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The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab

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Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab

#41

Post by gimmeThaBeet »

wiz21c wrote: post #35
KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Metcalfe offers a very interesting conservative perspective. The article IMHO has a more convincing conservative counterpoint: Labs, compared to university researchers, also maintain a constant link with delivering value and, ultimately, profitability. University incentive, prestige, and funding regimes suffer from the standard problems around non-profits: if you’re not trying to make profits, what are you trying to…

> if you’re not trying to make profits, what are you trying to do ? Like if working with a profit incentive is doing social good.

My response has some holes in it, but my view there is that profit/value has a pretty good feedback mechanism that social good doesn't. If you are a normal business, your customers basically give you a mandate to continue, maybe even grow. It may be a substandard metric to control for with regards to society, but at least it is a control system. The mechanics of social benefit feel a lot more complicated, I don't really know how to sum them up in one way without just being like, "the government pays for things it finds beneficial".

The issue is that a valuable endeavor doesn't have to be good, e.g. maybe social media.

Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab

#42

Post by dehrmann »

Part of the fall of the R&D lab is high-profile inventions like the silicon transistor, GUI, and digital camera that the corporation failed to capitalize on. Part of why you do all this research is to find the next big thing, but if you can't see the potential of these inventions and turn them into businesses, what's the point?

Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab

#43

Post by wenc »

amgreg wrote: post #22

Bob Metcalfe, self professed “conservative hippie,” inventor of the Ethernet, founder of 3Com, of Xerox Parc fame, has this to offer: > One of the few things that government should do is finance research, because — I have learned from many years — the only companies that can afford to do research are monopolies. Real companies cannot afford to do research other than monopolies. And there are some famous ones. The tel…

> other than the transistor and Unix and the princess telephone, what did we get for all that money?

Bell Labs may not have been able to commercialize all of its discoveries, but humanity certainly got a lot more than Unix and the transistor. Quote [1]:

"Researchers working at Bell Labs are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the Unix operating system, and the programming languages B, C, C++, and S. Nine Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories."

Bell Labs was also a training ground for a great many people who went on to make highly impactful discoveries [2], from Hamming to Bengio.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs#Notable_alumni

Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab

#44

Post by HarryHirsch »

gimmeThaBeet wrote: post #41
wiz21c wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you’re not trying to make profits, what are you trying to do ? Like if working with a profit incentive is doing social good.

My response has some holes in it, but my view there is that profit/value has a pretty good feedback mechanism that social good doesn't. If you are a normal business, your customers basically give you a mandate to continue, maybe even grow. It may be a substandard metric to control for with regards to society, but at least it is a control system. The mechanics of social benefit feel a lot more complicated, I don't rea…

This will be a bit poorly thought out, but the response goes like this: why invest in corporate R&D with uncertain returns when you can invest in index funds with guaranteed return?

The stock market is supported by ample goverment intervention, the rest of society not at all. Just consider the major stock market indices and compare that with continuing unemployment claims.

Now you have a feedback mechanism that supports investment banking at the expense of everything else, and here we are.

Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab

#45

Post by LatteLazy »

thatcat wrote: post #40
LatteLazy wrote: post #39

Corporations are basically unable to do R&D for a whole bunch of reasons. That's why we have all sorts of start ups and angle investment instead. Once an idea is half proven, then corporations can come in, finance it, run it effectively and market it etc. While also paying off the people actually taking the risk. This is a much better more efficient system for everyone.

How is that better for R&D scientists and engineers? They now have to come up with a possible technology progression, secure funding, build out the tech using some secondary business model, and then convince the corp to buy their company. It only seems more efficient for the corporation.

They actually get rewarded when they succeed. The man who invented artifical diamonds, a billion dollar industry, got 10usd savings bond.

Plus no bureaucracy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracy_Hall

Also, I imagine that getting funding from a pool of VCs (looking to fund long shots, with some expertise in the field maybe) is easier than from a single CEO who happens to run the place and has to justify all this on quarterly earnings statements etc...

Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab

#46

Post by sgt101 »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #44
gimmeThaBeet wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My response has some holes in it, but my view there is that profit/value has a pretty good feedback mechanism that social good doesn't. If you are a normal business, your customers basically give you a mandate to continue, maybe even grow. It may be a substandard metric to control for with regards to society, but at least it is a control system. The mechanics of social benefit feel a lot more complicated, I don't rea…

This will be a bit poorly thought out, but the response goes like this: why invest in corporate R&D with uncertain returns when you can invest in index funds with guaranteed return? The stock market is supported by ample goverment intervention, the rest of society not at all. Just consider the major stock market indices and compare that with continuing unemployment claims. Now you have a feedback mechanism that suppo…

Ummh - Index funds definitely do not have guaranteed returns.

Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab

#47

Post by HarryHirsch »

sgt101 wrote: post #46
HarryHirsch wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will be a bit poorly thought out, but the response goes like this: why invest in corporate R&D with uncertain returns when you can invest in index funds with guaranteed return? The stock market is supported by ample goverment intervention, the rest of society not at all. Just consider the major stock market indices and compare that with continuing unemployment claims. Now you have a feedback mechanism that suppo…

Ummh - Index funds definitely do not have guaranteed returns.

There's "too big to fail" and network effects, can't let Bank of America or Boeing go bankrupt and wipe out shareholders, especially pension funds are major shareholders. There is so much government backstop going around that returns are certain.

Compare that to bringing a new pharmaceutical compound into the clinic. The time from discovery to approval is ten years, with a billion spent over the lifetime of the project, and the success rate is ~ 30 %, most compounds fail. For innovative projects this is compounded by the fact that you need to do target discovery and validation, something you can't patent but every competitor will make use of. No surprise the pace of innovation has slowed down.

Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab

#48

Post by ColanR »

whateveracct wrote: post #34
rowanG077 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds almost comical. "Other than the transistor". The transistor is one of the most important inventions humanity ever made.

tbh the fallacy is thinking that invention is unique to the inventor because the transistor is so fundamental, we probably could've worked towards it in hundreds of different ways than Bell Labs but that's a big thing in tech circles - thinking a person or entity doing some technical feat is somehow a sign that they are otherworldly

That's really easy to say in retrospect, just like it's easy to say any major discovery was inevitable after we've already discovered it.

Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab

#49

Post by ghaff »

realityking wrote: post #32
criddell wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just finished reading Mitchell Waldrop's book The Dream Machines which is largely about J.C.R. Licklider and it has a lot of stories about the things Metcalfe is talking about during the 60's and 70's and into the 80's. It's a long, detailed book and I recommend it. After finishing the book it made me feel like progress has slowed tremendously. Look at the changes from 1960 to 1970 or from 1970 to 1980 and compare…

I think the most recent big shift, on a society level, was taking that networked world from our offices and homes to mobile devices. It‘s not exactly between 2010 and 2020 but definitely between 2000 and 2020.

I'd say it started in a relatively primitive way around 2000 with mobile WAP, fairly widespread texting, etc. You then had Blackberries and Treos. It was around 2010 though that the iPhone (introduced 2007) was really taking off.

Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab

#50

Post by HarryHirsch »

ColanR wrote: post #48
whateveracct wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tbh the fallacy is thinking that invention is unique to the inventor because the transistor is so fundamental, we probably could've worked towards it in hundreds of different ways than Bell Labs but that's a big thing in tech circles - thinking a person or entity doing some technical feat is somehow a sign that they are otherworldly

That's really easy to say in retrospect, just like it's easy to say any major discovery was inevitable after we've already discovered it.

But it is really like that. It depends on the groundwork that's there, technical capabilities and tooling. Once that's in place it only takes a lucky guy to pluck the discovery out of the air.

Consider dual-space methods in crystallography. Herb Hauptman is credited with the discovery. My undergraduate advisor obliquely mentioned that he had done something similar in 1986 - obtain atom positions from direct methods, then do a few cycles of tangent refinement from the highest peaks. It reduces map noise considerably.

Computers were simply too slow at that time to use this as a general method of solving 1000-atom structures, so the approach remained an afterthought. But the possibilities were noted once the computing power was there.

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