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Bringing back the golden days of Bell Labs

173 points by gtsnexp 4y ago

ryan93 4y ago
I think the number of good ideas waiting to be discovered has decreased. We arent gonna get the same rate of innovation.
thrown_22 4y ago
That tax was mentioned exactly once in the article is pretty sad. The corporate tax rate was over 50% for the period and R&D was a way to offset that. Today there is no need since innovations in accounting have lead to the extinction of profits in the US.
andbberger 4y ago
kind of ridiculous to write this without talking about janelia
- closedloop129 4y ago
  >some interdisciplinary problems are difficult to address in existing research settings, and Janelia was built as a separate institution to address such problems in neurobiology. >The center was designed to emulate the unconstrained and collaborative environments at AT&T Bell Laboratories and Cambridge's Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Researchers are on six-year contracts and fully internally funded, independent of traditional research grant funding.[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janelia_Research_Campus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janelia_Research_Campus
- a-dub 4y ago
  janelia is focused on a specific domain. an interesting domain, for sure, but the author is interested in quantum computing and that would be a shoehorn for janelia's mission at best.
sgt101 4y ago
>"In quantum computing thinking is shifting from a government-funded big science approach to an exploration and exploitation of the more dynamic start-up innovation ecosystem. “We need to try out different things, and use the innovation ecosystem to test, learn and build machines." this is weird because it's very clear that the basic science of quantum computing is far from done. Investors can pour as much money as they like into a series of holes in the ground, but if the universe says no then nothing will come of it. We do not know how to solve many of the fundamental problems of scaling a QC, until we do I think this is really just stupid. The QC startup scene looks like 50 Theranos's in search of a lawsuit to me; it's going to be 30 years before serious and usable machines appear - if ever.
- noduerme 4y ago
  the difference between a QC and Theranos is you can't prove a quantum computer isn't actually working as advertised.
  - Barrin92 4y ago
    if I got a startup grant for every idea someone can't prove doesn't work I'd be the most well funded individual on the planet
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    Shor you can: can it break RSA? If yes, QC. If not, not QC.
    - noduerme 4y ago
      What if it's just able to break a particular RSA file after several billion attempts to keep it running long enough?
  - sgt101 4y ago
    I was quite irritated by the debunking of Sycamore's result recently; I had the impression from the pr (and the paper) that they had obtained exact results, but the truth is that these results were approximate. That's totally different. Previously I had dug out of the papers that it takes 48hrs to boot the machine and that it can only run for a few hours... and that was disappointing enough. Also the obscuring of the impact of quantum fidelity on the Eagle chip from IBM. Ok, it's got 124 qbits - but you end up with a max circuit size of 24 which is similar to the previous 48 qbit generation (I think that one is called dodo or something). Anyway, it looks like the absolute best spin is put on everything and the actual problems are being ducked - probably because they have to be because they are way beyond the current SOA.
202206241203 4y ago
International industrial espionage was less of a problem back then.
- Jensson 4y ago
  International industrial spies doesn't seem to be needed today, USA gladly gave away most of their technology to China for free. Now the highest end silicon is made and developed in Asia, why would they spy on USA?
- FateOfNations 4y ago
  eeh... the Soviets pretty much wrote the textbook on industrial espionage during the Cold War.
closedloop129 4y ago
>Quantum computing is in a similar position today I don't think that the position is similar. The level of 'ingenuity' of the overall system was lower. Fewer men were needed to understand each and every aspect of the system. Now, each scientist is more specialized which means that they individually see less of the system. Additionally, the system is more complex. Together, this means that many more scientists have to be coordinated to make progress. This is further complicated by knowledge protections. Bell Labs most likely had all relevant patents and copy rights. To reach the same level of fluidity of knowledge, an additional army of patent lawyers is needed. An additional problem is that targeting quantum computer specifically takes away from the idea of 'no deadlines, objectives or progress reports'. This will be especially a problem in those proposed 'focused research organizations'. What I don't want to understand is how Google could come so close and fail. They have 10% projects and moonshots. They have the monopoly-like income stream to fund it. But instead of creating progress, their products seem to get worse and worse. How could one sustainably fund something like Bell Labs with company profits? *edit: The more interesting question: Since the target of the Bell Labs, the 'universal connectivity' has been achieved, do we still need centralized labs for the next relevant innovations? Doesn't universal connectivity give us the potential to come up with something better? I believe that a social network is missing that is built to create scientific progress.
- dr_dshiv 4y ago
  > a social network is missing that is built to create scientific progress Like a Royal Society?
  - closedloop129 4y ago
    That would be very exclusive, wouldn't it? The problem is that 'every mathematician has only a few tricks' [1]. This means that every scientific problem should be exposed to as many scientists as possible, coordinated in a way that maximizes the number of tricks that are tried. To me, this suggests that something like the TikTok algorithm should bring scientists and problems together. The problem is that each problem is not a 30 second video that is easy to consume, but a problem that requires some amount of studying before it is approachable. There is most likely not much to invent, e.g. there is already stack exchange to answer questions, and Khan Academy to gain basic knowledge, but like YT before TikTok, there is no algorithm that brings it all together. [1] https://mathoverflow.net/questions/363119/every-mathematician-has-only-a-few-tricks https://mathoverflow.net/questions/363119/every-mathematicia...
TabTwo 4y ago
I work in Stuttgart on the campus that once was SEL, then Alcatel and then Nokia. There was also one building with the big letters „Bell Labs“. Sadly they took the letters down about a year ago since all the buildings get assimilated by Porsche.
- zwieback 4y ago
  Interesting - I was born in New Jersey in 66 when my dad was working at Bell Labs but I grew up in Stuttgart. Had no idea there was a "Bell Labs" there
  - TabTwo 4y ago
    small world 48.83174624272352, 9.147884320080053 The smaller building to the right.
ackbar03 4y ago
I always felt universities should have been the ones to take on the roles similar to bell labs. They receive government funding and are focused on fundamental scientific research. Now it seems most academics are (understandably) preoccupied with publications and, in computer science at least, breakthrough deep learning research is from rich tech companies like Google and Facebook. I wonder what happened.
- govg 4y ago
