My father worked at Bell Labs. (Take your kid to work day was a blast for me!)
My father points out that the monopoly deal with the US govt turned Bell Labs the profit center. AT&T charged its customers a fixed percentage of its costs … from 3 years prior. The only way to make more profit was to make today’s costs cheaper than those of 3 years ago. This lead to: innovate, innovate, innovate.
Many companies admire research. For AT&T at that time, it was their lifeblood.
thaumasiotes 9 days ago [-]
> AT&T charged its customers a fixed percentage of its costs … from 3 years prior. The only way to make more profit was to make today’s costs cheaper than those of 3 years ago.
No, this still allows the standard method of increasing profits under a cost-plus structure: all it takes is increasing your costs. The more you spend, the better off you are. Doesn't matter what you get for your money.
With a three-year lag, you need to be able to pay your operating costs out of savings over a three-year window, but that's it. It's purely a cash-flow restriction.
By contrast, lowering your costs will make you a one-time cash bonus this year, at the cost of making you permanently poorer. This is not a sensible trade to make.
natpalmer1776 9 days ago [-]
Unless you double dip by increasing your on-paper costs via R&D / capex and decreasing your required expenditure via optimization of the former (while also increasing your revenue potential via infrastructure buildout). While on paper your costs are going up, in practice your profit potential is skyrocketing yoy.
thaumasiotes 8 days ago [-]
How so? You have to keep paying for everything, or your profits will be taken away. Your profit potential is always and only limited by your ability to cover costs in advance. Saving on necessary expenditures brings you zero benefit, because any necessary expenditure that you eliminate must be replaced by an unnecessary one, or profits will go down instead of up.
natpalmer1776 8 days ago [-]
The same way the tech industry currently does it. You spend all your profit on research, product development, marketing, etc. to increase your overall revenue when (in the short term) you could simply stop spending money on all those things and keep only enough engineers on-staff to keep your existing products stable and customers happy.
By comparison, a construction company cannot stop buying materials in order to continue generating revenue, and they cannot reduce their workforce significantly and continue taking on the same types of jobs.
In the instance of Bell Labs, those researchers were the 'unnecessary to business' route through which to increase revenue (by both increasing costs and also building a technology-based moat) and since those who control a company typically only profit by 'skimming the cream' increasing revenue without increasing profit seems like an excellent way to increase the value of the company to those who are interested in doing so.
MichaelZuo 9 days ago [-]
This, but also more suprisingly, this is the only comment out of 90 that offers genuine insight instead of repeating pre-existing talking points…
ants_everywhere 9 days ago [-]
It's interesting to note that Bell Labs started doing its most famous work around the same time quantum electrodynamics was hitting its stride, Von Neumann was doing his work in computer science, Eniac was being built, and the Manhattan project was going on. This was around 1945.
Richard Hamming worked on the Manhattan Project, and John Tukey developed fast Fourier transforms (FFT) in service of the US nuclear program. John Von Neumann shows up as a hidden presence, working with Tukey when Tukey coined the term "bit", and informing Claude Shannon that the mathematical quantity he was working on was a special case of the concept of entropy.
There are periods of history like this where major breakthroughs (quantum mechanics and also what we now call computer science) enable new technologies (like physically realizable Turing machines) and those technologies are suddenly in high demand (because of WWII and then the threat nuclear war). Suddenly there are lots of new ideas, insane amounts of money, and the survival of humanity requires getting things done.
The other interesting thing to me is that Bell had experience with communication at scale due to their telephone networks. And a lot of early computer hardware and software concepts echo designs from the telegraphy days. Think of things like UART and the progression from telegraphy to teleprinters to keyboards. Concepts like Clos Networks from the 1930s are still used in modern data centers today. So having all these large communication problems at scale fed into what we now think of as computer science but really predated computers.
So you may not get the same mileage asking the right questions as Bell Labs did. The environment they were working in was pretty remarkable. We may be getting there eventually with AI, and perhaps climate change will be a pressing enough problem the way nuclear war was.
Animats 9 days ago [-]
> The environment they were working in was pretty remarkable.
Yes. The heyday of big corporate research labs was roughly from WWII until the mid-1980s. There was a big open space for pushing things that seemed possible all the way through to commercial products. From synthetic rubber to transistors, the basics had been done but there was plenty of development ahead. There were lots of things which were possible but hadn't been done yet. Sometimes it was too early, and only a non cost effective demo resulted. Sometimes there was a big payoff. Overall,
corporate R&D had a positive payoff in that era.
I was lucky enough to visit or deal with many of the big corporate labs of that era. They were quite varied in outlook. The Bell Labs people were telco guys; their approach to networking fit the Bell System centralized model. The PARC people got personal computing and local area networking working, but somehow were obsessed with discrete-event simulation as an application. They didn't foresee how it would all be used. The SRI International people were too into abstraction, and kind of hand-wavey. I once tried using string substitution to remove "virtual" and "abstract" from one of their documents, and it got better. The IBM guys had the coolest location, a glass box on a hill overlooking a park. IBM happened to exit the disk drive business the day I visited. That place had invented the disk drive.
Their day was over. The Ford Scientific Research Lab people were theoreticians who were also car guys. The back side of the building had a long, long row of garage spaces with tools and lifts, and everybody had a car to which they were doing something. Their in-car fiber-optic network was forty years too early.
