I'm not sure if machine learning researchers have tools to analyze how minutia of their research e.g. proposing new activation function in ANN will impact shift

I'm not sure if machine learning researchers have tools to analyze how minutia of their research e.g. proposing new activation function in ANN will impact shifts in power in the future. I personally have no slightest clue how institutions like police across the world operate and what power dynamics are governing them. IMO academia is really bad at impacting anything mostly because they are couple of steps detached from actual engineering and management that leads to impactful deployments. Not to mention that academia overall is extremely naive - they failed for some 20 years to stand up for themselves when it comes to research publication. Some researchers even manage to loose rights to access their own research without paying big corporations... For anyone interested in raw power playing academia is like stealing a candy from a kid. The biggest impact academia could have is on education and that's probably where the focus should be concentrated.