[HN Gopher] The Influence of Bell Labs
___________________________________________________________________
The Influence of Bell Labs
Author : mooreds
Score : 206 points
Date : 2024-11-29 18:36 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.construction-physics.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.construction-physics.com)
| kranke155 wrote:
| Just reading the book The Idea Factory, it was incredible amount
| of innovation. Lasers, early satellites, transistors.
|
| And it was all done, apparently, at least in the beginning,
| because they hired smart people and they let them do what they
| wanted.
| fuzztester wrote:
| unix, c and c++ too.
| kranke155 wrote:
| Haven't gotten to that part of the book.
| Lyngbakr wrote:
| They don't cover it in the book, unfortunately. A serious
| omission, in my eyes.
| jhbadger wrote:
| And S, the statistical data language that was the ancestor of
| S-PLUS and R.
| fuzztester wrote:
| did not know about that, thank you.
| ioblomov wrote:
| All true, but monopoly profits sure help.
| l33t7332273 wrote:
| As do high corporate tax rates
| rmorey wrote:
| I know the author, Jon. Delightful guy
| toast0 wrote:
| Almost all of the things I can think of that came from bell
| labs are things that helped their business. The only thing that
| I don't know how it helped their business was Hemo the
| Magnificent and similar films; but I'm sure those helped with
| PR.
|
| Monopoly may have helped them pay for such r&d, but vertical
| integration is what made it possible for so much r&d to be
| relevant to the business.
| Aloha wrote:
| The research done at Bell Labs is the foundation of the
| information age, however, Bell Labs sowed the seeds that made the
| post-divestiture AT&T a doomed enterprise from the start - there
| is a reason they only lasted ~20 years from divestiture 'til they
| were bought by one of their former children, SBC.
|
| AT&T provided for most of its history, the best quality telephone
| service in the world, at a comparable price to anyone else,
| anywhere.
|
| There were structural issues with the AT&T monopoly however, for
| example cross subsidization - the true cost of services was often
| hidden because they would use optional services (like toll
| calling) to subsidize basic access, and business lines would
| cross subsidize residential service.
|
| The level that AT&T fought foreign connections (aka, bring your
| own phone), probably hastened their demise, in the end, the very
| technologies that AT&T introduced would turn long distance from a
| high margin, to low margin business - the brass at AT&T had to
| know that, but they still pinned the future of their
| manufacturing business on that - a manufacturing business that
| had never had to work in a competitive environment, yet was now
| expected to - because of this and other factors divestiture was
| doomed to failure.
|
| I'm a believer in utilities being a natural monopoly, but AT&T
| was an example of effective regulatory capture, it did not, and
| does not have to be this way, however it was.
| mixdup wrote:
| Eventually the cable guys were coming for AT&T's lunch,
| regardless of what happened with their monopoly. It's the rare
| circumstance where two seemingly unrelated utilities converged
| into the same business (moving bits, instead of analog video or
| audio) and we lucked into having two internet facilities in
| large portions of the country
| Aloha wrote:
| Local Access is a very different issue, and I dont really
| disagree - but the local copper loop being broadband is an
| accident and one of technological evolution.
|
| When the decisions were made about divesiture, that bit was
| non obvious.
| phtrivier wrote:
| Okay, I'm really in a sad mood, so: tell me there will be places
| like that, again, somewhere, ever ?
|
| We need this. Like, really, we need someone to have created the
| xerox part of the 21st century, somewhere about 20 years ago.
|
| I honestly though Google would be that - but apparently it's
| easier to fund R&D on "selling copying machines" than "selling
| ads". Maybe "selling ads" earn _too much_ money ? I don't know.
|
| I know, I know, DeepMind and OpenAI and xAI are supposed to fix
| climate change any time soon, and cure cancer while they invent
| cold fusion etc, etc... and it's only because I'm a pessimistic
| myopist that I can only see them writing fake essays and
| generating spam, bad me.
|
| Still. Assuming I'm really grumpy and want to talk about people
| doing research that affects the physical world in positive way -
| who's doing that on the scale of PARC or Bell ?
| querez wrote:
| > honestly though Google would be that - but apparently it's
| easier to fund R&D on "selling copying machines" than "selling
| ads". Maybe "selling ads" earn _too much_ money ? I don't know.
|
| I'm pretty sure Google Brain was exactly what you are looking
| for: People like to think of DeepMind, but honestly, Brain
| pretty much had Bell Labs/PARCs strategy: they hired a bunch of
| brilliant people and told them to just "research whatever is
| you think is cool". And think all the AI innovations that came
| out of Brain and were given to the world for free:
| Transformers, Vision Transformers, Diffusion Models, BERT (I'd
| consider that the first public LLM), Adam, and a gazillion of
| other cool stuff I can't think of right now.... Essentially,
| all of the current AI/LLM craze started at Brain.
| phtrivier wrote:
| Right. And I'm sure that if I ever get in a better mood, I'll
| find that the current AI/LLM craze is good for _something_.
|
| Right now the world needs GWh batteries made of salt, cheap
| fusion from trash, telepathy, a cure for cancer and a vaccine
| for the common cold - but in the meantime, advertisers can
| generate photos for their ads, which is, _good_, I guess ?
| aatd86 wrote:
| Can't you get telepathy from training AI on functional MRI
| data? And then finding a way to pinpoint and activate brain
| regions remotely?
|
| I mean brain-machine interfaces have been improving for
| quite a while.
|
| Telepathy might even already exist.