  In computer science, or more specifically in deep learning, there is a high correlation between resources you can spend / use and progress you can make. This is why all the major tech firms have a leg up, they have internal computing power and data that is impossible for any one university to have. It is also the case that a lot of professors and even students have temporary appointments with tech firms, for exactly this reason. If you look at other fields which are not as resource intensive, university can and do contribute to the state of the art. Especially in areas like theory, where even though MSR etc do cutting edge research, the bulk of work is done at universities.
  - caddemon 4y ago
    I don't think this is the only reason though. (preclinical) Bioscience experiments can be extremely expensive and yet they remain pretty concentrated at universities, for better or worse. I don't know about the state of funding in protein folding specifically, but knowing about the kind of funding that some other high profile bio labs can get I am skeptical that material resources were the main difference between alpha fold and what the prior academic lit could do, for example.
- bregma 4y ago
  I guess it's important to socialize product development in order to maximize the private profit of those few individuals who control the means of production.
- jmclnx 4y ago
  I agree, but I think the article had the reason, "Stable Funding". The few profs I have run into over the years largest worry is getting grants. Thus the preoccupation with publications. Where I work, it seems this trend is hitting commercial labs too, researchers are slowly being forced to "produce". Unless something changes, research for its own sake seems to be a rare thing, at least in the US.
dramm 4y ago
What a bizzare disjoint article. Bell Labs, Quantum Computing, racial discrimination, blah, blah. There are analogs to Bell Labs today, including in Google and other working on Quantum Computing, and machine learning, and self driving vehicles, and... With one similarity that large (possibly monopoly) financial power allows companies to make these long term expensive investments. If somebody in Nature wanted to opine on Bell Labs like organizations they only need to look at the many examples out there. Sure they will look different but they are there. Why what was written was worthy of being a feature article in Nature Review physics is beyond me.
smartmic 4y ago
This cannot go out without mentioning the wonderful book: "The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation" by Jon Gertner https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11797471-the-idea-factory https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11797471-the-idea-factor... A highly recommended read!
- thakoppno 4y ago
  This book is really good but does not detail the Thompson and Ritchie portion of the labs history. It only mentions it in passing.
  - pbronez 4y ago
    In your opinion, what's the single best book to read about Bell Labs and absorb lessons that can be applied to building modern innovative organizations?
    - carom 4y ago
      Not about Bell Labs - https://benjaminreinhardt.com/parpa https://benjaminreinhardt.com/parpa
    - thakoppno 4y ago
      Probably the one already mentioned. I am currently reading A Thread Across the Ocean which was recommended on here as well.
  - ruslan 4y ago
    "UNIX: A History and a Memoir" by B. Kernighan features both Unix creation and Bell Labs culture of its time. https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/dp/1695978552/ref=sr_1_1?crid=QIT21LB2ECOS&keywords=unix+a+history+and+a+memoir&qid=1659736725&sprefix=UNIX+memoir%2Caps%2C206&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/d...
lbriner 4y ago
I might be way-off here but although Bell Labs produced the various transistors we have grown to love, these were a relatively simple set of variables with a known problem, it can only take so long testing these combinations of temperature, acidity, material etc. to get pointed in the right direction (no offence to these clever men, it was still hard). Quantum computing is orders of magnitude more complex and requires an enormous number of things to be tried individually and in combination and not using a strip of metal with a wire glued to it on a wooden bench but using enormously expensive and specialist equipment. I can see how the Automated Turk model would work for these types of problems. That said, I could imagine something like this working perhaps in another arena like solving drinking dirty water, developing country toilets, other engineering problems.
ramraj07 4y ago
They always keep trying though. Janelia Farms, now this “renewed” Cancer Moonshot program, and some commercial attempts like Calico, Chan Zuckerberg - each with their own goal but similar idea that if only they could recreate bell labs or the Manhattan project or the moon Landings.. They all fail at that goal and become just another research institute no better or worse than the entities they purport to replace. If you ask me why, it’s because they forget and do the one cardinal mistake - they hire professors from existing academia or industry. By the time you finish your PhD (leave alone the rest of Tenure track), it has been subconsciously indoctrinated in you to only care about YOURSELF. And worse, that the only way to do that is to specialize in a specific topic and then keep convincing everyone that this is the topic that will cure cancer, eradicate Covid, solve the South China Sea crisis and then finally eliminate aging altogether. In the Manhattan project, the only qualifications required were that you were a physicist and smart one at that. You gave up on your own research and focused on what needed to be done whatever field it may be. In the cancer moonshot program every guy they brought in tried to cure cancer with his own tool. They always want to do their own thing. Guess what nothing has been cured and hundreds of billions have disappeared. For better or mosty worse Neuralink seems to be the one place bucking the tend. Worse because they seem to be driven by a guy who really doesn’t care about humanity, is of extremely questionable ethics and what they’re trying to do will likely be used for bad things more than good anyway (once it leaves the clinical realm). If someone gives me $50MM and asked me to cure cancer I’d probably run around the US top institutions and identify truly smart 1-2 year PhD students and recruit them with insane amounts and try to Train them “in the old ways” so to speak.
- gtsnexp 4y ago
  Interesting thoughts, could you perhaps expand on what you mean by " Train them “in the old ways” " ?
  - roenxi 4y ago
    The core of academia is preserving a fairly specific culture for long periods of time - a culture of people who care more about logical argument than social pressure. In an academic setting the person with the strongest argument generally has a long term advantage. That gets compared to the real world where entities like the churches, political parties & <insert any groups> just don't work that way. Many organisations can go for multiple generations with charisma being a superior strategy to argument. In academics they remember the people who went it alone with the most technically correct argument in the face of general opposition (names like Galileo and Socrates spring to mind, along with legions of unpopular and unlikable men who nevertheless earn places of high honour for their contributions to the world's knowledge). The academics perpetuate that with a series of exclusionary, weird and crufty traditions that frequently date back centuries. It isn't perfect but it has proven an effective culture at grinding out slow productivity gains.
