The following is my notes from a talk I attended in UCL by James Phillips on Creative Destruction and reforming science in the United Kingdom.
He is running an organization called ARIA, which aims to use ARPA-esque organizational principles to reinvigorate innovation and science. His main thread weaves through the history of ARPA, and the journey of computing from J.C.R Licklider’s stint as Program Manager at ARPA, through to Doug Engelbart’s Human Augmentation Lab and the invention of the mouse.
He criticizes contemporary UK science for being rigid and beaurocratic, and so risk-averse that high quality innovations are hard to do. And he heralds the rise of meta-science movements as a way to fix that, especially from a funding perspective.
Some interesting questions that arise:
- The power balance between corporate and government entities has shifted noticeably from the 1960s to now. J.C.R Licklider said
hire the best people you can find and get out of their way
But there is a real brain drain moving smart people away from the kind of long-term moonshot research that ARPA did to more commercial businesses with short-term application interests.
Visionary public figures have moved from Albert Einstein, to the notably more practical businessmen like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and recently Elon Musk. Which also shows a talent shift away from research to commercialization and business.
- There is a broader cultural shift away from science optimism to pessimism. A whole bunch of Not Boring articles explored this trend, maybe because the public has lost faith in the narrative of technological progress.
This reduces the public support for research funding and might be a larger problem of lack of political will. What are the incentives at play here and how might we shift it?
- Where do we go? As young scientist, engineers and innovators, if the contemporary research field is polluted, what might be the next best thing?
Some related meanders: destruction-and-creation-are-path-dependent