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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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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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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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Another factor is (perceived) urgency of mission - because I'm in a wartime posture, I am evaluating potential paths quite differently. Plus I have an unemployable personality.
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