> UBI can free scientists from grants

No it would not. The money necessary to find a lab is orders of magnitude higher than any reasonable UBI.

I'm a theoretical physicist. UBI would absolutely free me and most of my colleagues from grant writing (and IT freelancing, which frankly has better ROI at this point). I do basically all of my research on a mildly high end home computer and bits of paper.

The theoretical physicists I know get their funding from teaching and don’t need grants.

That varies by country and sometimes even by university. In some universities there are far fewer teaching positions than staff scientist jobs, particularly when you count research institutes, while in others a typical teaching load without additional funding hovers somewhere around the poverty line.

In my case it's both, so instead of teaching I take half-time IT consulting gigs here and there, which pay enough for me to be able to do science even if I had no funding at all. I still get some grants, mostly because you're looked at funny if you don't, but I'm done losing sleep over them, plus if I finally decide to give up academia I'll have an easy transition.

But they need teaching, a day job, right?

While teaching helps consolidate your own understanding, and is useful and satisfying, it's a matter of degree.

Some do, but not all scientists need expensive labs. Some equipment is getting cheaper too.

Bio lab equipment is getting cheaper as in $100K's instead of $1M's, not as in “can be bought with UBI”.

With the amount of computations you needs to do this days, no UBI is going to cover that.

How about a co-op of scientists pooling money to rent the kinds of AI chips the big players are starting to put out? I’m sure there are holes in that argument too; but c’mon, this is hacker news. If we don’t try to overcome the hard challenges then what’s the point of this community? ;)

> How about a co-op of scientists pooling money to rent the kinds of AI chips the big players are starting to put out?

What is really expensive and complicated for now is “wet” data collections: it is a finicky process stuffed to the brim with very expensive machinery, consumables, lab space and manual workers. Computing power is not really a limitation nowadays, you can comparably get a whole lot of bangs for your bucks.

Concerning the sharing part, equipment pooling is definitely already happening, at least at the local scale. And what is getting more and more developed is the “platform” concept, where some labs/teams slowly transition from doing research to producing data according to a standardized protocol (genome sequencing, genotyping, ChIP-seq, etc.) for other teams doing the research.

Years ago, genome sequencing was getting exponentially cheaper, and supposedly would be desktop-priced soon. Did that not happen?

I noticed companies moving into the space, like 23andme, and wondered if they might work in combination to keep consumer prices high...

> I noticed companies moving into the space, like 23andme

23andme is not doing sequencing, they're doing genotyping. And they are doing so using relatively old and well-established method; so I highly doubt they will be a force of innovation in the sector for the coming times.