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.
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.
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.
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?
I recently designed a PCB for a custom built 3D printer for a tenth of the cost (fab + assembly) of a board of similar complexity I made nearly a decade ago and the final cost of the 3d printer (based on an open source design) was a 20th of the price of the Stratasys Dimension Elite I purchased, also a decade ago. One of my next projects is to make a DIY semiconductor fab using just TI DLP micromirrors and a microscope because I want to experiment with DIY bio microfluidics - all based on technology and knowledge so common that it has trickled down to the hobbyist level. We've now got people building electron microscopes and genetically modifying organisms in their garages!
The robots I've worked with in clinical diagnostics are much more advanced now than they were a decade ago and are now cheap enough for the average lab. The metrology instruments and machining tools necessary to make high precision parts have become commonplace at manufacturers, factory automation robotics like 6-DoF arms have trickled down to the researcher and hobbyist level in the last 5 years, and agriculture is currently going through it's n-th revolution with software, remote sensing, and data science.
Every time I leave an industry for a few years and come back, the pace of change is staggering - it's just hidden behind the iron curtain.
Definitely something I need to keep thinking about. Biology probably is the next area to see some giant advances like physics did 80 years ago.
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.
To your broader point, it's not hard to find some specific domains of machine learning where there have been huge advances. But zoom out and look at the broader picture and the results aren't so impressive.
The question is: will the potential be fullfiled.
Maybe, given the many startups doing real work with machine learning(besides the many that just hype), it's reasonable to guess that that the potential Will be fullfiled.
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.
Like if working with a profit incentive is doing social good.
The issue is that a valuable endeavor doesn't have to be good, e.g. maybe social media.
The stock market is supported by ample goverment intervention, the rest of society not at all. Just consider the major stock market indices and compare that with continuing unemployment claims.
Now you have a feedback mechanism that supports investment banking at the expense of everything else, and here we are.
Mind clarifying this with specifics?
Compare that to bringing a new pharmaceutical compound into the clinic. The time from discovery to approval is ten years, with a billion spent over the lifetime of the project, and the success rate is ~ 30 %, most compounds fail. For innovative projects this is compounded by the fact that you need to do target discovery and validation, something you can't patent but every competitor will make use of. No surprise the pace of innovation has slowed down.
Huge chunks of the indexes are now made up of a small handful of stocks, and as the stocks (FANNGS) go up so the indexes buy more, and guess what. They go up. And this will carry on, and on, until at some point a structural failure will occur. This may well be fraud, it may be government (not even the US government) intervention, it may be a supply chain failure or a market destruction. For example in November there may be a civil war in the USA... At that point the stocks will fall and if they fall disproportionately (which they will if the artificial pump that is floating them up turns off) then the indexes will unwind their positions... in fact they have to unwind. And this will glut the market, which will force more unwinding.
This is made worse by how the indexes actually track the market - you see, guess what! They (often) don't actually buy the stock! They trade synthetic securities over the movements of the stock with counterparties... and these counterparties never ever ever fail - they are solid players like investment banks, like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch and RBS. So - safe as houses.
Sometimes this breaks down because you make other people's lives worse in order to make the 100,000 better, i.e. externalities.
But continuing to get funding for doing a social good means you're convincing someone you're making someone's else's life better(i.e. nonprofits). The problem is sometimes this convincing is entirely unrelated to actually making people's lives better.
Or you're convincing a beaurocrat that you'll make his life better. And hopefully the incentive structures are aligned such that this involves making someone's else's life better. But this can be incredibly tricky with the layers of reporting up to some political appointee who reports to a politician who reports to the people. And any break in incentives or more likely attention along the way can misalign the work with social good.
Social good is undefined, so it ends up meaning whatever the speaker wants it to mean. Lots of university professors think critical theory is socially good, and lots more people strongly disagree. There's no actual way to resolve that dispute because academia is disconnected from any kind of reality check.
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
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.
I heard recently about the Scythe Project. Apparently, the scythe was never invented in some places, including India. That's a long time for the lucky guy to never show up.
> 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