| phtrivier wrote:
| Indeed. Come to think of it, telepathy would bring chaos
| to society, ruin everyone's life, and open considerable
| advertising space - it's way more likely to be invented
| soon than a vaccine for the common cold.
| chasd00 wrote:
| "Want to remember a long lost cherished moment with a now
| deceased loved one? Think about this product for 15
| seconds first." I'm positive it's being worked on.
| eurikfkdks wrote:
| Rolling back the 1980s neoliberal cultural ideals of
| letting markets and profits be the highest arbiter of
| societal direction is the key.
|
| Silicon Valley hippies have been replaced by folks focussed
| on monetisation and growth.
|
| It's not great for the west, but those problems are being
| tackled. We just don't get to read about it because 'China
| bad' and the fear of what capital flight might do to
| arguably inflated US stock prices
|
| https://www.energy-storage.news/byd-launches-sodium-ion-
| grid...
| querez wrote:
| It does sound like you're in a particularly bad mood, so
| yes, maybe our outlook does change. Maybe it helps to think
| of a darker timeline where Google would have kept all of
| these advances to itself and improved its ad revenue.
| Instead it shared the research freely with the world. And
| call me naive, but I use LLMs almost daily, so there
| definitely _is_ something of value that came out of all
| this progress. But YMMV, of course.
| phtrivier wrote:
| I would love to find a way llms could help me right now.
|
| "Hey, xchatgclaudma, please conjure up time and energy
| out of thin air ?"
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Once we get superintelligence -- some time next year I'd
| say -- then we will have a tool to make all those dreams
| come true.
| l33t7332273 wrote:
| What are you basing such a bold prediction on?
| phtrivier wrote:
| It's not bold if the comment author lives in a state that
| switched clocks to EPT (Elon-Prediction-Time) this week-
| end.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| For instance, ARC prize now at human level...
| https://x.com/akyurekekin/status/1855680785715478546
|
| I dont know why it seems bold. So many signs.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| https://x.com/anthonynaguirre/status/1861893538532991096?
| s=4...
| jorvi wrote:
| Your problem stems from assuming our natural state is some
| Star Trek utopia, and only our distraction by paraphernalia
| is preventing us from reaching such a place. Like we are
| temporarily (temporally?) embarrassed ascended beings.
|
| Humanity's natural state is abject poverty and strife. Look
| at any wealth graph of human history and note how people
| are destitute right up until the Industrial Revolution, and
| then the graph explodes upward.
|
| In a way we (well, especially the West) are already living
| in utopia. You're completely right that we can still vastly
| improve, but look back at the progress we already made!
| petra wrote:
| Yes, it was basic research( guided to the field of machine
| learning), but between a search monopoly and their autonomous
| car project, they definitely have a great economic engine to
| use that basic research and the talent it pulled into Google,
| even if a lot of it escaped.
| tester756 wrote:
| Hmm
|
| There are companies that push many various technologies
|
| Samsung conglomerate does everything, Intel does hard
| (semiconductor research, manufacturing) and soft (computer
| science/software) things
|
| Maybe we're at the point where you need to specialize in one
| industry, so achieving various stuff like they did at Bell is
| harder?
| zusammen wrote:
| The secret hero of that time was the US government. I'm not
| talking about the MIC, which is still quite robust and more bad
| than good. I am speaking more broadly. If you had a practical
| PhD and were willing to show up at a place at 9:00, you could
| get a solid upper middle class job with the Feds where you
| couldn't get fired unless you broke the law.
|
| The government also has always kept academia afloat. It is a
| privilege afforded to professors to believe they do not work
| for the state, but they do.
|
| Great government and academic jobs forced companies to create
| these labs where it was better to hire great people and "lose"
| some hours to them doing whatever they want (which was still
| often profitable enough) than have zero great people. Can you
| imagine Claude Shannon putting up with the stuff software
| engineers deal with today?
|
| The other main change is that how to run big companies has been
| figured out well enough that "zero great people" is no longer a
| real survival issue for companies. In the 1970s you needed a
| research level of talent but most companies today don't.
| linguae wrote:
| Something that just dawned on me is the downstream effects of
| United States' policy regarding science during WWII and the
| Cold War. The Manhattan Project, NASA, the NSA and all of its
| contributions to mathematics and cryptography, ARPA, DARPA,
| and many other agencies and programs not only directly
| contributed to science, but they also helped form a
| scientific culture that affected not only government-ran and
| government-funded labs, but also private-sector labs, as
| people and ideas were exchanged throughout the years. It is a
| well-documented fact that Xerox PARC's 1970's culture was
| heavily influenced by ARPA's 1960's culture.
|
| One of the things that has changed since the 1990s is the
| ending of the Cold War. The federal government still has
| national laboratories, DARPA, NASA, the NSF, etc. However,
| the general culture has changed. It's not that technology
| isn't revered; far from it. It's just that "stopping Hitler,"
| "beating the Soviets," and grand visions for society have
| been replaced with visions of creating lucrative businesses.
| I don't hear about the Oppenheimers and von Neumanns of
| today's world, but I hear plenty about Elon Musk and Sam
| Altman, not to disrespect what they have done (especially
| with the adoption of EVs and generative AI, respectively),
| but the latter names are successful businessmen, while the
| former names are successful scientists.
|
| I don't know what government labs are like, but I know that
| academia these days have high publication and fundraising
| pressures that inhibit curiosity-driven research, and I also
| know that industry these days is beholden to short-term
| results and pleasing shareholders, sometimes at the expense
| of the long-term and of society at large.