JackFr 4y ago
Big fan of Bell Labs, and yet as a retail consumer of telecom services the improvement in price, customer service and improvement of the product once ATT was broken up can’t be understated.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
What's the rationale for thinking that Bell Labs is special? Reading a general history of science, it's remarkable how often the "inventor" of something is a rich amatuer who happened to have the time and money to spend on looking into the next big thing, and often the connections to publicize it. Like, invent the microscope, then the people who can afford a microscope use it to look at things and discover them. How do we know Bell Labs isn't the institutional version of that? And if it is, then the modern version would just to be to build really expensive machines and give some smart people time to play with them. edit: looked up the invention of radio telescopy at Bell Labs: > Karl Jansky made the discovery of the first astronomical radio source serendipitously in the early 1930s. As a newly hired radio engineer with Bell Telephone Laboratories, he was assigned the task to investigate static that might interfere with short wave transatlantic voice transmissions. Using a large directional antenna, Jansky noticed that his analog pen-and-paper recording system kept recording a persistent repeating signal or "hiss" of unknown origin. Since the signal peaked about every 24 hours, Jansky first suspected the source of the interference was the Sun crossing the view of his directional antenna. Continued analysis, however, showed that the source was not following the 24-hour daily cycle of the Sun exactly, but instead repeating on a cycle of 23 hours and 56 minutes. Jansky discussed the puzzling phenomena with his friend, astrophysicist Albert Melvin Skellett, who pointed out that the observed time between the signal peaks was the exact length of a sidereal day; the time it took for "fixed" astronomical objects, such as a star, to pass in front of the antenna every time the Earth rotated.[2] By comparing his observations with optical astronomical maps, Jansky eventually concluded that the radiation source peaked when his antenna was aimed at the densest part of the Milky Way in the constellation of Sagittarius.[3] edit: similar story with laser, they were just building a new type of Maser, which several people and places were doing at the same time. Bell Labs controversially got the patent though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser#Maser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser#Maser > The question of just how to assign credit for inventing the laser remains unresolved by historians
j-bos 4y ago
Between today and the hey day of places like Bell Labs there is one fundamental difference: Where are the true believers? Let's use a HN reader as our baseline. You're like much smarter than the average. Do you want to woek incredibly hard, long, focused hours building another IP monopoly for somebody who's already OP? What if they reward you with a pat on the back? Is that personally appealing? Is there anyone or entity you love enough to slave under? I posit the difference in mentality is massive. A new Bell Labs would need to incenticize the people actually creating value, by "allowing" them to retain real stake in what they own.
- yodsanklai 4y ago
  > You're like much smarter than the average. Do you want to woek incredibly hard, long, focused hours building another IP monopoly for somebody who's already OP? Possibly. Tons of people do ti. > What if they reward you with a pat on the back? They reward the high-performers with risk-free, extremely attractive compensation. Very few people would be able to create value on their own.
  - j-bos 4y ago
    Thanks, My question though is, do you personally desire to be in that position?
    - yodsanklai 4y ago
      It's all about trade-off, aversion to risk, skill sets and so on...
    - Sakos 4y ago
      A stable job with great pay and the freedom to work on tough problems without having to worry about funding? Yeah, I'd love to be in that position. If you want the fruits of that labour to not be monopolized, then it needs to be regulated.
      - j-bos 4y ago
dgb23 4y ago
A related thought: I sometimes think how cool it would be if some of the empowering ideas from the smalltalk and lisp communities (think Xerox, Symbolics etc.) would push personal and end user computing forward. HCI seems generally stagnant or at least the real world influences. Apple managed to extract and distill the UX portions, but their products lack the empowerment aspect. Linux is kind of the opposite of that. I feel like there are so many problems with end user computing, specifically because every program defines its own little world. Nothing is integrated well, most things are incredibly hard and shaky to integrate and extend. So much time and effort is wasted because of lock-in effects and feature bloat. Also we’re missing out on large portions of users solving their own problems, bringing in their expertise and creativity to computing instead of their frustrations.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  There's a lot of assumptions in this comment about (a) what people want (b) what people are willing to do (c) the conceptual level at which "integration" can and should take place. Look at other tools (non-computational). The story there doesn't look much like what you're proposing. Maybe there's agreement on lumber and thread sizing, but in general, tools do not interoperate much. Whatever level of integration they do have comes mostly from having to interface with the physical universe. In addition, most people don't know how to use most tools, and things are broadly left to experts ("tradesmen").
jshaqaw 4y ago
Bell Labs in its prime was a marvel of human civilization. But let’s admit the economic conditions which made it possible. Pre antitrust Bell was an absolute monopoly. They could afford science projects with no economic returns because they were insulated from any economic pressures. The public paid for Bell Labs through high monopoly rents. Want Google to have a Bell Labs then designate it the nation’s sole internet monopoly (which I’m not really advocating and nobody else would either).
- lkrubner 4y ago
  And yet it is the opposite fact, strong anti-monopoly enforcement, which lead to such labs. Most big companies had big R&D efforts during the mid-20th Century, and that was because the government was unusually aggressive in its anti-monopoly efforts. Big companies couldn't simply buy small, innovative startups. Mergers were less common, and the government examined each for any possible threat to competition. Buying an up-and-coming competitor, to limit competition, was strictly forbidden. So if you wanted to be innovative, you had to build a big lab, and do all the innovation yourself.
  - Isamu 4y ago
    Because of strict regulations on Ma Bell, Unix was free with all the source code. Universities would request a copy and Ken would send a magtape. And so it began.
  - nindalf 4y ago
    It’s not like Ma Bell had any competitors they could buy, even if they wanted to. Because they were a complete monopoly. And despite this supposed strong anti-monopoly enforcement, they milked that monopoly for decades. But hey, at least we got C and Unix out of it.
    - biofox 4y ago
      C, UNIX, radio astronomy, cellular networks, the transistor, integrated circuits, the laser, photovoltaic cells, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, super resolution microscopy, optical tweezers, error-correcting codes, fibre optic networks...
exabrial 4y ago
