The argument being made here, that industrial research labs have disappeared because they did not produce enough return on investment, ignores competing sources of ROI. Today, the easiest way to make a lot of money is in finance, not discovering new things. Other stories on HN have bemoaned how Boeing has destroyed itself by shrinking engineering and expanding cost cutting. As is pointed out in another comment, if the Fed is subsidizing the stock market, finance is the place to be. Research not so much.
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
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
genuine question (asking because i have a biased perspective): why dont you consider advances in ai to be a major shift? in the past decade, there has been a rapid increase in capabilities in computer vision, language understanding, robotics, etc.
The technology has advanced a lot but what major changes have these advances in AI really made to the average person's life? I can't think of any that are anywhere near as dramatic as the invention of cars/air travel/the internet/smartphones.
AI is largely used for surveillance and advertising. Great.
Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab
#73Part 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?
remimds me of...
https://www.amazon.com/My-years-xerox-billions-nobody/dp/B00...
Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab
#74Bob 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…
The whole interview (multiple hours) is fascinating, like a good episode of "On the Metal". Heavy recommend for people interested in CS history and Innovation.
Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
But what if they want to research something that will never, ever be profitable.
Well they'd never be given that chance under either the corporate or the venture models. That's why governments or charities are for I guess?
Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
The problem is, that lucky guy can take an indefinitely long time to show up.
I heard recently about the Scythe Project. Apparently, the scythe was never invented in some places, including India. That's a long time for the lucky guy to never show up.
Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab
#77Earlier 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.
According to Wikipedia [1], the transistor was independently rediscovered by two German physicists just a year later (1948).
Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is a very important point. Usually, taxes incentivize companies to spend their profit on making the company better - buy new machines, pay the workers more, invest in r&d. This way, they reduced their taxable profit by spending the money on themselves. The companies profited from getting better, the state (or society) profited from growth and innovation. Now with reduced taxes, but even more importantly…
Tax incentives are also responsible for the return of open office plan since 1960s, as depreciation rules regarding buildings and furniture changed. In addition, you have people believing that Milton Friedman's biggest lie is a law, namely that maximising shareholder value (which is often interpreted to include dividends) is fiduciary duty for the corporation. (It's not)
>...Milton Friedman's biggest lie is a law,
You are misrepresenting what is called the Friedman doctrine. He didn't claim it was the law of the land. As the wikipedia article states:
>...The Friedman doctrine, also called shareholder theory or stockholder theory, is a normative theory of business ethics advanced by economist Milton Friedman which holds that a firm's main responsibility is to its shareholders. This shareholder primacy approach views shareholders as the economic engine of the organization and the only group to which the firm is socially responsible. As such, the goal of the firm is to maximize returns to shareholders.[1] Friedman argues that the shareholders can then decide for themselves what social initiatives to take part in, rather than have an executive whom the shareholders appointed explicitly for business purposes decide such matters for them
Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't seem that AI and robotics over-promise. Sure, we're not at AGI, but if you look at the potential(i.e. startups) to replace jobs, there are tons of that.
The same was said of expert systems in the 1980’s. Yes, there’s potential, but that potential hasn’t been realized yet. At least not to the point where people compare the impact of AI to the impact of semi-conductors and integrated circuits.
It will take time. Like every big innovation.
The question is: will the potential be fullfiled.
Maybe, given the many startups doing real work with machine learning(besides the many that just hype), it's reasonable to guess that that the potential Will be fullfiled.
Re: The rise and fall of the industrial R&D lab
#80Buying off-the-shelf technology works if you want the cookie-cutter solution (which, don't get me wrong, is fine for a lot of things) Now, newsflash for the MBAs, if you just sell the same thing as everybody else, you're just competing on price (and maybe marketing/sales channel). Otherwise you need to get your hands dirty. (Though apparently there's still money in dropshipping to be made, until people realize everyt…
> Now, newsflash for the MBAs, if you just sell the same thing as everybody else, you're just competing on price (and maybe marketing/sales channel). You don't think MBAs know this?
They know, what they don't know is how to get out of that position.