“Technologies are always constructive and beneficial, directly or indirectly….yet their consequences tend to increase instability….... Now the effectiveness of offensive weapons is such as to stultify all plausible defensive time scales…..For the kind of explosiveness that man will be able to contrive by 1980, the globe is dangerously small, its political units dangerously unstable….We should not deceive ourselves: once such possibilities become actual, they will be exploited…...For progress there is no cure. Any attempt to find automatically safe channels for the present explosive variety of progress must lead to frustration.
Hi James, I really enjoyed this! Please keep it up!
Have you considered doing a post on how we can reform universities?
On block funding - in the UK a substantial minority (not quite half) of government research funding is distributed as block funding, to groups of researchers in the form of institutions. https://www.ukri.org/publications/explainer-dual-support-funding-for-uk-research-and-innovation/explainer-dual-support-funding-for-research-and-innovation/
This comes with its own set of side-effects (in the form of REF)...