Want R&D? Oppose monopolies. Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and possibly others all need to be broken up into smithereens. There seems to be bipartisan support for this but current leadership is once again distracted buying voters rather than solving hard problems (typical for no matter who is in power).
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  And yet TFA is in large part about how government backed monopolies can and did give rise to significant R&D ....
  - luckylion 4y ago
    It's always tough to tell, because we don't have a comparison to anything else. Maybe society would've seen more innovation under the same circumstances without the government backed monopoly. That you can get X units of innovation even within the government is not controversial, I think. It's whether you can get more than X units with the same input without government (or monopolist).
rr888 4y ago
Never forget NJ was the #1 tech hub. Edison was here, Bell labs, Princeton had Einstein and Von Neumann.
throwaway1777 4y ago
Rose tinted glasses much?
saboot 4y ago
Every once in a while these articles about Bell Labs or Google X, etc. come up, and I'm always amazed that our national network of government funded research labs are never brought up. Quantum Computing, new encryption methods, neuromorphic computing, tons of cool stuff. All stuff being worked on by some of the smartest people, at our national labs. Some are more security focused than others (Sandia, Los ALamos) but others (LBNL, LLNL) are very diverse in their research areas. And they collaborate with businesses to bring their work into the real world. Are they just not well known enough? It's a great alternative to universities that is more research focused, publication track records aren't as important.
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  When Bell Labs was doing cool stuff, few people knew about them. It's only retrospectively that they are famous, because we have all those historical tech figures that went there and got blown away. Then this bubble expended, and year later, it became public, common knowledge. It may happen the same way for the places you are talking about.
- bmitc 4y ago
  The national labs do pretty cool stuff, but I don't think it was as freeform as the original ARPA with Licklider and Bell Labs research. My understand is that the success of those programs where that they funded ideas and people and not projects. Nowadays, that is extremely rare, and for the most part, the national labs are highly focused on projects. There is not much speculative research on things that could fail. Really, the same goes for a lot of academia. That's not to say that the projects at the national labs aren't interesting. They're very interesting, difficult, and challenging. But it would be nice if cells within them had much longer time-frames of ten years and beyond for transformational technology. The other issue is that ARPA, Bell Labs, PARC Research, and the like were also catalyzed by their time. They were absolutely ahead of their time with the solutions they came up with, but the 20th century was ripe for the picking for transformational technologies.
- fastneutron 4y ago
  The national labs are a huge asset I wish more people knew about. You get to work on interesting, meaningful projects, are given access to all the expertise, training, and development resources you could reasonably want, and have a relatively secure job with a good work-life balance. I often talk to graduate students in STEM fields about their career prospects, many of whom are interested in software development, but are disillusioned with the career paths academia, FAANG, and the standard tech companies have to offer. Many of them just aren't aware of what the labs have to offer when I bring it up, unless their faculty advisor is in some way involved.
smm11 4y ago
About 15 years ago I had a neighbor who had worked at our local sprawling Bell mothership years before I met him. He was retired at maybe 45, and could talk Fortran until my ears bled. This was pre-smart-phone, but dude did not have Internet access either. The PC at his house I managed to spot one day I was helping move furniture around was a mid-80s "Turbo" button nondescript 486 box. He had a VCR he'd tape NFL games on, but would wait until they started to press "record."
- icedchai 4y ago
  I never knew anybody who actually programmed their VCR, either. My family was an 'early adopter' and had one of the first VHS models released back in the 80's. Are you sure you aren't exaggerating? 486's weren't released until 1989. Almost nobody actually had one until the early 90's.
  - smm11 4y ago
    It was 2005 or 06 I saw this computer at his place.
fatjokes 4y ago
https://youtu.be/IFfdnFOiXUU https://youtu.be/IFfdnFOiXUU Half cringe corporate jingle, half mind-blowing list of accomplishments with a chorus punctuated by Nobel prizes.
frozencell 4y ago
Why is Bell Labs owned by Nokia?
- jpmattia 4y ago
  ATT Bell Labs -> Lucent Bell Labs -> Alcatel Bell Labs -> Nokia Bell Labs. The first step was a corporate breakup, the others were corporate purchases. (I was there during Lucent days.)
russellbeattie 4y ago
Reading about the history of the transistor, it's truly amazing that AT&T basically just gave the technology away to the world for a single $25k licensing fee. Nominally, they were hoping to benefit from other company's innovations, but mostly they were worried about protecting their government sanctioned monopoly and didn't want to be seen as abusing it. That last bit isn't mentioned in most online summaries, but was an actual decision made at the highest levels of the company. So as long as you weren't in a communist nation, you could license the tech, including a nine-day long seminar on the details, and another a year later detailing the manufacturing process. [1] In Europe, there was an independently developed point-transfer transistor called the Transitron created by a couple German physicists, and developed as an amplifier by a Westinghouse subsidiary in France. But the Bell Labs bipolar junction transistor was more advanced and based on a better understanding of the underlying effect. (Shockley was a paranoid asshole, but he was also a very capable scientist.) Imagine if the US had a monopoly on transistor technology for a decade or so? No flood of cheaper Japanese electronics, no competitors for the microchip, etc. It's truly an astounding gift, or massive blunder depending on your point of view. 1. https://www.computerhistory.org/siliconengine/bell-labs-licenses-transistor-technology/ https://www.computerhistory.org/siliconengine/bell-labs-lice...
ruslan 4y ago
Strangely no one mentions IBM which holds half the global patents and has R&D labs almost in any country of the world.
mdnahas 4y ago
My father worked at Bell Labs, with Thompson, Ritchie, Aho, etc.. My dad says Bell Labs was the result of the monopoly laws restricting AT&T. The government forced AT&T's prices to be based on its costs from 2 years previously with a fixed rate of profit. So, prices were something like 104% of its costs from 2 years earlier (or something like that). That meant that the only way that AT&T could increase its profits was by innovating to lower its costs. For example, if research lowered its costs by 2% per year, the company's profits would double! Thus, research was a top priority for AT&T and Bell Labs was well-funded and well-managed. (BTW, I loved "take your kid to work day" at Bell Labs --- I got to use computers with 5-button mice and play hilarious computer games. I was also given a copy of "the old testament" (pre-ANSI "The C Programming Langauge" book) in high school. My dad worked in hardware and really enjoyed his time there helping to design the CRISP and Hobbit processors.)

