It would look very different from current research, I think, because the way things are optimized now it's far more efficient and effective to have one person d

It would look very different from current research, I think, because the way things are optimized now it's far more efficient and effective to have one person dedicate their entire life to basic research versus lots of people spending a little time on it. We already have an attention span issue; it's hard to fund the really long-running projects that are essential for making progress in a lot of areas. And from an industry standpoint, being an academic researcher is a personal sacrifice: more prestigious, sometimes, but often a lot less lucrative than if you'd have spent that time climbing the ladder at a major tech company or developing skills that were more immediately job-relevant. So it'd have to look significantly different than what we currently have, including something to mitigate the income hit that a 40-something professional would take for spending a couple of years doing research. Might be worth building that society, but we'd have to figure out how to get there.