What economic / political model would cause the society to prioritize this over adtech? It seems so unsettling that brilliant human minds are trying hard, every day, to figure out how to make it impossible to bypass watching ads on YouTube, instead of helping cure cancer.

> would cause the society to prioritize this over adtech?

Private pharmaceutical R&D spending in the U.S. is around $100bn per year [1]. NIH spends another $50bn a year on biomedical research [2].

That eclipses total investments into adtech per se, which generously counted shouldn’t exceed $50 to 60bn. (And that only by counting like a third to a half of Google, Amazon, et cetera R&D and capital spending as adtech.) More precisely counted, it probably doesn’t exceed $10bn.

[1] https://phrma.org/blog/phrma-member-companies-rd-investments...

[2] https://www.science.org/content/article/final-nih-budget-202...

The bargaining dynamics are stacked against biology researchers at every stage of their career, from needing years and years of unrelated performance to be admitted to terribly expensive programs before they can begin to do experiments, to requiring costly equipment and resources to work, to needing to work with a small number of very powerful companies.

As a result, life science researchers are more price-taking than proce-setting when it comes to their wages / salary. If money is the motivator, then the market as-is isn’t addressing this one.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted, it's quite an interesting (and important!) question.

Also wonder, outside of politics and economics, whether there's a social and cultural component that can contribute. TV shows, movies, books, and other forms of media that put science and scientists in the spotlight in a positive light can be tremendously inspirational.

When you reframe ads as "control of human attention" it suddenly makes a lot more sense why so many resources are poured into them.

Humans are a bunch of hairless monkeys that have evolved to scam each other rather than hunt and gather food from Nature.

I don't think an economic model would work. Only a political one would work where the government would redirect a lot of funds towards this, making it a lucrative profession.

Adtech works because there is a lot of money in it. There is a lot of money in it because people seek quick entertainment, and we have a LOT of people driving the demand.

Now compare that to cancer research. There's no short term gratification about it.

There's a fair bit of frequency illusion involved here. A lot of brilliant human minds aren't, in fact, working on ad tech, and a lot of the people working on ad tech aren't, in fact, that brilliant (as evidenced by them working adversarially against their own fellow humans, for one).

There's a wide world outside big tech, Silicon Valley, and software in general. It only tends to be a bit less visible online.

>brilliant human minds are trying hard, every day, to figure out how to make it impossible to bypass watching ads on YouTube, instead of helping cure cancer.

And even more brilliant minds are defeating it, every day. I have doubts about how useful they would be in a research lab.

I remember seeing a comic strip about this exact argument but I can’t find it any more