Common factors?
- Steady funding. Not many ups and downs.
- A profitable parent company with a stable business model.
- Good support. Unlike academia, where grad students tried to do machining, badly, the corporate labs had competent people to build stuff.
- Not too rigorous cost accounting. I was once told by a manager of a major lab that "your accounting system is too good", because it kept people on defined tasks.
- A focus on good demos. Production was the responsibility of others. R&D did not ship products.
WillAdams 9 days ago [-]
An interesting knock-on affect of the importance of rubber was the Chemical Rubber Corporation being the publisher of a de facto handbook, the _CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics_:
which I have found quite useful for its overview of trigonometry and so forth when machining.
throwoutway 9 days ago [-]
Could you expand on the "Not too rigorous cost accounting"
dartos 9 days ago [-]
Not OP, but my take:
Goodheart’s law states: “ When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”
If your accounting is too fine grained, there becomes an inescapable draw to point at a metric and declare that a goal.
Once that happens, engineering tasks can be come extremely well defined to the point of acting like tunnel vision.
Instead of finding improvements or innovations generally, the focus is entirely on moving a specific metric.
You see this issue in highly metric driven orgs as well.
jordanb 9 days ago [-]
Bell Labs was involved in the MIT Radiation Lab, which was a rival to the Manhattan Project in importance to the US war effort. They developed Radar and Radar control systems, in collaboration with the British.
One thing people don't realize is that we had anti-submarine aircraft that would fly themselves on autopilot using sea-scan radar to attack submarines, radar-guided anti-aircraft batteries that would automatically shoot down aircraft (the only thing the humans were doing is loading the shells), proximity-detecting shells that would explode when they got near a target, and many other amazingly high-tech weapons during WWII. Most of them came out of the Rad Lab and a few other places.
Solid-state electronics using semiconductors and masers were both explored at the Rad Lab but it was obvious that they would not be useful for creating weapons so they were set aside, but they were also taken back to institutions like bell for development post-war.
lokimedes 9 days ago [-]
This is a story that really needs a “Richard Rhodes - The making of electronic warfare” treatment like the Manhattan project got.
I work in radar (and formerly in nuclear research) and have been stitching together a historical picture of the developments of US radar technology, but it is incoherent (pun intended) at best.
rjsw 9 days ago [-]
I don't think the UK side of making radar into products is very well documented either, there is some on the research done by TRE [1] but less on what was done in industry.
My grandfather designed and was in charge of production of the Chain Home transmitters at Metrovick [2], he worked on centimetric systems after this as there is a family story of him sleeping with one of the prototype Cavity Magnetrons under his pillow to keep it safe from air raids.
He also built the transmitter for the first AWACS, a Wellington bomber, and helped fit it into the aircraft, but this is presented as just a TRE project.
Once the Rad Lab got involved, the UK focused on more theoretical or foundational aspects of the technology and let the Rad Lab develop the actual weapons systems.
The anti-submarine radar was a good example: the British developed the sea-scan radar, but testing showed it was very difficult for a bomber crew to use it to actually get the plane on-target so the Rad Lab developed the radar-driven autopilot and integrated it with the B-24s.
I think the H2S radar was developed entirely by the British with limited US/Rad Lab involvement though.
Amazing story about your grandfather! Actually the cavity magnetron played a key role in starting the Rad Lab. The US was still neutral at this point and Churchill decided to "gift" one of the prototypes as well as some scientists to explain how it works to the US in hopes that the US would create radar sets. On the way over the scientists decided to give the crew of the convoy ship a physics lecture, but they couldn't talk about what they worked on so they decided to talk about something that could not possibly be relevant to the war: nuclear fission.
rjsw 9 days ago [-]
The UK had longer wavelength radar on aircraft before the US entered the war, the biplane attack planes flying off carriers looked old-fashioned but they could find their targets at night and land safely again.
To circle back to the subject of the thread, after WWII my grandfather was in charge of the research lab at Metrovick, his final job before retirement was to close it down.
lokimedes 9 days ago [-]
Indeed. And with the wheel of history turning, the organizational structure and political maneuvering that it took to invest in these newfangled modes of warfare, is also important to understand.
timewizard 9 days ago [-]
> enable new technologies
Precisely. Such as:
> the threat nuclear war
One would not happen without the other. Invention is neutral. Humanity puts it to good or bad uses.
> and the survival of humanity requires getting things done.
Well, that's what they tell themselves, looking back on their works, at least.
linguae 9 days ago [-]
Thank you for sharing this article; this changed some of my perceptions of Bell Labs regarding how free its researchers were, though Bell Labs was certainly one of the most free industrial research labs in history, alongside 1970s-era Xerox PARC.
The part of the article that mentioned Bell Labs’ philosophy for choosing research problems reminds me of Richard Hamming’s famous “You and Your Research” talk, where Hamming talked about the importance of working on important problems, and how he asked his colleagues about the importance of their problems.