173 points by gtsnexp 4y ago

I think the number of good ideas waiting to be discovered has decreased. We arent gonna get the same rate of innovation.

thrown_22 4y ago

That tax was mentioned exactly once in the article is pretty sad. The corporate tax rate was over 50% for the period and R&D was a way to offset that. Today there is no need since innovations in accounting have lead to the extinction of profits in the US.

andbberger 4y ago

kind of ridiculous to write this without talking about janelia

closedloop129 4y ago
>some interdisciplinary problems are difficult to address in existing research settings, and Janelia was built as a separate institution to address such problems in neurobiology. >The center was designed to emulate the unconstrained and collaborative environments at AT&T Bell Laboratories and Cambridge's Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Researchers are on six-year contracts and fully internally funded, independent of traditional research grant funding.[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janelia_Research_Campus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janelia_Research_Campus
a-dub 4y ago
janelia is focused on a specific domain. an interesting domain, for sure, but the author is interested in quantum computing and that would be a shoehorn for janelia's mission at best.

sgt101 4y ago

>"In quantum computing thinking is shifting from a government-funded big science approach to an exploration and exploitation of the more dynamic start-up innovation ecosystem. “We need to try out different things, and use the innovation ecosystem to test, learn and build machines." this is weird because it's very clear that the basic science of quantum computing is far from done. Investors can pour as much money as they like into a series of holes in the ground, but if the universe says no then nothing will come of it. We do not know how to solve many of the fundamental problems of scaling a QC, until we do I think this is really just stupid. The QC startup scene looks like 50 Theranos's in search of a lawsuit to me; it's going to be 30 years before serious and usable machines appear - if ever.

noduerme 4y ago
the difference between a QC and Theranos is you can't prove a quantum computer isn't actually working as advertised.
- Barrin92 4y ago
  if I got a startup grant for every idea someone can't prove doesn't work I'd be the most well funded individual on the planet
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  Shor you can: can it break RSA? If yes, QC. If not, not QC.
  - noduerme 4y ago
    What if it's just able to break a particular RSA file after several billion attempts to keep it running long enough?
- sgt101 4y ago
  I was quite irritated by the debunking of Sycamore's result recently; I had the impression from the pr (and the paper) that they had obtained exact results, but the truth is that these results were approximate. That's totally different. Previously I had dug out of the papers that it takes 48hrs to boot the machine and that it can only run for a few hours... and that was disappointing enough. Also the obscuring of the impact of quantum fidelity on the Eagle chip from IBM. Ok, it's got 124 qbits - but you end up with a max circuit size of 24 which is similar to the previous 48 qbit generation (I think that one is called dodo or something). Anyway, it looks like the absolute best spin is put on everything and the actual problems are being ducked - probably because they have to be because they are way beyond the current SOA.

202206241203 4y ago

International industrial espionage was less of a problem back then.

Jensson 4y ago
International industrial spies doesn't seem to be needed today, USA gladly gave away most of their technology to China for free. Now the highest end silicon is made and developed in Asia, why would they spy on USA?
FateOfNations 4y ago
eeh... the Soviets pretty much wrote the textbook on industrial espionage during the Cold War.

closedloop129 4y ago

>Quantum computing is in a similar position today I don't think that the position is similar. The level of 'ingenuity' of the overall system was lower. Fewer men were needed to understand each and every aspect of the system. Now, each scientist is more specialized which means that they individually see less of the system. Additionally, the system is more complex. Together, this means that many more scientists have to be coordinated to make progress. This is further complicated by knowledge protections. Bell Labs most likely had all relevant patents and copy rights. To reach the same level of fluidity of knowledge, an additional army of patent lawyers is needed. An additional problem is that targeting quantum computer specifically takes away from the idea of 'no deadlines, objectives or progress reports'. This will be especially a problem in those proposed 'focused research organizations'. What I don't want to understand is how Google could come so close and fail. They have 10% projects and moonshots. They have the monopoly-like income stream to fund it. But instead of creating progress, their products seem to get worse and worse. How could one sustainably fund something like Bell Labs with company profits? *edit: The more interesting question: Since the target of the Bell Labs, the 'universal connectivity' has been achieved, do we still need centralized labs for the next relevant innovations? Doesn't universal connectivity give us the potential to come up with something better? I believe that a social network is missing that is built to create scientific progress.

dr_dshiv 4y ago
> a social network is missing that is built to create scientific progress Like a Royal Society?
- closedloop129 4y ago
  That would be very exclusive, wouldn't it? The problem is that 'every mathematician has only a few tricks' [1]. This means that every scientific problem should be exposed to as many scientists as possible, coordinated in a way that maximizes the number of tricks that are tried. To me, this suggests that something like the TikTok algorithm should bring scientists and problems together. The problem is that each problem is not a 30 second video that is easy to consume, but a problem that requires some amount of studying before it is approachable. There is most likely not much to invent, e.g. there is already stack exchange to answer questions, and Khan Academy to gain basic knowledge, but like YT before TikTok, there is no algorithm that brings it all together. [1] https://mathoverflow.net/questions/363119/every-mathematician-has-only-a-few-tricks https://mathoverflow.net/questions/363119/every-mathematicia...

