4 ms·

Bell Labs worked in part because of the architecture of the building encouraging interaction. I am not sure decentralization will work.

• nicklovescode 8y ago
  I think it’s an open question how the internet will support research collaboration. There’s clear success stories such as Wikipedia when it comes to mass scale contribution, but fewer specific research innovations outside of open source projects. My best guess is that the types of collaborations will simply be different (The Bazaar and The Cathedral documents this well). The internet is arguably better at flourishing novel ideas than Bell Labs was. For instance, machine learning Twitter is an active and relatively small community. Excellent ideas from obscure researchers often rise to prominence within hours when retweeted by a more followed researcher. This wouldn’t happen as often in a building, and the type of idea discovery that Twitter allows is just the tip of the iceberg. I think it’s worth realizing the significant downsides to in person collaboration (nothing is saved, it's entirely flow vs stock, you need enough status to be hired in the first place). I was in the first class of the Thiel Fellowship, a decentralized program that tended to centralize itself anyway in pockets (groups of us rented big houses and lived together). The combination of in-person and distributed was a great midway, and I predict the Shannon Fellowship will be similar. I'm excited to see what the Bell Labs of the Internet looks like, and I think it's too early to say decentralization will simply not work. (disclosure: mentor for Shannon Fellowship)
  • white-flame 8y ago
    Wikipedia and the like are fine when each contribution is usually quite independent. AI pursuit often involves a singular potential breakthrough idea that's larger than one person can work on in isolation, for any reasonable time frame. Certainly a group of people with low living expenses might be able to run a team of 3-4 people with this sort of budget, but it sounds like it's intended for individual researchers.
  • zawerf 8y ago
    The Polymath Project is another great example of crowdsourced research: https://terrytao.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/polymath.pdf https://terrytao.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/polymath.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project
• laGrenouille 8y ago
  It also worked because researchers had long-term employment with ample research funding and long periods of time to think outside of the rapid-pace of today's culture in academic and industry labs. Projects such as UNIX, C, C++, and S were built by a small set of bright people who had a significant portion of their time to devote to a single project. They did user-testing, reimplementing, and even had the luxury of starting-over from scratch several times to get the first stable prototype ready. Something like the proposed model doesn't work if they are only giving someone "1 year"; they'll spend a good chunk of that time looking for the next job or source of funding.
  • Fomite 8y ago
    This. Of all the problems, 1 year is just too short a time.