Come to think of it, part of the reason why Xerox PARC and Bell Labs are so renowned is because of the importance of the problems they worked on. Transitors, Unix, Smalltalk, the Xerox Alto, GUIs, word processing, Ethernet, the list goes on.
jandrese 9 days ago [-]
Don't get the impression that they were batting 1000 either. Bell Labs spent an inordinate amount of time writing and debugging a driver for a dodgy printer. Several of the projects never went anywhere. How many of you have used pico to edit an image lately?
Isamu 9 days ago [-]
>a driver for a dodgy printer
You mean the Mergenthaler Linotron 202? That cost nearly $60,000 but they considered it the lowest price high-resolution phototypesetter available in 1978?
jandrese 8 days ago [-]
Yeah, and it was still a huge pile of crap that required constant TLC just to not break. Printers never change.
virtue3 9 days ago [-]
I think there’s a huge argument here for what their research inspired others to do as well.
Just the small work they did on supporting mice so early on (third system to integrate a mouse?) was pretty massive for changing the way we interact and deal with computers.
I know the mouse concept is in “the mother of all demos” but actually first principle integration of the mouse into the system probably belongs to PARC.
cma 9 days ago [-]
Trackball predates the mouse though and things wouldn't have been very different if we only had them.
almostnormal 9 days ago [-]
Light pens are old, too, and with touch screens we are going back to that, without the light of the pen needed.
inglor_cz 9 days ago [-]
If their employees got 9 Nobel Prizes among them, surely we can wave away some fails that happened along the way.
oivey 9 days ago [-]
I agree with your post, but thought I’d point out that the problems those labs worked on weren’t transistors, Unix, etc. Those were the solutions.
flomo 9 days ago [-]
Question: In light of the article, is it fair to lump Bell Labs in with Xerox PARC like that? Bell invented a lot of stuff which directly improved the telephone system and communications in general. Possibly because they owned every problem from end-to-end. PARC invented some really great space-cadet stuff, which was semi-related to document production, but Xerox had no idea how to sell it, because it wasn't 'make copies'.
cma 9 days ago [-]
Xerox made more off PARC's laser printer patent than the entire PARC budget. Plus they invented the modern desktop UI, and ethernet.
flomo 9 days ago [-]
Oy, you're right about the laser printer (as that is how modern copy machines work).
But GUIs, OOP programming, etc, Xerox had no business model around that at all and it was just sitting around, until someone "stole the loot".
adwf 9 days ago [-]
Seems to me like many research institutions, but well funded, attracting great talent and able to operate for a long timescale - they asked a lot of wrong questions too and we just highlight the great ones.
grandempire 9 days ago [-]
I don’t think putting more money into the system makes the ideas better. We have way more money and people in science in the last decade than in 1960.
inglor_cz 9 days ago [-]
It is more like "Don't burden talented people with 15 hours of mindless grant-related bureaucracy per week". Current models of science funding sap precious time away from the researchers in the name of red tape.
The brains are the most precious resource, not the money, and they should not be bothered with trivialities.
grandempire 9 days ago [-]
The institute of advanced study follows this philosophy. The results are mixed. Putting people away with no urgency or engagement with real world problems hasn’t done that well.
timewizard 9 days ago [-]
The Bell system was rapidly growing and expanding across the world. This gave it capital to spend but it also gave it incredible access across our entire society to government, universities, and business.
Tostino 9 days ago [-]
It allows more people to do it as a career if the funding goes partially towards salaries. That goes a long way towards making more progress in more fields.
typewithrhythm 9 days ago [-]
I'm starting to come to the idea that the rate of progress is more driven by the rate of adoption than by number of researchers.
It takes a whole lot of implementation and organisation to make any innovation tangible, so in some ways a bigger overall society slows things down as much as you gain from the total number of researchers.
Competition from foreign societies is also a part of this.
Tostino 9 days ago [-]
I'd say that's true after a certain point in any specific field. But there are so many fields that do show some future promise with only a few people doing research at any one time. I think a bit more breath of search will do us well
grandempire 9 days ago [-]
So how much faster is our progress now compared with 1960?
jjfjjjjjjjfjjf 9 days ago [-]
Certainly, as does any open-ended research organization. But when there are innumerable questions to consider and maybe 1% are worth-while, a 25% success rate might be incredibly impressive.
jgord 9 days ago [-]
Ask all the Qns and have a fast fits-reality filter ?
Seems like a general recipe useful in startups, science and life.
afterthought :
We are not doing this now, either in science research or in startups :
The current VC model of funding startups is too few large bets, and too many hoops for small startups to jump thru to get to VC money.
Wouldn't a more efficient betting stategy be to place a small bet on a promising team/idea/market .. then followup with a larger bet on proof of progress ?
I think we are missing out on funding a long-tail of small startups using Reinforcement Learning techniques to solve real problems in engineering / logistics etc.
The impedance mismatch means we dont get the useful new tech built, we dont develop talent and VCs take on more risk than needed and miss out on high growth startups.
This might be structural in the money supply .. we might need smaller boutique VCs to fit that gap between large capital and small startup .. perhaps more post-exit founders should start small angel firms, and mine the RL niche.
jgord 9 days ago [-]
A container-style standardization of apply-for-capital process, might help make an open market for small-startups meet small-investors work :
standardized questionnaire / pitch format
standardized terms
trust ratings on both sides, like airbnb reviews
common tag set for searching / matching
In an auction style market to mix and match small investors and small startups.