| dartos wrote:
| > successful businessmen, while the former names are
| successful scientists
|
| We've seen this before with Thomas Edison.
| aguaviva wrote:
| _I don't hear about the Oppenheimers and von Neumanns of
| today's world_
|
| Sadder still is the underlying situaiton behind this: the
| fact that there's nothing of even remotely comparable
| significance happening in the public sphere for such minds
| to devote themselves to, as those man did. Even though the
| current civilization risk if anything significantly greater
| than in their time.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I feel like having access to instant high definition
| video communication and to the world's repository of
| text, audio, and video information at a moment's notice
| from a device in your pocket is of comparable, if not
| more, significance.
|
| These innovations in LEDs, battery technology, low power
| high performance microchips with features measured in
| number of atoms is extraordinary, and seemingly taken for
| granted.
|
| Then we also have medicines that can even bend one's
| desire to over eat or even drink alcohol, not to mention
| better vaccines, cancer therapies, and so on and so
| forth.
| phtrivier wrote:
| And the smartphone is making sure you'll get plenty of
| access to the people who will prevent you from taking the
| vaccines or the cancer therapies (which, sadly, have
| _not_ been progressing as much as we would need.)
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Google immunotherapy bro.
|
| Vaccines are in a golden age, except political assholes
| are stoking ignorance and rejection.
|
| In fact the two are advancing together. Bespoke vaccines
| for your cancer in in trial now.
| fragmede wrote:
| Even if you don't buy that LLMs and the transformer
| architecture in particular will lead to AGI, and then
| artificial super intelligence (ASI), the quest to try and
| make ASI is far more significant than anything that's
| ever come before. ASI would be the last thing that humans
| need to invent.
|
| https://youtu.be/fa8k8IQ1_X0
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > It's not that technology isn't revered; far from it. It's
| just that "stopping Hitler," "beating the Soviets," and
| grand visions for society have been replaced with visions
| of creating lucrative businesses.
|
| Any kind of societal grand vision we had has been falling
| apart since about 1991. Slowly at first (all the talk about
| what to do with the "peace dividend" we were going to get
| after the fall of the Soviet Union) And that accelerated
| with the advent of the internet and then accelerated even
| more when social media came on the scene. We no longer have
| any kind of cohesive vision for what the future should look
| like and I don't see one emerging any time soon. We can't
| even agree on what's true anymore.
|
| > I don't know what government labs are like
|
| Many of these are going to be in danger in the next
| administration especially if the DOGE guys get their way.
| mixdup wrote:
| >It's not that technology isn't revered; far from it. It's
| just that "stopping Hitler," "beating the Soviets," and
| grand visions for society have been replaced with visions
| of creating lucrative businesses
|
| Universities are tripping over themselves to create
| commercialization departments and every other faculty
| member in departments that can make money (like CS) has a
| private company on the side. Weird that when these things
| hit, though, the money never comes back to the schools
| zusammen wrote:
| The academic entrepreneur phenomenon is an absolute sink,
| but it exists for a reason and ought to wake people up,
|
| Universities put a lot of pressure on faculty to win
| grants, and take 60-70% of the proceedings for
| "overhead", which is supposed to fund less sellable
| research and provide job security but is, in practice,
| wasted.
|
| You have to be a fundraiser and a seller if you want to
| make tenure, but if people are forced to basically put up
| with private sector expectations, can you fault them when
| they decide to give themselves private sector pay?
| phtrivier wrote:
| Yup. Silicon Valley would not exist without large government
| spending.
|
| You can bet this spending is going to be among the fist
| things slashed by DOGE-lile efforts ("Scientists ? They're
| just liberal elites wasting our hard earned money researching
| vaccines that will change your dog's gender in order to feed
| it to communist immigrants.")
|
| I suppose I could be cheered up by the irony, but, not today.
| gaze wrote:
| No, but you also shouldn't romanticize Bell Labs _too_ much. It
| was not exactly a fun place to work. You got a 2 year postdoc
| and then you were out, and those two years were absolutely
| brutal. Its existence was effectively an accounting fluke.
| Nothing like it really exists now because it would largely be
| seen as an inefficiency. Blame Jack Welch, McKinsey, KKR, HBS
| or whoever you like.
| osnium123 wrote:
| Just curious, are you speaking from personal experience?
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| I was a postdoc there and I would not say it was brutal. I
| got a very good salary (far above an academic postdoc),
| health benefits, relocation, the ok to spend $1000/day on
| equipment with no managerial review[0], and access to anyone
| and everyone to whom I felt like speaking. I read horror
| stories in Science and other journals about people's
| experiences elsewhere and am grateful that I was spared so
| much nonsense. It was the greatest university I have ever set
| foot in. I still feel unworthy of the place.
|
| [0]This was in the early '90s when $1000 went a long way.
| jpmattia wrote:
| > _It was not exactly a fun place to work._
|
| I couldn't disagree more, but perhaps the time I was there
| (late 90s) was different.
| leptons wrote:
| >I honestly though Google would be that - but apparently it's
| easier to fund R&D on "selling copying machines" than "selling
| ads". Maybe "selling ads" earn _too much_ money ? I don't know.
|
| Google has put quite a bit of resources into quantum computing
| research. It's not just for selling ads, though I have no doubt
| that it will be used for that among other things. But right now
| there's still no guarantee it's going to pay off at all.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| Extreme ultraviolet lithography originated with paper out of
| Bell Labs in 1991, then US government funded multiple research
| efforts via national nuclear research labs that came up with a
| potential method to implement but it took 20 more years of
| trial and error by ASML to make a practical machine they could
| sell. Other companies tried and gave up because of the
| technical challenges. This advance is responsible for modern
| chip fabs fastest chips.
