Interesting that there aren’t true tech think tanks where you could go work on speculative things. Chiices are: academia, industry, industrial/govt R&D labs with a productization expectation, or startup incubators. The best fit might actually be art residencies at museums.
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The things that come closest to what I’d consider speculative tech is self-funded engineers working by themselves.
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This hacker-research program should really be a funded tech think tank with maybe a dozen people and a couple of support staff. I’d totally join up. There have been at least 2 attempts to build serious orgs around Artem that I know of. orbides.org
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If he were in the US instead of Russia it would probably already have happened.
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Bunch of design people seem to try to do things in Bret Victor mode, but I think of design research as a weird special case between tech proper and product research. Product labs aren’t quite what I’m thinking of.
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I know like a dozen solo self-funded engineers doing this sort of thing. Not very collegial types.
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It’s probably an unstable zone because people who would do interesting things in such a position would also be strongly tempted away by big job offers. So you’d want people who don’t care about money, or have really unemployable personalities to outweigh their talents.
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Yeah I know. Was there a couple of years ago for a thing, and have been collaborating with their protege too. They’re still firmly on the art side though.
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i feel like the mediated matter group at the media lab hits surprisingly close to that
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