you probably heard about these little things called LLMs, that's Google research, yup, another quasi-monopoly. And it wasn't product centric, in fact, Google turned out to be pretty bad at making a product out of their research, that's how OpenAI took over.

    Monopolies are bad for consumers, but there is also some good. Because they make tons of money and don't have to worry about competitors, they can invest a lot into fundamental research with a long term perspective. A competitive industry rewards shorter term strategy, because companies can't afford to wait 20 years for the next big thing if their competitor takes over after 2 years with the next small thing.