| jonas21 wrote:
| The answer _is_ Google. I 'm not sure why you're being so
| dismissive.
|
| When we look back in 20 years, things like the transformer
| architecture, AlphaFold (which just won a Nobel prize), and
| Waymo are going to have improved the world in a positive way as
| much as anything Bell Labs did, and certainly more than PARC.
| linguae wrote:
| During my teenage and college years in the 2000s, I was inspired
| by what I've read about Bell Labs, and I wanted to work as a
| computer science researcher in industry. I've also been inspired
| by Xerox PARC's 1970s and 1980s researchers. I pursued that goal,
| and I've worked for a few industrial research labs before I
| switched careers to full-time community college teaching a few
| months ago.
|
| One thing I lament is the decline of long-term, unfettered
| research across the industry. I've witnessed more companies
| switching to research management models where management exerts
| more control over the research directions of their employees,
| where research directions can abruptly change due to management
| decisions, and where there is an increased focus on
| profitability. I feel this short-term approach will cost society
| in the long term, since current funding models promote
| evolutionary work rather than riskier, potentially revolutionary
| work.
|
| As someone who wanted to become a researcher out of curiosity and
| exploration, I feel alienated in this world where industry
| researchers are harangued about "delivering value," and where
| academic researchers are pressured to raise grant money and to
| publish. I quit and switched to a full teaching career at a
| community college. I enjoy teaching, and while I miss the day-to-
| day lifestyle of research, I still plan to do research during my
| summer and winter breaks out of curiosity and not for career
| advancement.
|
| It would be great if there were more opportunities for
| researchers to pursue their interests. Sadly, though, barring a
| cultural change, the only avenues I see for curiosity-driven
| researchers are becoming independently wealthy, living like a
| monk, or finding a job with ample free time. I'm fortunate to
| have the latter situation where I have 16 weeks per year that I
| could devote outside my job.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| The truth is that kind of research can only happen with a very
| rich monopoly.
|
| Bell labs came about when AT&T was the monopoly telephone
| provider in the US.
|
| PARC happened when Xerox had a very lucrative monopoly on copy
| machines.
| linguae wrote:
| I have come to realize that over the years, though I still
| believe that wealthier companies like Apple, NVIDIA,
| Facebook, and the like could fund curiosity-driven research,
| even if it's not at the scale of Bell Labs or Xerox PARC.
|
| On a smaller scale, there is The Institute for Advanced Study
| where curiosity-driven research is encouraged, and there is
| the MacArthur Fellowship where fellows are granted $150,000
| annual stipends for five years for them to pursue their
| visions with no strings attached. Other than these, though,
| I'm unaware of any other institutions or grants that truly
| promote curiosity-driven research.
|
| I've resigned myself to the situation and have thus switched
| careers to teaching, where at least I have 4 months of the
| year "off the clock" instead of the standard 3-4 weeks of PTO
| most companies give in America.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| If Zuck's obsession with VR isn't curiosity driven research
| than nothing is.
|
| 10 billion yearly losses for something that by all accounts
| isn't close to magically becoming profitable. It honestly
| just seems like something he thinks is cool and therefore
| dumps money in.
| linguae wrote:
| It's an example of _Zuck 's_ curiosity. When I refer to
| curiosity-driven research, I mean curiosity driven by the
| researchers, where the researchers themselves drive the
| research agenda, not management.
|
| To be fair, though; Facebook, I mean, Meta is a publicly-
| traded company and if the shareholders get tired of not
| seeing any ROI from Meta's VR initiatives, then this
| could compel Zuck to stop. Even Zuck isn't free from
| business pressures if the funding is coming from Meta and
| not out of Zuck's personal funds.
|
| Back to Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, my understanding of how
| they worked is that while management did set the overall
| direction, researchers were given very wide latitude when
| pursuing this direction with little to no pressure to
| deliver immediate results and to show that their research
| would lead to profits. Indeed, at one point AT&T was
| forbidden by the federal government from entering
| businesses outside of their phone business, and in the
| case of Xerox PARC, Robert Taylor was able to negotiate a
| deal with Xerox executives where Xerox's executives
| wouldn't meddle in the affairs of PARC for the first five
| years. (Once those five years ended, the meddling began,
| culminating with Bob Taylor's famous exit in 1983.)
| rat9988 wrote:
| I mean at some point. You either have to find someone
| rich who has the same curiosity as you and wants to fund
| it, or fund it yourself.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Is patronage a thing that even really happens anymore?
| mrunkel wrote:
| As far as I know, Mr. Zuckerberg still owns a controlling
| interest in Meta Platforms.
|
| Since he has 57% of the votes, he can tell everyone to
| pound sand.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| That's right. Research needs to be bottom-up.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Managers heard that too but dramatically misunderstood
| what that phrase means.
| GaelFG wrote:
| I bet (litteraly, founded an xr game development company
| in february) xr/vr games will indeed became a mainstream
| gaming platform in the next 5 years, maybe even next
| year. If or when it become the case it may totally become
| as present as smartphone and replace a lot of monitors,
| especially if they succeed to reduce them as smartglasses
| like their totally are progressing to.
|
| if it become the case, meta get 30% of the revenues
| associated with it.
|
| If it does not, i'm pretty sure they can now make good
| smartphones and even have a dedicated os. I'm pretty sure
| they can find a way to make money with it.