A similar style market for cofounders / early hires might work.
YC cofounder matching has a great pool of talent, but my guess is tag search would be a better way to find good matches.
ngriffiths 9 days ago [-]
> The one hard and fast rule Labs did seem to have was that you could not say no to any request for help from any of the applied folks — or other researchers for that matter.
Nice example of a simple policy that changes the culture in exactly the way you want it to. The university researcher types want to say "ugh, stop interrupting me," but when that's not an option everybody keeps each other on track.
myself248 9 days ago [-]
It's a really important point. Your expertise is valuable beyond your own direct tasks.
ashoeafoot 9 days ago [-]
Curious, intrinsic motivated, self organized experts, that where free of micro management . You can not value or misery-management the unknown, thus you can not correctly assign resources , thus you can not play it safe. The modern management paradigm and processes are pure poison for innovation.
In a war of desperation , those playing it safe and conservative are instantly out and all the experts get their day in the sun. All the safe choices become coffins for the ideas of the past.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 9 days ago [-]
If you look at the very successful research organizations they were basically funded by monopolies, hired a bunch of smart people, and allowed them to think long-term without quarterly or even annual pressure to produce.
Bell Labs and Xerox PARC are examples of this.
jhbadger 9 days ago [-]
And you know, government labs, which have generated more than a few Nobels, had a lot in similarity with these monopoly-created private sector labs, I mention them because we are at a time when the government of the US doesn't seem to understand that these labs have value.
osnium123 9 days ago [-]
Government labs are valuable but what made industrial labs even more valuable was that they were tied to companies that were deploying these technologies and thus had clearer missions. That’s a key distinction between Bell Labs and the DOE labs.
poulsbohemian 9 days ago [-]
What the government potentially offers more paths to opportunity and success though, in that they do the research and then spin it out into the public sector to commercialize. So things that might not even get off the ground in the public sector get their chance and yet there is still a path for commercialization. That said, I’m sitting here a stones throw away from the national lab in Richland and I’m not sure why we don’t see even more innovation happening in the public sector here given the per capita number of phds, scientists and engineers here - my guess is we haven’t built the public sector infrastructure for it.
jhbadger 9 days ago [-]
True, but AT&T and Xerox were kind of infamous for not capitalizing on what Bell Labs and PARC were creating. If you have either an iPhone or an Android phone you are using an OS based on UNIX and yet AT&T gets none of that money. If you are using Windows, Mac, or a graphical interface on Linux, you are using interface concepts created by Xerox, although likewise they "fumbled the future" (as a famous book about PARC put it).
nullc 9 days ago [-]
Article's point is though that they shoveled useful and relevant problems at them. This is extremely clear if you spend some time reading the BSTJ or the phenomenal "The History Of Engineering and Science in the Bell System" books.
So while there were not significant pressures to produce products there was a culture of working on relevant problems or in areas connected to relevant problems. ... rather than going full open-loop gazing deep into the category theory of their navels -- which appears to be an occasional failure mode of academia.
In working with academics in niche areas there often is a thirst for applications-- like you've found some interesting idea but where to go next? What constraints need to be solved for to make this interesting property into something useful. Applications would be a good guide if anyone would provide some, but the connections often don't exist. Part of the magic sauce of Bell labs must have been this enormous science and engineering driven industrial corporation that could just flood real problems at people who needed them.
greesil 9 days ago [-]
I have known of a hundred person organization that was supposed to do R&D and after six years produced nothing of value. I have seen a team of twenty launch a hardware product in a year. Purpose is important!
moandcompany 9 days ago [-]
I'd argue that a concise explanation for these organizations having keen abilities to make great impact with their research is related to their participation in the golden age of "operations research" ... they had a plethora of real problems to solve, some of these being in a wartime environment, and collections of bright and capable engineers/scientists/mathemeticians/physicists/etc that were motivated to solve those problems.
They were also allowed to explore areas where they reasonably believed value might exist without being forced to ship quarterly or being forced to pursue and sell their pursuit of what would be sexy to investors
mjevans 9 days ago [-]
Solutions in search of a problem.
Rather than Problems in search of a solution, possibly related to this technology.
randomcarbloke 7 days ago [-]
have you read The Idea Factory and is it any good or is it just a pop-history of the place?
warkdarrior 9 days ago [-]
A lot of these kinds of articles about Bell Labs and other industrial labs with big scientific results read like cargo-culting to me: "if contemporary companies would copy their culture/planning/freedom, scientific breakthroughs are sure to follow."
Maybe Bell Labs was lucky to be the right place and right time for a lot of briliant people.
Swizec 9 days ago [-]
> Maybe Bell Labs was lucky to be the right place and right time for a lot of briliant people.
High corporate profit taxes lead to lots of innovation because what else are you gonna do with all that money? Give it to the govt? No no, better pay a bunch of super smart people to just do stuff, maybe they’ll find something.
Exactly. This is why lower corporate taxes hurt the country. Badly.
With high corporate tax rates companies are incentivized to invest in tax deductible expenses like: research, employee training and retention benefits, building factories, etc.
