| Those are great questions. I'm not sure the answer is clear. What I do know for sure is the current system for paid research and funding is broken on several levels. The advisor/advisee relationship and the whole idea of PhDs is a medieval system. There are amazing PhDs doing amazing work. Norvig, Thrun and Ng certainly are, but there are some who have made a career out of publishing recycled variations on marginal insights, while it is increasingly difficult for young PhDs with fresh ideas to even get consideration for grants. Open vs Closed is orthogonal to paid vs volunteer. Sure there is a lot of unpaid open source work, but a ton of the oss in use was written by people who were paid. There is also an implication of what it means to develop and claim intellectual property, which I think most people on HN would agree is also somewhat broken in our current system. I'm not the one with the answers, but I'm definitely going to keep asking questions. I just want to finish with a Star Trek movie quote someone said the post reminded them of: Captain Jean-Luc Picard: The economics of the future is somewhat different. You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th century.
Lily Sloane: No money? You mean, you don't get paid?
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: We work to better ourselves. |