12 ms·

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 t

by amgreg 6y ago

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 telephone monopoly — Bell Labs. The computer monopoly — Watson Labs. The copier monopoly — Xerox Parc. And on it goes. In retrospect the monopolies aren't worth it for the research they do. It's nauseating how much we hear about how cool Bell Labs was, but other than the transistor and Unix and the princess telephone, what did we get for all that money? And then for years AT&T as a monopoly sat on innovation — and IBM after that, and Xerox after that — it's just not worth it, so let's kill those monopolies. And if we need research, have it done at research universities. And the other spin I would offer there: as a practitioner of technological innovation, I worry about technology transfer — how do you get technology transferred from the lab into the marketplace. And the best way to do that is with people; and it is the business of universities to graduate people. So let's do our research there, and I think the ARPANet is a great example where government financed the research. Source: https://youtu.be/zKz07DdaKzw?t=3772 https://youtu.be/zKz07DdaKzw?t=3772

criddell 6y ago
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 that to 2010 to 2020. The last decade produced lots of incremental improvements but where are the giant technological shifts? I was born in 1970 and if I look back over my life, the giant change was going from a non-networked world to a networked world. I think it's similar to how my grand parents could remember the world before and after commercial flight or how my great-grandmother remembered the arrival of automobiles. I wonder what it is my kids will point to 40 years from now. A colony on the moon or Mars maybe?
- one_electron 6y ago
  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.
  - opencl 6y ago
    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.
    - Ericson2314 6y ago
      AI is largely used for surveillance and advertising. Great.
  - criddell 6y ago
    AI researchers have been over-promising and under-delivering for 70 years now. It seems like AI has settled into making discriminators. Maybe intelligence really is just pattern matching and grouping? I don't think it is, but I could be wrong.
    - petra 6y ago
      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.
      - criddell 6y ago
        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.
rowanG077 6y ago
It sounds almost comical. "Other than the transistor". The transistor is one of the most important inventions humanity ever made.
- whateveracct 6y ago
  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
  - rowanG077 6y ago
    Probably yes. But let's say the transistor would have been invented 20 years later by a university. The world would look completely different today. Simply saying we could have invented it some other way disregards the continous impact a result in research makes.
  - ColanR 6y ago
    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.
    - HarryHirsch 6y ago
      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.
jjcon 6y ago
In the US at least (less so here in the EU) a ton of scientific research is funded and performed with funds earmarked for national security, health and defense (often just called the military budget). That money goes to way more than just pure military though.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
KKKKkkkk1 6y ago
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 do? How do you know that what you’re doing is socially useful? Working without a profit signal can lead to deeply broken incentives systems and extremely wasteful admin burdens that weigh heavily on productivity, along with research that is in no way tied to improving human lives. Some estimates suggest that university scientists spend just a third of their time on active research. Historically, labs have seemed less prone to this problem.
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  The idea that a lab can know just where to put their efforts to be "socially useful" is questionable at best.
- wiz21c 6y ago
  > 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.
  - gimmeThaBeet 6y ago
    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.
    - HarryHirsch 6y ago
kilroy123 6y ago
I could not agree more with this. I'm very concerned because China has been ramping up their R&D spending while the US has been decreasing, at a time we need to be increasing.
wenc 6y ago
> 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs#Notable_alumni https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs#Notable_alumni
- EarthIsHome 6y ago
  > 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. This point illustrates that human benefits and profit do not always align. If we want to focus more on making things that benefit humanity, we have change our system that runs off of profit.
  - wenc 6y ago
    I can't say I follow that logic. It's true that human benefits and profit don't always align at all points of contact. They do align at some. Hence I don't think it's true that for-profit systems that are not focused on "making things that benefit humanity" do not actually benefit humanity. Bell Labs clearly has, even though it has had a concomitant commercial objective. Conversely, it is also not true that not-for-profit systems necessarily produce human benefits -- sure, they can, but not always. I worked in an university applied research setting for close to a decade before joining industry. I can tell you the incentives and pressures to produce something that "works in practice" and is "commercializable" (whether it is actually done or not) is much greater in industry. Not-for-profit environments are better for long-range explorations with high failure rates and uncertain outcomes, i.e. basic research. For-profit environments are better at the discipline of producing applied knowledge (whether it is actually applied or not). That said, Germany has a hybrid model called the Fraunhofer model (Fraunhofer Societies do applied research and is 70% funded by industry/government) which produced the MP3 standard. So there are alternatives. But I'm not convinced the industrial R&D model is fatally flawed.
Rochetshipz 6y ago
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.