TabTwo 4y ago

I work in Stuttgart on the campus that once was SEL, then Alcatel and then Nokia. There was also one building with the big letters „Bell Labs“. Sadly they took the letters down about a year ago since all the buildings get assimilated by Porsche.

zwieback 4y ago
Interesting - I was born in New Jersey in 66 when my dad was working at Bell Labs but I grew up in Stuttgart. Had no idea there was a "Bell Labs" there
- TabTwo 4y ago
  small world 48.83174624272352, 9.147884320080053 The smaller building to the right.

ackbar03 4y ago

I always felt universities should have been the ones to take on the roles similar to bell labs. They receive government funding and are focused on fundamental scientific research. Now it seems most academics are (understandably) preoccupied with publications and, in computer science at least, breakthrough deep learning research is from rich tech companies like Google and Facebook. I wonder what happened.

govg 4y ago
In computer science, or more specifically in deep learning, there is a high correlation between resources you can spend / use and progress you can make. This is why all the major tech firms have a leg up, they have internal computing power and data that is impossible for any one university to have. It is also the case that a lot of professors and even students have temporary appointments with tech firms, for exactly this reason. If you look at other fields which are not as resource intensive, university can and do contribute to the state of the art. Especially in areas like theory, where even though MSR etc do cutting edge research, the bulk of work is done at universities.
- caddemon 4y ago
  I don't think this is the only reason though. (preclinical) Bioscience experiments can be extremely expensive and yet they remain pretty concentrated at universities, for better or worse. I don't know about the state of funding in protein folding specifically, but knowing about the kind of funding that some other high profile bio labs can get I am skeptical that material resources were the main difference between alpha fold and what the prior academic lit could do, for example.
bregma 4y ago
I guess it's important to socialize product development in order to maximize the private profit of those few individuals who control the means of production.
jmclnx 4y ago
I agree, but I think the article had the reason, "Stable Funding". The few profs I have run into over the years largest worry is getting grants. Thus the preoccupation with publications. Where I work, it seems this trend is hitting commercial labs too, researchers are slowly being forced to "produce". Unless something changes, research for its own sake seems to be a rare thing, at least in the US.

dramm 4y ago

What a bizzare disjoint article. Bell Labs, Quantum Computing, racial discrimination, blah, blah. There are analogs to Bell Labs today, including in Google and other working on Quantum Computing, and machine learning, and self driving vehicles, and... With one similarity that large (possibly monopoly) financial power allows companies to make these long term expensive investments. If somebody in Nature wanted to opine on Bell Labs like organizations they only need to look at the many examples out there. Sure they will look different but they are there. Why what was written was worthy of being a feature article in Nature Review physics is beyond me.

smartmic 4y ago

This cannot go out without mentioning the wonderful book: "The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation" by Jon Gertner https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11797471-the-idea-factory https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11797471-the-idea-factor... A highly recommended read!

thakoppno 4y ago
This book is really good but does not detail the Thompson and Ritchie portion of the labs history. It only mentions it in passing.
- pbronez 4y ago
  In your opinion, what's the single best book to read about Bell Labs and absorb lessons that can be applied to building modern innovative organizations?
  - carom 4y ago
    Not about Bell Labs - https://benjaminreinhardt.com/parpa https://benjaminreinhardt.com/parpa
  - thakoppno 4y ago
    Probably the one already mentioned. I am currently reading A Thread Across the Ocean which was recommended on here as well.
- ruslan 4y ago
  "UNIX: A History and a Memoir" by B. Kernighan features both Unix creation and Bell Labs culture of its time. https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/dp/1695978552/ref=sr_1_1?crid=QIT21LB2ECOS&keywords=unix+a+history+and+a+memoir&qid=1659736725&sprefix=UNIX+memoir%2Caps%2C206&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/d...

lbriner 4y ago

I might be way-off here but although Bell Labs produced the various transistors we have grown to love, these were a relatively simple set of variables with a known problem, it can only take so long testing these combinations of temperature, acidity, material etc. to get pointed in the right direction (no offence to these clever men, it was still hard). Quantum computing is orders of magnitude more complex and requires an enormous number of things to be tried individually and in combination and not using a strip of metal with a wire glued to it on a wooden bench but using enormously expensive and specialist equipment. I can see how the Automated Turk model would work for these types of problems. That said, I could imagine something like this working perhaps in another arena like solving drinking dirty water, developing country toilets, other engineering problems.

ramraj07 4y ago

They always keep trying though. Janelia Farms, now this “renewed” Cancer Moonshot program, and some commercial attempts like Calico, Chan Zuckerberg - each with their own goal but similar idea that if only they could recreate bell labs or the Manhattan project or the moon Landings.. They all fail at that goal and become just another research institute no better or worse than the entities they purport to replace. If you ask me why, it’s because they forget and do the one cardinal mistake - they hire professors from existing academia or industry. By the time you finish your PhD (leave alone the rest of Tenure track), it has been subconsciously indoctrinated in you to only care about YOURSELF. And worse, that the only way to do that is to specialize in a specific topic and then keep convincing everyone that this is the topic that will cure cancer, eradicate Covid, solve the South China Sea crisis and then finally eliminate aging altogether. In the Manhattan project, the only qualifications required were that you were a physicist and smart one at that. You gave up on your own research and focused on what needed to be done whatever field it may be. In the cancer moonshot program every guy they brought in tried to cure cancer with his own tool. They always want to do their own thing. Guess what nothing has been cured and hundreds of billions have disappeared. For better or mosty worse Neuralink seems to be the one place bucking the tend. Worse because they seem to be driven by a guy who really doesn’t care about humanity, is of extremely questionable ethics and what they’re trying to do will likely be used for bad things more than good anyway (once it leaves the clinical realm). If someone gives me $50MM and asked me to cure cancer I’d probably run around the US top institutions and identify truly smart 1-2 year PhD students and recruit them with insane amounts and try to Train them “in the old ways” so to speak.

gtsnexp 4y ago
Interesting thoughts, could you perhaps expand on what you mean by " Train them “in the old ways” " ?
- roenxi 4y ago
  The core of academia is preserving a fairly specific culture for long periods of time - a culture of people who care more about logical argument than social pressure. In an academic setting the person with the strongest argument generally has a long term advantage. That gets compared to the real world where entities like the churches, political parties & <insert any groups> just don't work that way. Many organisations can go for multiple generations with charisma being a superior strategy to argument. In academics they remember the people who went it alone with the most technically correct argument in the face of general opposition (names like Galileo and Socrates spring to mind, along with legions of unpopular and unlikable men who nevertheless earn places of high honour for their contributions to the world's knowledge). The academics perpetuate that with a series of exclusionary, weird and crufty traditions that frequently date back centuries. It isn't perfect but it has proven an effective culture at grinding out slow productivity gains.

