Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Influence of Bell Labs

construction-physics.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 139 posts

Re: The Influence of Bell Labs

#71

Post by ricksunny »

linguae wrote: post #10

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 de…

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.

Re: The Influence of Bell Labs

#72

Post by dredmorbius »

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.

Re: The Influence of Bell Labs

#73

Post by Aloha »

mixdup wrote: post #62
Aloha wrote: post #8

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 anyo…

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

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.

Re: The Influence of Bell Labs

#74

Post by toast0 »

kranke155 wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Re: The Influence of Bell Labs

#75

Post by casey2 »

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.

Re: The Influence of Bell Labs

#76

Post by callc »

fsckboy wrote: post #65
dartos wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of people want high corporate profit taxes

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.

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.

Re: The Influence of Bell Labs

#77

Post by fragmede »

aguaviva wrote: post #42
linguae wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 governme…

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.

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

Re: The Influence of Bell Labs

#78

Post by miohtama »

fsckboy wrote: post #65
dartos wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of people want high corporate profit taxes

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.

This is similar to the perverse incentive of share buybacks. It's just more tax efficient to pump stock value than pay proper dividends.

Re: The Influence of Bell Labs

#79

Post by uLogMicheal »

linguae wrote: post #37
uLogMicheal wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not the mindset of monopolies, cutting research for the sake of short term profits is the mindset of Wallstreet's modern monopoly.

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…

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.

Re: The Influence of Bell Labs

#80

Post by rat9988 »

linguae wrote: post #46
ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 b…

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.
Post reply on HN