Higher taxes are good for the country. Lower taxes are only good for wealthy individuals, and only in the short term.
roenxi 9 days ago [-]
Yglesias' argument isn't really valid. He'd identified that companys weren't operating to pay dividends and faced high profit taxes. Fair enough. But there are an infinite number of reasons not to do anything. I could equally observe that companies weren't being operated to bridge the psychic gap between the mundane and the divine and that has equal logical power.
That sort of topic requires an active argument of the form "this is why they did that". IE, identifying how Bell's owners and operators were profiting from the work. It probably wasn't by running skunkworks and research labs.
And, carthago delenda est, the big change in the US has been the transition to a service economy and financialisation. Since research isn't likely to help that sort of economy but is in an industrial economy this change seems like an obvious candidate for why it got rolled back. Doing research while trying to be a cutting edge producer makes sense.
musicale 9 days ago [-]
> service economy and financialisation ... research isn't likely to help
Yet Bell Labs was jointly owned by AT&T, which provided telephone service, and Western Electric, which made the equipment used by AT&T to provide telephone service.
leoc 9 days ago [-]
‘Sic transit’ is probably the Latin tag you want here.
SideQuark 9 days ago [-]
The vast majority of these golden years of innovation had corporate tax rates at a fraction of the years following.
Maybe your claim is the opposite of the evidence.
PaulDavisThe1st 9 days ago [-]
Perhaps you could be specific and actually name the years you consider "the vast majority of these golden years" ?
philosopher1234 9 days ago [-]
Stock buy backs
wombatpm 9 days ago [-]
Stock buy backs should not be possible within 1 years of a layoff, and should be a taxable expense if a layoff occurs within one year after a buyback.
I also think dividends should not be taxed by corporations, and only taxed as ordinary income by stock holders.
I’ve been told I’m a crazy socialist.
musicale 9 days ago [-]
Wait, so you're saying that layoffs are or are not a means of freeing up cash for stock buybacks?
How else are they supposed to raise the stock price without actually improving the business in any way?
wombatpm 8 days ago [-]
If they just want to do financial engineering and not actually produce something maybe they are in the wrong business?
keybored 9 days ago [-]
Progressives are in an eternal battle with the right-wing since they never rise to advocating for socialism, only for smartypants arguments for why rich people and entities should still exist but with the government nibbling at a larger percent of their wealth and income.
Qwertious 9 days ago [-]
I do wonder how much the corporate culture of the time - of hiring people for life - affected Bell Labs, and the mindset of today prevents Bell Labs from being replicable. In particular, the mindset of employees needing to swap employers to get ahead, and of employers not wanting to train up employees when they could instead hire someone already trained for the position.
(I know it's more than just a "mindset" and is driven by real, rational financial incentives, but nonetheless it's a cultural phenomenon.)
Even if you set up Bell2 Labs, the people you're hiring are still the standard 21st century STEM workers/academics.
Perhaps Bell2 Labs would do better if set up in Japan?
rednafi 9 days ago [-]
Modern STEM workforce churn is actively causing damage. The “switch or stagnate” mindset makes it hard to hold on to a problem when you’re constantly thinking about switching jobs just to get a promotion or avoid a layoff.
Also, companies would rather spend money on acquisitions than retention, and that choice keeps reinforcing the cycle.
not2b 9 days ago [-]
I think that the article is useful because it corrects a number of things commonly said about Bell Labs that just weren't correct. They didn't just hire a bunch of geniuses and let them do whatever they wanted.
NikkiA 9 days ago [-]
> Maybe Bell Labs was lucky to be the right place and right time for a lot of briliant people.
They also hired literally thousands upon thousands of researchers.
hy4000days 9 days ago [-]
I think it’s more of “if they didn’t do it then somebody else would have,” the outcome from Bell was inevitable regardless of the name.
Consider that fusion power is an inevitability, but you don’t know who’s name will be associated with it, nor the correct stock to invest in prior to their success.
Hindsight is always 20/20, remember?
keybored 9 days ago [-]
Your own brand of idealism (the maybe) is that this success was about finding a bag of “brilliant people” by happenstance. Which is great man history in another guise.
moandcompany 9 days ago [-]
I feel that people like Russell Ackhoff should be mentioned when exploring the topic of asking the right questions and understanding the right problems to solve (at Bell Labs):
I think it is worth pointing out that Bell Labs was an Engineering research lab. Scientists there created new disciplines, but in the service of relatively well defined engineering goals.
Contrast this with the NIH, where the science also has a goal - improving human health - but the system to be improved was not engineered. Curing a disease, which has a natural origin, is quite different from improving communications channel capacity.
I suspect that managing engineering research is much more amenable to process analysis than research on biological systems.
freaktakes 9 days ago [-]
Just seeing this now. If any UK-based folks are interested, I just profiled an Oxford org looking for a systems engineer-style person to help with their work applying AI/math to applied science problems: https://www.freaktakes.com/p/a-category-theory-inspired-bbn
mannyv 9 days ago [-]
It's essentially portfolio management. You win some, you lose some.
And you work at a phone company, and phone companies have interesting problems. I'm sure at some point everyone there felt somewhat obligated to do something to contribute. And there's plenty of interesting things to do at the phone company.
rqtwteye 9 days ago [-]
"You win some, you lose some."
Then the MBAs come in, try to reduce the "lose some" with tightly managed processes and you slowly start losing the wins.
