The fact that this sort of crap pays so very much better than doing actual research that genuinely advances mankind's fundamental capability to arrange the univ

The fact that this sort of crap pays so very much better than doing actual research that genuinely advances mankind's fundamental capability to arrange the universe to our benefit is, to me at least, a low-level itch or irritant of moral indignation that I am unfortunately condemned to experience regularly due to growing up in the neoliberal era ;-). I agree 100%. Our society has fucked-up priorities. Everything is based on the next quarter, not the next 50 years. Most of us are employed on semi-charismatic executives' private-sector political campaigns (sorry, I mean "careers") rather than advancing the state of the world. I think you're looking at industry, while I'm looking at research (where I enjoy living). Fair. But the low pay in research and extreme difficulty of getting in once you're out (PhD admissions get hard after 30; returning to academia if you leave after a PhD is nearly impossible) are indicators that our society's disinvestment in academia is continuing unabated. Expanding industries take chances on people and train people up. Besieged and contracting industries (like academia) develop the pedigree bigotry and petty politicking. Neural Turing Machines (paper published out of DeepMind), for instance, can learn a general, arbitrary function on arbitrary-size data structures from input-output examples. That is a phenomenal advance in learning: generalized induction of functions, up to complexity limits. Yeah, there's a lot of great work that's being done. AI "winter" doesn't mean otherwise, and nor does this mediocre spring that (one hopes) is the precursor to something better. As I said, the current state is an acceptable March but, if this is summer, that's depressing. It's not a lack of great work being done that's the problem. It's the fact that there's so little funding for it, and consequently so very few people are doing anything stimulating or important. There are always a few who can do great work in spite of the system, but we shouldn't have to bet our society on that. It wasn't a lone hero that put people on the moon; it's was a large set of people working together (who weren't worrying about whether they'd be employable after 40, because they were taken care of). I don't think you can form that kind of an all-around strong team with academia and industry both in their current, degraded, resource-starved state. Right now, you need top-0.25% talent and to sacrifice your life to get an academic or basic-research position. It'd be an improvement to get to a state where one of the two sufficed.