|
| A meta quest 3s in inself is an insane experience for
| 330EUR and it's current main disadvantages for gaming are
| the lack of players and the catalogue size. Even using it
| as a main monitor with a bluetooth keyboard is
| "possible". I would have find it 'improbable' a few years
| ago even as an enthousiasth, i now could totally imagine
| a headset replacing my screen in a few years with a few
| improvements on.
| dylan604 wrote:
| What about Musk and push to reach Mars? While I haven't
| liked Musk from long ago, SpaceX has given some steely
| eyed rocket men/women a pretty successful playground.
| petra wrote:
| Maybe it's rare to do curiosity driven research.
|
| But from the days of Bell Labs, haven't we greatly improved
| our ability to connect between some research concept to the
| idea of doing something useful, somewhere ?
|
| And once you have that you can be connected to grants or
| some pre-VC funding, which might suffice, given the tools
| we have for conceptual development of preliminary
| ideas(simulation, for ex.) is far better than what they had
| at Bell?
| linguae wrote:
| I believe this depends on the type of research that is
| being done. There are certain types of research that
| benefit from our current research grant system and from
| VC funding. The former is good when the research has a
| clear impact (whether it is social or business), and the
| latter is good when there is a good chance the research
| could be part of a successful business venture. There are
| also plenty of applied research labs where the research
| agenda is tightly aligned with business needs. We have
| seen the fruits of applied research in all sorts of
| areas, such as self-driving vehicles, Web-scale software
| infrastructure (MapReduce, Spark, BigTable, Spanner,
| etc.), deep learning, large language models, and more.
|
| As big of a fan I am of Xerox PARC and Bell Labs, I don't
| want to come across as saying that the Bell Labs and
| Xerox PARC models of research are the only ways to do
| research. Indeed, Bell Labs couldn't convert many of its
| research ideas to products due to the agreement AT&T made
| with the federal government not to expand into other
| businesses, and Xerox PARC infamously failed to
| successfully monetize many of its inventions, and many of
| these researchers left Xerox for other companies who saw
| the business potential in their work, such as Apple,
| Adobe, and Microsoft, to name a few.
|
| However, the problem with our current system of grants
| and VC funding is that they are not a good fit for
| riskier avenues of research where the impacts cannot be
| immediately seen, or the impact will take many years to
| develop. I am reminded of Alan Kay's comments
| (https://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/) on how NSF
| grants require an explanation of how the researchers plan
| to solve the problem, which precludes exploratory
| research where one doesn't know how to attack the
| problem. Now, once again, this question from the NSF is
| not inappropriate; there are different phases of
| research, and coming up with an "attack plan" that is
| reasonable and is backed by a command of the prior art
| and a track record of solving other problems is part of
| research; all PhD programs have some sort of thesis
| proposal that requires answering the same question the
| NSF asks in its proposals. With that said, there is still
| the early phase of research where researchers are
| formulating the question, and where researchers are
| trying to figure out how they'd go about solving the
| problem. This early phase of research is part of
| research, too.
|
| I think the funding situation for research depends on the
| type of research being done. For more applied research
| that has more obvious impact, especially business impact,
| then I believe there are plenty of opportunities out
| there that are more appropriate than old-school
| industrial research labs. However, for more speculative
| work where impacts are harder to see or where they are
| not immediate, the funding situation is much more
| difficult today compared to in the past where industrial
| research labs were less driven by the bottom line, and
| when academics had fewer "publish-or-perish" pressures.
| aprdm wrote:
| What makes you think they don't fund it ?
| fuzztester wrote:
| I thought I had read somewhere that 2 weeks vacation is
| more common in USA, at least for software companies, before
| things like "unlimited vacation". which is right, 3-4 or 2
| weeks?
| 0xCMP wrote:
| I think most "tech/bay" companies offer 3-4 weeks of
| vacation + holidays. Some have mandatory minimums a year
| and ability to accrue up to 30 days of PTO at a time in
| my experience. (e.g. not "unlimited", but specific
| amounts of PTO earned/used)
| cgh wrote:
| I've had anywhere from three to six weeks depending on
| seniority.
| uLogMicheal wrote:
| This is not the mindset of monopolies, cutting research for
| the sake of short term profits is the mindset of Wallstreet's
| modern monopoly.
| linguae wrote:
| I agree with you that the modern corporate world seems to
| be allergic to anything that doesn't promise immediate
| profits. It takes more than a monopoly to have something
| like Bell Labs. To be more precise, monopolies tend to have
| the resources to create Bell Labs-style research labs, but
| it also takes another type of driving factor to create such
| a research lab, whether it is pleasing government
| regulators (I believe this is what motivated the founding
| of Bell Labs), staying ahead of existential threats (a
| major theme of 1970's-era Xerox PARC was the idea of a
| "paperless office," as Xerox saw the paperless office as an
| existential threat to their photocopier monopoly), or for
| purely giving back to society.
|
| In short, Bell Labs-style institutions not only require
| consistent sources of funding that only monopolies can
| commit to, but they also require stakeholders to believe
| that funding such institutions is beneficial. We don't have
| those stakeholders today, though.
| uLogMicheal wrote:
| The time, motives, and management were different, the
| essence of my point was that in today's world even a
| monopoly would cut research for profit.
| teleforce wrote:
| That's my conclusion as well since now the closest we have to
| Bell Labs is the Google R&D where it has a virtual monopoly
| on Internet search and it's able to hire excellent well paid
| researchers [1].
|
| [1] US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41784599
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| Bell Labs was also funded by a massive monopoly.