A similar thing happened at my company. During summer they would let people go at noon on Fridays resulting in a 36 hour week. Productivity stayed the same, people were happy. New VP comes in "won't we be more productive if we worked Friday afternoon?", back to 40 hours. Productivity still the same, people less happy, more people leaving.
fuzzfactor 9 days ago [-]
You should have seen DuPont in the 1970's.
insane_dreamer 9 days ago [-]
How do places like Xerox PARC and Bell Labs of old compare to Microsoft Research, Facebook/Meta Reality Labs, and Google X of today? Are the latter modern equivalents so to speak of the former in terms of funding innovative research?
hy4000days 9 days ago [-]
> Mervin Kelly used to often tell new hires at Labs, “You get paid for the seven and a half hours a day you put in here, but you get your raises and promotions on what you do in the other sixteen and a half hours.”
Oh but how true this still is today!
quantum_state 9 days ago [-]
The unfortunate fact is places like Bell Labs are gone …
mike_hearn 9 days ago [-]
Google is nothing but such labs. Google Brain, DeepMind, Google X "moonshot labs" etc are all labs that operate in a similar way to how Bell Labs did. There's also Microsoft Research (much more academic), FAIR, lots of such labs.
Bell Labs like orgs can only exist within companies that are protected by a rock solid moat (ie ATT monopoly)
dv_dt 9 days ago [-]
And a willingness to allow open ended exploration of wide of problems, combined with putting together all kinds of experts. Plenty of companies have this moat now but aren't willing to leave thins as open ended.
Sadly our academic institutions and how they are funded by the govt is also hyper focused with grants and goals required to "prevent waste" and require specific results - serving as blinders to wifer ranging exploitation
Spooky23 9 days ago [-]
And those loosey goosey accountants.
Modern companies are under much tighter control.
quantum_state 9 days ago [-]
Kinda of agree. There are some research places funded by private donation, such as Simons Foundation. Wonder if those are properly managed to attract the right people ...
spaceguillotine 9 days ago [-]
and a ton of government cash doesn't hurt either. Post war science boom was nearly all funded from government grants that have mostly dried up and are extinct under Trump, its why America started falling behind post Reagan.
bayarearefugee 9 days ago [-]
They could exist with government funding but "socialism bad hurr durr"
inglor_cz 9 days ago [-]
From across the pond, no they don't, even if the government redistributes much more money from the GDP.
Government funding tends to have a problem with bureaucratic overreach, the need to persuade committees mostly composed of old ossified has-beens, and the need to produce papers at any cost to "prove" you are not slacking off.
France redistributes over 50 per cent of domestic GDP. It has some scientific successes (as measured, say, by Nobel Prizes), but not dramatically more than other comparably developed countries.
rednafi 9 days ago [-]
I feel like 30 years from now, many of today’s AI labs will be regarded with the same reverence as Bell Labs or Xerox PARC. They have a lot of the same ingredients—backing from massive monopolies, virtually unlimited funding, and a wave of public interest in what they’re doing.
Sure, LLMs are impressive, but they don’t yet feel as foundational as Unix, transistors, GUIs, editors, or word processors. But give it a few decades, and who knows? In hindsight, we might look at OpenAI, Anthropic, or DeepMind with the same awe we reserve for Bell Labs and PARC today.
tomrod 9 days ago [-]
Meh. We don't look at Yahoo or ebays attempts in the same way. Adtech was an interesting space but it turns out to have poor explanatory power for whether ads actually have an effect beyond basic notification (poor Coca Cola shareholders...). AI labs may be respected by insiders, but the raw engineering prowess of Bell labs, along with the joint basic and applied research initiatives, are "gone from our sight."
rednafi 9 days ago [-]
I agree. It’s kind of like how we always try to explain brain function in terms of whatever tech is trending at the time. In the same way, we’re biased to think the biggest hype lab today is gonna be the next Bell Labs. But that doesn’t mean it’ll actually turn out that way.
timewizard 9 days ago [-]
There are more ways to not reach that goal that to reach it. I have strong doubts. Their scaling ideology does not seem to be generating the types of returns it should.
logifail 9 days ago [-]
I'm certainly showing my age, but
despite it being an interesting topic I really struggled with the English style in the piece.
cbracketdash 9 days ago [-]
The author seems to use many qualifiers in each sentence.
So for example, rather than succintly stating: "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog", this author adopts the style more akin to: "The quick brown fox, which grew up Oakville near the rushing river, jumped, or, leaped mightily, over the lazy dog rather than simply walking around the dog like most would do normally".
Similar to Blaise Pascal's sentiment: 'I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.'
Indeed, Thomas Jefferson writes about this skill: “The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”
dylan604 9 days ago [-]
If you're writing something for a bunch of nerdy engineers, discussing the mood/feelings/rationale about things is wasted effort. If you're writing for literature people, then all of the extra prose makes a difference and is nuanced. This board is made up of the former, and not the latter.
