The implicit denigration of fundamental research is bizarre considering that’s where nearly all 
of the modern world came form.
This week, Rice University said that Darpa, the Pentagon’s mad science division, has invested $11 million in this autocomplete programming project, dubbed PLINY, after the ancient Roman author of the first encyclopedia.
DARPA created the internet. Was that mad science? To the clueless at the time, I guess so. The thing is all really creative things will seem absolutely harebrained and useless at their inception.
Humans are very limited in their cognitive scope mostly (I’d guess) due to evolutionary history.
Even Wired is very, very conservative in many areas.
If “mad science” gave us the internet, self-driving cars (also kicked off by DARPA) and so many other cool and useful things, I’ll take “mad science” for $2,000, Alex.
I don’t know. The D in DARPA does, after all, stand for “defense.” When I first encountered the Internet (1991) I thought it was technology’s greatest gift yet to human kind. Lately I’ve been thinking of it as a Trojan Horse upon society, in every way. In part I think this is due to the failure to enact strong net neutrality legislation, and I fear the window of opportunity for that may have already passed. It’s also the case that some things about the human-machine-human interface seem to have compulsive or even addictive behavior patterns as strong attractors, but there will always be addictions. When I was a child, someone wrote a book titled “The Plug-in Drug.” It was about television. Right now what I fear the most is the (apparent) fact that Information Wants To Be Valuable. Combine this with certain (apparent) facts about economy of scale and certain (alleged) properties of price signals, and it looks to me like the information asymmetry problem is not only utterly unsolvable, but destined to get much worse. My biggest fear re. consumer analytics is the (rumored) ability of sufficiently equipped and informed market researchers to know, with some intimacy, the “price points” and even “pain points” of millions if not billions of consumers. 10-15 years ago I thought perhaps a large (or at least largish) cadre of open source activists and people pursuing data capture and analysis as a volunteer activity, might create open source versions of data mining (which has since been re-branded “big data”?) that might be effective countermeasures for consumer profiling or even data darwinism (misrepresented as “reputation metrics,” in the emerging industry that misrepresents itself as “sharing economy”). The more I observe economic trends, think through the implications of information science, economics, etc., the less optimistic I become about the prospects for such projects.
As for the war on basic research, I’m with you there. When it comes to basic (or any other kind of) research, I trust universities more than I trust corporations, and distrust corporations less than I distrust strategy-oriented institutions whose names end in “National Laboratory” (or whose name is DARPA). I believe very strongly in something called “publish or perish.” I believe the only alternative to “publish or perish” is “cargo cult.”