| gwervc wrote:
| > the only avenues I see for curiosity-driven researchers are
| becoming independently wealthy, living like a monk
|
| I came to the same conclusion. This is the path I'm following
| (trying to set up a company and lean FIRE). It's sad in a way
| because those efforts and years could have been directed to
| research but we have to adapt.
| amtc80 wrote:
| I've seen that many times over by now, sort of done it
| myself. It doesn't really work. You end up replacing one
| problem for another. There is also a heavy dose of
| procrastination and escapism related to it. Think about how
| many could, and does, do it and but how few results there
| are.
| dylan604 wrote:
| All it took was one bored patent clerk spending idle time
| thinking about something that he couldn't just let go and
| now we have General Relativity and black holes.
| twilo wrote:
| That was mostly how the big scientific breakthroughs came in
| the 1800-1900s .. independent wealth.
|
| That's what a "scholar" is and Universities provided the
| perfect environment for that to thrive, which is no longer
| the case.
| bee_rider wrote:
| In the 1800's and early 1900's, maybe...
|
| In post WW2 America though there was increased funding from
| the state, large research universities, institutes and
| national labs could be created. In the era where all that
| was really working at full speed, the "big scientific
| breakthrough" came at such a pace that it became hard to
| see what was big or not.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Edison's research lab was funded by companies wanting
| specific inventions developed.
| leoc wrote:
| I _think_ that this was Paul Graham 's original ambition for
| YC, really: a hope that some at least of the successful
| founders would choose to take their winnings and implement
| the next Lisp Machine and similar projects. Unfortunately, as
| with other things, winning the SV VC game just seems to
| incline people to either keep climbing that same greasy pole,
| or to do unstrenuous rich-guy things, or some combination of
| those two.
| tolerance wrote:
| I was going to make a snarky remark like "Researchers are just
| going to have to write on Substack".
|
| Then I read this: http://mmcthrow-
| musings.blogspot.com/2020/10/interesting-opi...
|
| I think the alt-economy that you describe may turn up soon. at
| least the one that I'm imagining that doesn't involve
| registering for Substack.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| > Our economy promotes short-term gains and not long-term
| initiatives; I blame over 30 years of artificially-low
| interest rates for this.
|
| Don't low interest rates promote long-term thinking, perhaps
| to an absurd degree (e.g. the "it's okay that we hemorrhage
| money price dumping for 10 years as long as we develop a
| monopoly" playbook)? Bigger interest rate = bigger discount
| for present value of a future reward.
| Electricniko wrote:
| I'm guessing that they're referring to the practice of
| investors borrowing with low interest rates to buy large
| amounts of stock in a company, then milking the company of
| all its value for short term gains. Unless there's a
| significant plan in place, many companies can't really get
| away with long term playbooks if they are responsible to
| shareholders using ownership for short term gains (so they
| can quickly move to the next money making asset).
| ricksunny wrote:
| I hope that the #DeSci movement wlll help with this.
| ResearchHub is the closest so far in the soce to putting a
| financially sustainable crowdsourced research ecosystem
| together, but its early days.
| muzster wrote:
| I lament the decline also. Hopefully all of that lost energy
| has been put into good use on side projects.
|
| On a tangent, but think it's related, the curiosity,
| exploration and research by the kids maybe stalling too.
|
| Just a thought.
| MaysonL wrote:
| Back in 1963, I had the privilege of participating in a program
| the summer before my senior year of high school. This was at
| the research lab of GE in Schenectady. I was working (not very
| productively) on a project involving platinum catalyst of
| hydrocarbons - what eventually became catalytic converters. The
| kid who tutored me in calculus (and later won a MacArthur grant
| and founded his own think tank) worked on what was then called
| nuclear magnetic resonance or NMR. Now it's the guts or MRI
| machines (they left off the "nuclear" for PR reasons. I wonder
| how many kids these days have the chance to do shit like that,
| and if there are any labs where long-term research like that is
| funded.
| rr808 wrote:
| I think Fang companies have a lot of curiosity driven research,
| just the output is open source software instead of physical
| products. AI especially.
| rfmoz wrote:
| Inline with this, the talk from Richard Hamming "You and Your
| Research" (June 6, 1995)
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw
| Swizec wrote:
| Everyone wants Bell Labs, but not the thing that made it possible
| -- high corporate profit taxes. They were making bucket loads of
| monopoly money and had to put it _somewhere_ or taxes would it
| away.
| thrance wrote:
| Yes, disincentivize dividends and buybacks, reincentivize
| investments, R&D and others.
| dartos wrote:
| I think a lot of people want high corporate profit taxes
| fsckboy wrote:
| people own corporations. If you tax the income of people who
| own corporations, it's not necessarily necessary to tax
| corporations; just pass their profits through to the people
| and tax the people. There are good reasons not to double-tax,
| first at the corporate level and then again at the personal
| level.
| callc wrote:
| Corporations are apparently people too! They should be
| taxed like any other flesh and blood human!
|
| I really want gov around the world to take back governance
| to be solely for the benefit of people. None of this greedy
| corruption lobbyist stuff.
| miohtama wrote:
| This is similar to the perverse incentive of share
| buybacks. It's just more tax efficient to pump stock value
| than pay proper dividends.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| How else will we know if seatbelts are effective in Africa?
| thrance wrote:
| Congrats, you've been brainwashed by billionaires into
| voting against your interest.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Har
| bena wrote:
| From what I understand, they weren't really allowed to sell
| anything not related to telephony as well.