As a counter, readers of this board love some Tolkien, yet that writing goes on and on and on and on with so much extra text
cbracketdash 8 days ago [-]
The difference between Tolkien and this article is that this author uses extra words while Tolkien introduces extra ideas. Such ideas are for enjoyment like you said. On the other hand, extra words just makes it hard to understand the author's intention. Tolkien presents his ideas so clearly that you almost never have to reread a sentence because of lack of comprehension.
lioeters 9 days ago [-]
> extra text
This describes the majority of all literature, works of the written word, and perhaps human communication in general. For Tolkien, it could be argued that the whole purpose of his books is to entertain with the medium of language, so all that "extra text" is not extra at all, since they're all supposed to be there to be appreciated and enjoyed. If you took away the "extra", there would be no literature there, just a plot summary.
8 days ago [-]
card_zero 9 days ago [-]
Interesting proposal, you have my tentative approval. Perhaps concentrate on the poems.
logifail 9 days ago [-]
But repeatedly using sentences which start with with words such as "but" or "and" can feel clumsy. And for some people it's hard to ignore these stylistic things.
It wasn't just extra prose. I found it genuinely difficult to read.
thfuran 9 days ago [-]
Writing in a way that engineers will dislike the inefficiency of and literature people (as if those are mutually exclusive groups) will dislike the style of hardly seems like the right compromise.
stevebmark 9 days ago [-]
It’s very telling that most of the comments on the article are about Bell Labs, almost none of the comments are about the article. Few have actually read it! The writing is terrible and verbose.
bregma 9 days ago [-]
It was all just fun and games until the invention of the MBA.
9 days ago [-]
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Rendered at 10:42:01 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
My father points out that the monopoly deal with the US govt turned Bell Labs the profit center. AT&T charged its customers a fixed percentage of its costs … from 3 years prior. The only way to make more profit was to make today’s costs cheaper than those of 3 years ago. This lead to: innovate, innovate, innovate.
Many companies admire research. For AT&T at that time, it was their lifeblood.
No, this still allows the standard method of increasing profits under a cost-plus structure: all it takes is increasing your costs. The more you spend, the better off you are. Doesn't matter what you get for your money.
With a three-year lag, you need to be able to pay your operating costs out of savings over a three-year window, but that's it. It's purely a cash-flow restriction.
By contrast, lowering your costs will make you a one-time cash bonus this year, at the cost of making you permanently poorer. This is not a sensible trade to make.
By comparison, a construction company cannot stop buying materials in order to continue generating revenue, and they cannot reduce their workforce significantly and continue taking on the same types of jobs.
In the instance of Bell Labs, those researchers were the 'unnecessary to business' route through which to increase revenue (by both increasing costs and also building a technology-based moat) and since those who control a company typically only profit by 'skimming the cream' increasing revenue without increasing profit seems like an excellent way to increase the value of the company to those who are interested in doing so.
Richard Hamming worked on the Manhattan Project, and John Tukey developed fast Fourier transforms (FFT) in service of the US nuclear program. John Von Neumann shows up as a hidden presence, working with Tukey when Tukey coined the term "bit", and informing Claude Shannon that the mathematical quantity he was working on was a special case of the concept of entropy.
There are periods of history like this where major breakthroughs (quantum mechanics and also what we now call computer science) enable new technologies (like physically realizable Turing machines) and those technologies are suddenly in high demand (because of WWII and then the threat nuclear war). Suddenly there are lots of new ideas, insane amounts of money, and the survival of humanity requires getting things done.
The other interesting thing to me is that Bell had experience with communication at scale due to their telephone networks. And a lot of early computer hardware and software concepts echo designs from the telegraphy days. Think of things like UART and the progression from telegraphy to teleprinters to keyboards. Concepts like Clos Networks from the 1930s are still used in modern data centers today. So having all these large communication problems at scale fed into what we now think of as computer science but really predated computers.
So you may not get the same mileage asking the right questions as Bell Labs did. The environment they were working in was pretty remarkable. We may be getting there eventually with AI, and perhaps climate change will be a pressing enough problem the way nuclear war was.
Yes. The heyday of big corporate research labs was roughly from WWII until the mid-1980s. There was a big open space for pushing things that seemed possible all the way through to commercial products. From synthetic rubber to transistors, the basics had been done but there was plenty of development ahead. There were lots of things which were possible but hadn't been done yet. Sometimes it was too early, and only a non cost effective demo resulted. Sometimes there was a big payoff. Overall, corporate R&D had a positive payoff in that era.
I was lucky enough to visit or deal with many of the big corporate labs of that era. They were quite varied in outlook. The Bell Labs people were telco guys; their approach to networking fit the Bell System centralized model. The PARC people got personal computing and local area networking working, but somehow were obsessed with discrete-event simulation as an application. They didn't foresee how it would all be used. The SRI International people were too into abstraction, and kind of hand-wavey. I once tried using string substitution to remove "virtual" and "abstract" from one of their documents, and it got better. The IBM guys had the coolest location, a glass box on a hill overlooking a park. IBM happened to exit the disk drive business the day I visited. That place had invented the disk drive. Their day was over. The Ford Scientific Research Lab people were theoreticians who were also car guys. The back side of the building had a long, long row of garage spaces with tools and lifts, and everybody had a car to which they were doing something. Their in-car fiber-optic network was forty years too early.
Common factors?
- Steady funding. Not many ups and downs.
- A profitable parent company with a stable business model.
- Good support. Unlike academia, where grad students tried to do machining, badly, the corporate labs had competent people to build stuff.
