I am trying to read transcript, but I can't really make sense of it. It seems all over the place. I mean, what is even the argument that society, or growth, is hard science bound? Maybe that isn't the point.<p>Some things that define society, or at least peoples views, have also just been getting harder. You can't really do something as obviously meaningful in space as the moon landing. You can do many other things if you change your frame of reference, but we are not going interstellar anytime soon.<p>If there is any observation I would make it is that the way innovation is made seems to have changed. It used to be you had some sort of goal and then tried to get the best technology to do that. Today, it seems like companies, and societies, are sitting around waiting for technologies to exploit. One day self-driving cars, 3d printed houses and AI enabled health scanners are going to save us all. We aren't really sure how, why or if there is even much worth saving at that point, but it will surely happen?
I remember being a bit surprised when I read this (the Atlantic article much of the convo is focused on) back in December, that there was no mention of Thomas Kuhn's perspective on the structure of scientific progress. Maybe I'm out of date on the consensus views though.<p>Personally I would find it more surprising if there were <i>not</i> diminishing returns on investments on scientific inquiry, than (as presented in the article) if there are. Kuhn's paradigms offer the escape maybe, ROI diminishing within one paradigm, and then increasing rapidly within some new paradigm.
Patrick Collison is always interesting to read, but the 103 occurrences of "kind of" and 54 of "you know" remind me why I tend to avoid podcasts.
The benefits of productivity growth are normed to the size of the economy, so the relevant comparison is R&D spending as a percentage of GDP to productivity growth. As fas as I know, R&D spending as a percentage of GDP has been relatively flat for a long time. See [1] for data for a bunch of countries going back to 1996. So this is much less dramatic than the claims of, e.g., 50x growth in spending on scientific research that he mentions in the podcast.<p>[1] <a href="https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GB.XPD.RSDV.GD.ZS" rel="nofollow">https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GB.XPD.RSDV.GD.ZS</a>
Love seeing so much Patrick Collison content (should I say PC content?) lately. His Tim Ferriss podcast was thought provoking. I think that's what's important - he has new ideas and he's talking about them.
I think it all comes down to one thing:<p><i>There is no Income-As-A-Service available on the internet or in industrialized society.</i><p>Real technology liberates people from labor and minutia. What we have today could be thought of as phantom technology (similar to phantom wealth) in that it gives the appearance of providing labor-saving devices and software without actually providing such things:<p><a href="http://neweconomy-wg.thenextsystem.org/visions/living-wealth-money-system/real-wealth-phantom-wealth" rel="nofollow">http://neweconomy-wg.thenextsystem.org/visions/living-wealth...</a><p>Under our current capitalist system, no amount of income frees someone from the daily obligations and distractions that slowly drain away the time that each of us is allotted. So we end up with millionaires that have less time than ever, or that feel undignified that they can't get out of The Matrix, who then impress their toxic worldview on things like our political system, perpetuating servitude on the masses and future generations.<p>The vast majority of people working in technology are underemployed. University researchers spend too much time raising funding. Internet startups can raise millions and even billions of dollars if they find creative ways to turn dollars into profit, but there seems to be no funding to permanently solve problems like energy, hunger, disease, etc etc.<p>People have tried to create their own off-the-grid societies, but these have so far been mostly unsuccessful. I'm not aware of any similar online groups that one could join and obtain a stipend just by being a member. Open source or crowd funding could possibly go this direction someday, feeding profits back into the groups instead of siphoning them off to private shareholders.<p>IMHO the way to solve this is to get back to a grant-based system. Give researchers, hackers and makers the funding they need to solve the real problems facing the world, and we'd see outsized returns on investment almost overnight. That's why I'm a huge proponent of UBI. And also why I think the entrenched forces of the status quo will never let it happen.
Scott Alexander over at SlateStarCodex has a rational take on this: <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/26/is-science-slowing-down-2/" rel="nofollow">https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/26/is-science-slowing-dow...</a>