|
| So they could create Unix, but they weren't allowed to profit
| off of it. So they just gave it away, because why not.
| leoc wrote:
| Pasting my comment on the article https://www.construction-
| physics.com/p/what-would-it-take-to... :
|
| > RCA Laboratories/the Sarnoff Research Center is surely one of
| the most important of the American corporate labs with
| similarities to Bell Labs. (It features prominently in Bob
| Johnstone's _We Were Burning_
| https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/bob-johnstone/we-we... :
| it has a big role in the history of the Japanese semiconductor
| industry, in large part because of its roles in the development
| of the transistor and the LCD and its thirst for patent-licensing
| money.)
|
| >> In Dealers of Lightning, Michael Hiltzik argues that by the
| 1990s PARC was no longer engaged in such unrestricted research
| decoupled from product development.
|
| > According to Hiltzik and most other sources, the PARC Computer
| Science Lab's salad days were over as early as 1983, when Bob
| Taylor was forced to leave, while the work of the other PARC labs
| focussed on physics and materials science wasn't as notable in
| the period up to then.
|
| Seriously: if this kind of thing interests you at all, go and
| read _We Were Burning_.
| paulpauper wrote:
| I think the mythos of the Bell labs and other thinktanks of the
| Cold War era is overstated to some extent.
| https://greyenlightenment.com/2024/07/19/the-decline-of-cold...
|
| These organizations employed too many people of relatively
| mediocre ability relative to output, leading to waste and
| eventual disbandment. Today's private sector companies in FAMNG+
| are making bigger breakthroughs in AI, apps, self-driving cars,
| etc. with fewer people relative to population and more profits.
| This is due to more selective hiring and performance metrics.
| Yeah those people form the 60s were smart, but today's STEM whiz
| kids are probably lapping them.
| cfraenkel wrote:
| Off the top of my head: Shannon, Nyquist, Hamming. Lapping them
| you say.
| ggm wrote:
| I think my reading of your comment is: that's just wrong. And
| I tend to agree. The current STEM and FAANG activity is
| second order work in the main. I wouldn't hold AI work up as
| a paragon, myself. It's diverting from progress across a
| field.
|
| I have hopes of a resurgence of operations research and
| linear optimisation as goods in themselves: we could be
| plotting more nuanced courses in dark waters of competing
| pressure. Decision systems support across many fields would
| remove subjective, politicised pressures.
| l33t7332273 wrote:
| Do you think there is room for a resurgence in linear
| optimization?
|
| Linear programming, and even integer linear programming are
| pretty well solved practically speaking.
| ggm wrote:
| I tried using some online systems to help formulate
| weighted sum decisions over unrankable choices and it's
| bloody hard work getting people on board. I think how the
| logic presents could improve.
|
| This stuff while old, is not routine for decision makers.
| They don't seem to grok how to formulate the questions
| and the choices.
| l33t7332273 wrote:
| I think it's fundamentally hard to make tools like that
| because models can be sensitive to specifics, so dumbing
| them down is generally not great
| pinewurst wrote:
| I'm hoping this is sarcasm deserving my heart-felt belly laugh.
| FANG (or whatever the backcronym is these days) "selective
| hiring" is just puzzle driven mediocrity with a ridiculous
| amount of elect self-praise at their own good fortune. And
| "performance metrics", give me a break - product innovation is
| in the toilet and product quality even further down the drain.
| Unless you're talking about advanced PR and market manipulation
| techniques to capture and retain ad revenue...definitely genius
| there.
| l33t7332273 wrote:
| I agree with the vibes of your comment, but I have to reply
| to this:
|
| > Unless you're talking about advanced PR and market
| manipulation techniques to capture and retain ad revenue
|
| Those very much _are_ the goals at those enterprises.
| pinewurst wrote:
| Indeed they are, but my point is that _these_ goals are
| hardly admirable. At the same time, the claimed innovations
| aren't real, at least in the sense that anything in any
| issue of the Bell Labs Technical Journal was. "Apps", etc?
| This is like giving the Medellin cartel credit for their
| hippo culture while ignoring the basis of their real
| success.
| l33t7332273 wrote:
| > making bigger breakthroughs in AI, apps, self-driving cars
|
| Those weren't really the topics people were interested in at
| the time (depending on your definition of AI).
|
| The shoulders of giants, as they say.
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| Impostor syndrome was real at that joint!
| jpmattia wrote:
| > _and the other co-inventor of the integrated circuit was
| Fairchild Semiconductor, which as far as I can tell didn't
| operate anything like a basic research lab._
|
| Kind of a strange statement. Fairchild took the "traitorous
| eight" from Shockley Semiconductor, which was founded by William
| Shockley, who famously co-invented the transistor at Bell Labs
| (and who named the "traitorous eight" as such.)
|
| So while Fairchild "didn't operate anything like a basic research
| lab", its co-invention of the IC was not unrelated to having a
| large amount of DNA from Bell Labs.
| inside_story wrote:
| New Jersey back to this when!?
| teleforce wrote:
| If you want to understand and appreciate Bell Labs innovation
| eco-system from first hand account and perspective of its
| researcher while at the same time learning to perform research
| based innovations, please check this book written by one of its
| celebrated researchers Richard Hamming [1].
|
| [1] The Art of Doing Science and Engineering:
|
| https://press.stripe.com/the-art-of-doing-science-and-engine...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| What were the _other_ major R &D labs, _corporate or otherwise_
| of this era (roughly: 1880s through 1980s)?