JackFr 4y ago

Big fan of Bell Labs, and yet as a retail consumer of telecom services the improvement in price, customer service and improvement of the product once ATT was broken up can’t be understated.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

What's the rationale for thinking that Bell Labs is special? Reading a general history of science, it's remarkable how often the "inventor" of something is a rich amatuer who happened to have the time and money to spend on looking into the next big thing, and often the connections to publicize it. Like, invent the microscope, then the people who can afford a microscope use it to look at things and discover them. How do we know Bell Labs isn't the institutional version of that? And if it is, then the modern version would just to be to build really expensive machines and give some smart people time to play with them. edit: looked up the invention of radio telescopy at Bell Labs: > Karl Jansky made the discovery of the first astronomical radio source serendipitously in the early 1930s. As a newly hired radio engineer with Bell Telephone Laboratories, he was assigned the task to investigate static that might interfere with short wave transatlantic voice transmissions. Using a large directional antenna, Jansky noticed that his analog pen-and-paper recording system kept recording a persistent repeating signal or "hiss" of unknown origin. Since the signal peaked about every 24 hours, Jansky first suspected the source of the interference was the Sun crossing the view of his directional antenna. Continued analysis, however, showed that the source was not following the 24-hour daily cycle of the Sun exactly, but instead repeating on a cycle of 23 hours and 56 minutes. Jansky discussed the puzzling phenomena with his friend, astrophysicist Albert Melvin Skellett, who pointed out that the observed time between the signal peaks was the exact length of a sidereal day; the time it took for "fixed" astronomical objects, such as a star, to pass in front of the antenna every time the Earth rotated.[2] By comparing his observations with optical astronomical maps, Jansky eventually concluded that the radiation source peaked when his antenna was aimed at the densest part of the Milky Way in the constellation of Sagittarius.[3] edit: similar story with laser, they were just building a new type of Maser, which several people and places were doing at the same time. Bell Labs controversially got the patent though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser#Maser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser#Maser > The question of just how to assign credit for inventing the laser remains unresolved by historians

j-bos 4y ago

Between today and the hey day of places like Bell Labs there is one fundamental difference: Where are the true believers? Let's use a HN reader as our baseline. You're like much smarter than the average. Do you want to woek incredibly hard, long, focused hours building another IP monopoly for somebody who's already OP? What if they reward you with a pat on the back? Is that personally appealing? Is there anyone or entity you love enough to slave under? I posit the difference in mentality is massive. A new Bell Labs would need to incenticize the people actually creating value, by "allowing" them to retain real stake in what they own.

yodsanklai 4y ago
> You're like much smarter than the average. Do you want to woek incredibly hard, long, focused hours building another IP monopoly for somebody who's already OP? Possibly. Tons of people do ti. > What if they reward you with a pat on the back? They reward the high-performers with risk-free, extremely attractive compensation. Very few people would be able to create value on their own.
- j-bos 4y ago
  Thanks, My question though is, do you personally desire to be in that position?
  - yodsanklai 4y ago
    It's all about trade-off, aversion to risk, skill sets and so on...
  - Sakos 4y ago
    A stable job with great pay and the freedom to work on tough problems without having to worry about funding? Yeah, I'd love to be in that position. If you want the fruits of that labour to not be monopolized, then it needs to be regulated.
    - j-bos 4y ago

dgb23 4y ago

A related thought: I sometimes think how cool it would be if some of the empowering ideas from the smalltalk and lisp communities (think Xerox, Symbolics etc.) would push personal and end user computing forward. HCI seems generally stagnant or at least the real world influences. Apple managed to extract and distill the UX portions, but their products lack the empowerment aspect. Linux is kind of the opposite of that. I feel like there are so many problems with end user computing, specifically because every program defines its own little world. Nothing is integrated well, most things are incredibly hard and shaky to integrate and extend. So much time and effort is wasted because of lock-in effects and feature bloat. Also we’re missing out on large portions of users solving their own problems, bringing in their expertise and creativity to computing instead of their frustrations.

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
There's a lot of assumptions in this comment about (a) what people want (b) what people are willing to do (c) the conceptual level at which "integration" can and should take place. Look at other tools (non-computational). The story there doesn't look much like what you're proposing. Maybe there's agreement on lumber and thread sizing, but in general, tools do not interoperate much. Whatever level of integration they do have comes mostly from having to interface with the physical universe. In addition, most people don't know how to use most tools, and things are broadly left to experts ("tradesmen").

jshaqaw 4y ago

Bell Labs in its prime was a marvel of human civilization. But let’s admit the economic conditions which made it possible. Pre antitrust Bell was an absolute monopoly. They could afford science projects with no economic returns because they were insulated from any economic pressures. The public paid for Bell Labs through high monopoly rents. Want Google to have a Bell Labs then designate it the nation’s sole internet monopoly (which I’m not really advocating and nobody else would either).

lkrubner 4y ago
And yet it is the opposite fact, strong anti-monopoly enforcement, which lead to such labs. Most big companies had big R&D efforts during the mid-20th Century, and that was because the government was unusually aggressive in its anti-monopoly efforts. Big companies couldn't simply buy small, innovative startups. Mergers were less common, and the government examined each for any possible threat to competition. Buying an up-and-coming competitor, to limit competition, was strictly forbidden. So if you wanted to be innovative, you had to build a big lab, and do all the innovation yourself.
- Isamu 4y ago
  Because of strict regulations on Ma Bell, Unix was free with all the source code. Universities would request a copy and Ken would send a magtape. And so it began.
- nindalf 4y ago
  It’s not like Ma Bell had any competitors they could buy, even if they wanted to. Because they were a complete monopoly. And despite this supposed strong anti-monopoly enforcement, they milked that monopoly for decades. But hey, at least we got C and Unix out of it.
  - biofox 4y ago
    C, UNIX, radio astronomy, cellular networks, the transistor, integrated circuits, the laser, photovoltaic cells, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, super resolution microscopy, optical tweezers, error-correcting codes, fibre optic networks...

exabrial 4y ago

Want R&D? Oppose monopolies. Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and possibly others all need to be broken up into smithereens. There seems to be bipartisan support for this but current leadership is once again distracted buying voters rather than solving hard problems (typical for no matter who is in power).