by amgreg 6y ago

criddell 6y ago

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 that to 2010 to 2020. The last decade produced lots of incremental improvements but where are the giant technological shifts? I was born in 1970 and if I look back over my life, the giant change was going from a non-networked world to a networked world. I think it's similar to how my grand parents could remember the world before and after commercial flight or how my great-grandmother remembered the arrival of automobiles. I wonder what it is my kids will point to 40 years from now. A colony on the moon or Mars maybe?

one_electron 6y ago
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.
- opencl 6y ago
  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.
  - Ericson2314 6y ago
    AI is largely used for surveillance and advertising. Great.
- criddell 6y ago
  AI researchers have been over-promising and under-delivering for 70 years now. It seems like AI has settled into making discriminators. Maybe intelligence really is just pattern matching and grouping? I don't think it is, but I could be wrong.
  - petra 6y ago
    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.
    - criddell 6y ago
      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.

rowanG077 6y ago

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

whateveracct 6y ago
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
- rowanG077 6y ago
  Probably yes. But let's say the transistor would have been invented 20 years later by a university. The world would look completely different today. Simply saying we could have invented it some other way disregards the continous impact a result in research makes.
- ColanR 6y ago
  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.
  - HarryHirsch 6y ago
    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.

jjcon 6y ago

In the US at least (less so here in the EU) a ton of scientific research is funded and performed with funds earmarked for national security, health and defense (often just called the military budget). That money goes to way more than just pure military though.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

KKKKkkkk1 6y ago

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 do? How do you know that what you’re doing is socially useful? Working without a profit signal can lead to deeply broken incentives systems and extremely wasteful admin burdens that weigh heavily on productivity, along with research that is in no way tied to improving human lives. Some estimates suggest that university scientists spend just a third of their time on active research. Historically, labs have seemed less prone to this problem.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago
The idea that a lab can know just where to put their efforts to be "socially useful" is questionable at best.
wiz21c 6y ago
> 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.
- gimmeThaBeet 6y ago
  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.
  - HarryHirsch 6y ago

kilroy123 6y ago

I could not agree more with this. I'm very concerned because China has been ramping up their R&D spending while the US has been decreasing, at a time we need to be increasing.

wenc 6y ago

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

EarthIsHome 6y ago
> 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. This point illustrates that human benefits and profit do not always align. If we want to focus more on making things that benefit humanity, we have change our system that runs off of profit.
- wenc 6y ago
  I can't say I follow that logic. It's true that human benefits and profit don't always align at all points of contact. They do align at some. Hence I don't think it's true that for-profit systems that are not focused on "making things that benefit humanity" do not actually benefit humanity. Bell Labs clearly has, even though it has had a concomitant commercial objective. Conversely, it is also not true that not-for-profit systems necessarily produce human benefits -- sure, they can, but not always. I worked in an university applied research setting for close to a decade before joining industry. I can tell you the incentives and pressures to produce something that "works in practice" and is "commercializable" (whether it is actually done or not) is much greater in industry. Not-for-profit environments are better for long-range explorations with high failure rates and uncertain outcomes, i.e. basic research. For-profit environments are better at the discipline of producing applied knowledge (whether it is actually applied or not). That said, Germany has a hybrid model called the Fraunhofer model (Fraunhofer Societies do applied research and is 70% funded by industry/government) which produced the MP3 standard. So there are alternatives. But I'm not convinced the industrial R&D model is fatally flawed.

Rochetshipz 6y ago

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.