>Finally, and worst of all, gaining funding has been almost entirely divorced from the usefulness that research has to people.
By "usefulness to people" do you mean, essentially, "good for society"? Because I have a hard time believing that funding entities are simply flushing money down the toilet. They must find the research useful to their ends.
There is definitely a lot of money thrown after whatever the current buzzword is - we had blockchain, now we hve AI; sustainability is also a big one in some places. That doesn't mean that there's not great things one could achieve for society in both the AI and sustainability fields, but having the correct keywords on your project proposal goes a long way even if you quite obviously don't have a clue what those words mean.
Yes, I mean good for society. They are not flushing money down the toilet: who do you think makes funding decisions? Who do you think reads the funding proposals? Scientists. Scientists are giving money to each other to keep their efforts alive. Scientists don't do things for the good of humankind, they do it for fame and pure intellectual curiosity.
Of course, there are benefits to those outside of science: science furthers the growth of technology, but is that really beneficial to us? Yes, we are thrown a bone now and then that is useful such as a vaccine here and there, but the the benefits that actually make life better probably account for 1% of scientific activity these days.
By "usefulness to people" do you mean, essentially, "good for society"? Because I have a hard time believing that funding entities are simply flushing money down the toilet. They must find the research useful to their ends.