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
And yet TFA is in large part about how government backed monopolies can and did give rise to significant R&D ....
- luckylion 4y ago
  It's always tough to tell, because we don't have a comparison to anything else. Maybe society would've seen more innovation under the same circumstances without the government backed monopoly. That you can get X units of innovation even within the government is not controversial, I think. It's whether you can get more than X units with the same input without government (or monopolist).

rr888 4y ago

Never forget NJ was the #1 tech hub. Edison was here, Bell labs, Princeton had Einstein and Von Neumann.

throwaway1777 4y ago

Rose tinted glasses much?

saboot 4y ago

Every once in a while these articles about Bell Labs or Google X, etc. come up, and I'm always amazed that our national network of government funded research labs are never brought up. Quantum Computing, new encryption methods, neuromorphic computing, tons of cool stuff. All stuff being worked on by some of the smartest people, at our national labs. Some are more security focused than others (Sandia, Los ALamos) but others (LBNL, LLNL) are very diverse in their research areas. And they collaborate with businesses to bring their work into the real world. Are they just not well known enough? It's a great alternative to universities that is more research focused, publication track records aren't as important.

BiteCode_dev 4y ago
When Bell Labs was doing cool stuff, few people knew about them. It's only retrospectively that they are famous, because we have all those historical tech figures that went there and got blown away. Then this bubble expended, and year later, it became public, common knowledge. It may happen the same way for the places you are talking about.
bmitc 4y ago
The national labs do pretty cool stuff, but I don't think it was as freeform as the original ARPA with Licklider and Bell Labs research. My understand is that the success of those programs where that they funded ideas and people and not projects. Nowadays, that is extremely rare, and for the most part, the national labs are highly focused on projects. There is not much speculative research on things that could fail. Really, the same goes for a lot of academia. That's not to say that the projects at the national labs aren't interesting. They're very interesting, difficult, and challenging. But it would be nice if cells within them had much longer time-frames of ten years and beyond for transformational technology. The other issue is that ARPA, Bell Labs, PARC Research, and the like were also catalyzed by their time. They were absolutely ahead of their time with the solutions they came up with, but the 20th century was ripe for the picking for transformational technologies.
fastneutron 4y ago
The national labs are a huge asset I wish more people knew about. You get to work on interesting, meaningful projects, are given access to all the expertise, training, and development resources you could reasonably want, and have a relatively secure job with a good work-life balance. I often talk to graduate students in STEM fields about their career prospects, many of whom are interested in software development, but are disillusioned with the career paths academia, FAANG, and the standard tech companies have to offer. Many of them just aren't aware of what the labs have to offer when I bring it up, unless their faculty advisor is in some way involved.

smm11 4y ago

About 15 years ago I had a neighbor who had worked at our local sprawling Bell mothership years before I met him. He was retired at maybe 45, and could talk Fortran until my ears bled. This was pre-smart-phone, but dude did not have Internet access either. The PC at his house I managed to spot one day I was helping move furniture around was a mid-80s "Turbo" button nondescript 486 box. He had a VCR he'd tape NFL games on, but would wait until they started to press "record."

icedchai 4y ago
I never knew anybody who actually programmed their VCR, either. My family was an 'early adopter' and had one of the first VHS models released back in the 80's. Are you sure you aren't exaggerating? 486's weren't released until 1989. Almost nobody actually had one until the early 90's.
- smm11 4y ago
  It was 2005 or 06 I saw this computer at his place.

fatjokes 4y ago

https://youtu.be/IFfdnFOiXUU https://youtu.be/IFfdnFOiXUU Half cringe corporate jingle, half mind-blowing list of accomplishments with a chorus punctuated by Nobel prizes.

frozencell 4y ago

Why is Bell Labs owned by Nokia?

jpmattia 4y ago
ATT Bell Labs -> Lucent Bell Labs -> Alcatel Bell Labs -> Nokia Bell Labs. The first step was a corporate breakup, the others were corporate purchases. (I was there during Lucent days.)

russellbeattie 4y ago

Reading about the history of the transistor, it's truly amazing that AT&T basically just gave the technology away to the world for a single $25k licensing fee. Nominally, they were hoping to benefit from other company's innovations, but mostly they were worried about protecting their government sanctioned monopoly and didn't want to be seen as abusing it. That last bit isn't mentioned in most online summaries, but was an actual decision made at the highest levels of the company. So as long as you weren't in a communist nation, you could license the tech, including a nine-day long seminar on the details, and another a year later detailing the manufacturing process. [1] In Europe, there was an independently developed point-transfer transistor called the Transitron created by a couple German physicists, and developed as an amplifier by a Westinghouse subsidiary in France. But the Bell Labs bipolar junction transistor was more advanced and based on a better understanding of the underlying effect. (Shockley was a paranoid asshole, but he was also a very capable scientist.) Imagine if the US had a monopoly on transistor technology for a decade or so? No flood of cheaper Japanese electronics, no competitors for the microchip, etc. It's truly an astounding gift, or massive blunder depending on your point of view. 1. https://www.computerhistory.org/siliconengine/bell-labs-licenses-transistor-technology/ https://www.computerhistory.org/siliconengine/bell-labs-lice...

ruslan 4y ago

Strangely no one mentions IBM which holds half the global patents and has R&D labs almost in any country of the world.

mdnahas 4y ago

My father worked at Bell Labs, with Thompson, Ritchie, Aho, etc.. My dad says Bell Labs was the result of the monopoly laws restricting AT&T. The government forced AT&T's prices to be based on its costs from 2 years previously with a fixed rate of profit. So, prices were something like 104% of its costs from 2 years earlier (or something like that). That meant that the only way that AT&T could increase its profits was by innovating to lower its costs. For example, if research lowered its costs by 2% per year, the company's profits would double! Thus, research was a top priority for AT&T and Bell Labs was well-funded and well-managed. (BTW, I loved "take your kid to work day" at Bell Labs --- I got to use computers with 5-button mice and play hilarious computer games. I was also given a copy of "the old testament" (pre-ANSI "The C Programming Langauge" book) in high school. My dad worked in hardware and really enjoyed his time there helping to design the CRISP and Hobbit processors.)