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A comment on IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI News. Parent comment

Re:IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI... by sidewndr46 on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @01:56PM (#35791604)
What good is a R&D performed that can't be commercialized? To me, that is just good research followed by bad development. No one investing in IBM is expecting it to be a public works project.

Lookup the saga of HP's memristor followed by "The Machine" for a similar story.

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Re:IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI... by TedDoesntTalk on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @02:31PM (#35792138)
> What good is a R&D performed that can't be commercialized?

Then I guess we can throw out Xerox Parc's NLS because they never commercialized "windows, hypertext, graphics, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor." They were commercialized by others later on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

We can also throw out most psych, social science, archeology, and history R&D, too.

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Re:IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI... by willcipriano on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @02:58PM (#35792484)
> We can also throw out most psych, social science

Yes.

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Re:IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI... by anthk on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @04:36PM (#35793832)
First at all, they had to be called 'sciences'. They aren't.
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Re:IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI... by pinewurst on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @03:44PM (#35793089)
NLS came from SRI not Xerox PARC. NLS was in fact commercialized and sold by Tymshare.
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Re:IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI... by smcin on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @05:14PM (#35794304)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLS_(computer_system)

Fun fact: funded by ARPA

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Re:IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI... by fallingknife on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @05:52PM (#35794738)
Would love to know what the last major breakthrough in social science / psych R&D was.

Archeology / history, on the other hand, definitely have some pretty awesome finds.

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Re:IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI... by abakker on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @10:41PM (#35797109)
Maybe UBI? I mean, hard to say it's been tested enough, but that feels like an answer to this question.
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Re:IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI... by dralley on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @06:44PM (#35795195)
Also 2000 years of Mathematicians talking about Prime Numbers before someone came up with the idea of cryptography using prime numbers.

And the laser, which took a few decades to find an application.

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Re:IBM to pause hiring in plan to replace 7,800 jobs with AI... by 6510 on Tuesday May 02, 2023 @05:47PM (#35794678)
> What good is a R&D performed that can't be commercialized?

It attracts playful wizards. If you get enough of those no amount of zombies can beat them.

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