|
| I can think of: AT&T, DuPont, Kodak, Xerox PARC, Westinghouse,
| IBM, GE, the original Edison labs (best as I can tell acquired by
| Western Union), Microsoft, Rockefeller University, Google
| Research.
|
| Of notable industries and sectors, there's little I can think of
| in automobile, shipping, aircraft and aviation (though much is
| conducted through Nasa and military), railroads, steel (or other
| metals/mining), petroleum, textiles, or fianance. There's also
| the Manhattan Project and energy labs (which conduct both general
| energy research and of course much weapons development).
|
| (I've asked similar questions before, see e.g.,
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41004023>.)
|
| I'd like to poke at this question in a number of areas: what
| developments did occur, what limitations existed, where private-
| sector or public / government / academic research were more
| successful, and what conditions lead to both rise and fall of
| such institutions.
| anthk wrote:
| MIT's AI Lab with Lisp, ITS and such. They were far ahead of
| Unix, Bell Labs and Berkeley.
| casey2 wrote:
| People always say "oh if you had this or that system we would be
| so much more innovative", but it's all wishy-washy unprovable
| statements pulled from 3rd hand sources. If you distill the
| problem down to it's essentials you are asking "how do I design
| (human in the loop) AGI", and until you can write a program for
| it, it will remain an artform, and the success or failure of art
| depends entirly on it's cultural context.
|
| Rather than p(r)aying for the smartest people who have ever been
| born, design a corporation that can have the average high school
| dropout work in R&D and you will print money, innovation and
| goodwill.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| I'm a bit surprised that RCA's research division didn't get a nod
| here. They came up with color TV, then did basically nothing of
| note for a good 25 years. They're a big part of the reason why
| RCA is nothing more than a label slapped on imported slop
| nowadays.
| sourcepluck wrote:
| Bell Labs is wonderful to read about, and I've really loved
| delving into it. Alan Kay's talks in particular.
|
| However, it should be seen as a starting point! Alternative
| hypothetical pasts and futures abound. One issue is that the
| stuff from the past always looks more legendary seen through the
| lens of nostalgia; it's much harder to look at the stuff around
| you and to go through the effort of really imagining the thing
| existing.
|
| So that's my hypothesis - there isn't a smaller volume of
| interesting stuff going on, but viewing it with hope and
| curiosity might be a tad harder now, when everyone is so "worldy"
| (i.e., jaded and pessimistic).
|
| Proof:
|
| https://worrydream.com/ (brett victor)
|
| and the other people doing dynamicland and realtalk, both
| discussed straightforwardly here:
|
| https://dynamicland.org/2024/FAQ/
|
| https://solidproject.org/about -- solid, tim berners-lee and co,
| also.
|
| https://malleable.systems/catalog/ -- a great many of the
| projects here are in the same spirit, to me, as well!
|
| https://spritely.institute/ -- spritely, too
|
| https://duskos.org/ -- duskOS, from Virgil Dupras
|
| https://100r.co/site/uxn.html -- 100 rabbits, uxn, vibrating with
| new ideas and aesthetics
|
| https://qutech.nl/ -- quantum research institute in the
| netherlands, they recently established a network link for the
| first time I believe
|
| etc etc. These are off the top of my head, and I'm fairly new to
| the whole space!
| nmcost wrote:
| It's coincidental that this article has reached the front page
| today. I just picked up _The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the
| Great Age of American Innovation_ by Jon Gartner. (I 'll let you
| know how it is when I finish)
|
| One thing to consider is that Bell Labs didn't innovate for
| altruistic reasons like furthering the human race or scientific
| understanding. They innovated to further AT&T's monopoly and to
| increase shareholder value. This doesn't seem that different than
| what Meta, Google, NVIDIA, etc. are doing. Maybe in 10-20-30
| years we will view the research that modern tech companies are
| doing through the same lens.
|
| Although, I do admit that the freedom with which these scientists
| and engineers were able to conduct research is something special.
| Maybe that's the real difference here.
| redbeanmochibun wrote:
| Isaac Morgan is an unsung hero from those ages, man I miss
| working for that man
| newsclues wrote:
| What was the influence of the manhattan project on bell labs?
| Hilift wrote:
| "Unpacking the reasons for this increase goes beyond the extent
| of this essay, and it certainly wasn't just because of AT&T and
| Bell Labs. But Bell Labs' achievements, particularly the
| invention of the transistor in 1947, seem to have prompted the
| decisions of many companies to start their own R&D labs, and
| influenced how those labs were structured."
|
| 1947 was a magical year. That announcement had profound
| implications. They effectively invented something that would
| replace the huge existing base of vacuum tube components with
| miniaturized transistors. This miniaturization phase
| significantly influenced Von Nuemann's recommendation for the
| ballistic missile program. Many of the discrete component systems
| manufactured during this time remained in service into the
| 1980's.
|
| This is a photo of a D-17B guidance computer that deployed on the
| Minuteman Missile in 1962, 15 years after creating the
| transistor, and was typical of military printed circuitry at the
| time for general purpose computers, disk/drum storage drives, and
| printers.
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/38/Autoneti...
|
| "The D-17B weighed approximately 62 pounds (28 kg), contained
| 1,521 transistors, 6,282 diodes, 1,116 capacitors, and 5094
| resistors. These components were mounted on double copper-clad,
| engraved, gold-plated, glass fiber laminate circuit boards. There
| were 75 of these circuit boards and each one was coated with a
| flexible polyurethane compound for moisture and vibration
| protection."
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-11-30 23:01 UTC)