I'm currently halfway through The Idea Factory: Bell Labs & the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner. The stories and characters behind all the inventions and ideas are absolutely fascinating, as is the culture they cultivated there. Definitely recommended!
Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home
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Re: Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home
#22Is there a Bell Labs of today? If so who or where?
Re: Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are in the UK Deepmind seemed to be that way to me when I applied. A lot of research groups doing hard research in a wide array of fields, cutting edge AI stuff, a core team of SEs developing in house programs for researchers, and research engineers for productionization. And no, I didn't get the job lol. I've heard mixed things about it as a company but GResearch (also UK) seemed like an interesting R&D softw…
Thanks for your suggestions! I'm currently in The Netherlands but I'll keep these in mind (though they sound more "math-ey" than engineering-ey but that's fine).
>though they sound more "math-ey" than engineering-ey
Isn't math necessary for most real-world engineering, and even in CS research? And what were you expecting? You asked for a cutting edge Bell-Labs type of R&D place, and that's what research is all about, even in CS.
You'll work with a lot of new yet-unproven theoretical concepts for which you need a lot of math to prove they have a high chance of working in practice and being better than existing solutions, before someone approves budget for the costly development and implementation of an actual product.
Re: Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home
#24Is there a Bell Labs of today? If so who or where?
Prestige AI labs. But for hardware? I am not sure.
Re: Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
High-frequency trading, I'd assume. Exploiting the stock market for profit.
Or providing liquidity to reduce transaction costs for everyone.
How high are the costs and how much can you reduce them before you reach diminishing returns? Will it reach zero?
Re: Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home
#26I have a question for anyone in an R&D/Bell Labs-esque place - are there any good recommendations for similar places to work, particularly outside the US? "Old" Google apparently was, but going by what ex-googlers have been saying it hasn't been the case for a long while now.
Any prestige research lab - MS, Google, OAI, etc.
Re: Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home
#27Re: Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home
#28This article - a retrospective puff piece - entirely neglects the circumstances leading to the loss of relevance of Bell Labs. It's explained in the autoposy of one of the greatest scientific frauds (fabricated nanoelectronic devices made of organic carbon materials e.g. pentacene) of the past few decades [1]:
> "For over half a century, Bell Labs had been owned by the telephone monopoly AT&T and had plenty of money to spend on science. But in 1984, the monopoly broke up, and after 1989, managers encouraged Bell Lab researchers to focus on research with commercial applications. Disenchanted, top scientists began to leave for universities and were mostly not replaced by new recruits. In 1995, ownership of Bell Labs was transferred to the newly formed company Lucent Technologies."
Then Lucent got hit by the dot-com bubble blowout, resulting in a 30% loss of share value in Jan 2000. This led to a new focus on PR:
> "By keeping up its practice of releasing exciting scientific findings, the lab could continue to demonstrate to investors, customers and anyone else that Lucent had a sound, long-term technological future. Again, this was a question of survival: with revenues falling, managers had to make the argument that their jobs and the jobs of their staff were worth keeping."
This led to a culture in which critical scrutiny of the claims of one fraudulent researcher was discouraged in favor of institutional cheerleading, and the end result was that 15 papers published in Science and Nature had to be retracted.
[1] "Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World" (2009) Eugenie Samuel Reich.
If you want a parable for what's happened to Bell Labs and many other scientific institutions in the US, it's that of the greedy farmer killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.
Re: Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or providing liquidity to reduce transaction costs for everyone.
How high are the costs and how much can you reduce them before you reach diminishing returns? Will it reach zero?
It is pretty close to zero. Has anyone thought about how much a trade of a broadly traded security will cost them in recent times, or ever thought it would not happen near instantly?