- Not too rigorous cost accounting. I was once told by a manager of a major lab that "your accounting system is too good", because it kept people on defined tasks.
- A focus on good demos. Production was the responsibility of others. R&D did not ship products.
https://www.goodreads.com/work/editions/937703-crc-handbook-...
which I have found quite useful for its overview of trigonometry and so forth when machining.
Goodheart’s law states: “ When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”
If your accounting is too fine grained, there becomes an inescapable draw to point at a metric and declare that a goal.
Once that happens, engineering tasks can be come extremely well defined to the point of acting like tunnel vision.
Instead of finding improvements or innovations generally, the focus is entirely on moving a specific metric.
You see this issue in highly metric driven orgs as well.
One thing people don't realize is that we had anti-submarine aircraft that would fly themselves on autopilot using sea-scan radar to attack submarines, radar-guided anti-aircraft batteries that would automatically shoot down aircraft (the only thing the humans were doing is loading the shells), proximity-detecting shells that would explode when they got near a target, and many other amazingly high-tech weapons during WWII. Most of them came out of the Rad Lab and a few other places.
Solid-state electronics using semiconductors and masers were both explored at the Rad Lab but it was obvious that they would not be useful for creating weapons so they were set aside, but they were also taken back to institutions like bell for development post-war.
My grandfather designed and was in charge of production of the Chain Home transmitters at Metrovick [2], he worked on centimetric systems after this as there is a family story of him sleeping with one of the prototype Cavity Magnetrons under his pillow to keep it safe from air raids.
He also built the transmitter for the first AWACS, a Wellington bomber, and helped fit it into the aircraft, but this is presented as just a TRE project.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Research_Es... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan-Vickers
The anti-submarine radar was a good example: the British developed the sea-scan radar, but testing showed it was very difficult for a bomber crew to use it to actually get the plane on-target so the Rad Lab developed the radar-driven autopilot and integrated it with the B-24s.
I think the H2S radar was developed entirely by the British with limited US/Rad Lab involvement though.
Amazing story about your grandfather! Actually the cavity magnetron played a key role in starting the Rad Lab. The US was still neutral at this point and Churchill decided to "gift" one of the prototypes as well as some scientists to explain how it works to the US in hopes that the US would create radar sets. On the way over the scientists decided to give the crew of the convoy ship a physics lecture, but they couldn't talk about what they worked on so they decided to talk about something that could not possibly be relevant to the war: nuclear fission.
To circle back to the subject of the thread, after WWII my grandfather was in charge of the research lab at Metrovick, his final job before retirement was to close it down.
Precisely. Such as:
> the threat nuclear war
One would not happen without the other. Invention is neutral. Humanity puts it to good or bad uses.
> and the survival of humanity requires getting things done.
Well, that's what they tell themselves, looking back on their works, at least.
The part of the article that mentioned Bell Labs’ philosophy for choosing research problems reminds me of Richard Hamming’s famous “You and Your Research” talk, where Hamming talked about the importance of working on important problems, and how he asked his colleagues about the importance of their problems.
Come to think of it, part of the reason why Xerox PARC and Bell Labs are so renowned is because of the importance of the problems they worked on. Transitors, Unix, Smalltalk, the Xerox Alto, GUIs, word processing, Ethernet, the list goes on.
You mean the Mergenthaler Linotron 202? That cost nearly $60,000 but they considered it the lowest price high-resolution phototypesetter available in 1978?
Just the small work they did on supporting mice so early on (third system to integrate a mouse?) was pretty massive for changing the way we interact and deal with computers.
I know the mouse concept is in “the mother of all demos” but actually first principle integration of the mouse into the system probably belongs to PARC.
But GUIs, OOP programming, etc, Xerox had no business model around that at all and it was just sitting around, until someone "stole the loot".
The brains are the most precious resource, not the money, and they should not be bothered with trivialities.
It takes a whole lot of implementation and organisation to make any innovation tangible, so in some ways a bigger overall society slows things down as much as you gain from the total number of researchers.
Competition from foreign societies is also a part of this.
Seems like a general recipe useful in startups, science and life.
afterthought :
We are not doing this now, either in science research or in startups :
The current VC model of funding startups is too few large bets, and too many hoops for small startups to jump thru to get to VC money.
Wouldn't a more efficient betting stategy be to place a small bet on a promising team/idea/market .. then followup with a larger bet on proof of progress ?
I think we are missing out on funding a long-tail of small startups using Reinforcement Learning techniques to solve real problems in engineering / logistics etc.
The impedance mismatch means we dont get the useful new tech built, we dont develop talent and VCs take on more risk than needed and miss out on high growth startups.
This might be structural in the money supply .. we might need smaller boutique VCs to fit that gap between large capital and small startup .. perhaps more post-exit founders should start small angel firms, and mine the RL niche.
A similar style market for cofounders / early hires might work.
YC cofounder matching has a great pool of talent, but my guess is tag search would be a better way to find good matches.
Nice example of a simple policy that changes the culture in exactly the way you want it to. The university researcher types want to say "ugh, stop interrupting me," but when that's not an option everybody keeps each other on track.
In a war of desperation , those playing it safe and conservative are instantly out and all the experts get their day in the sun. All the safe choices become coffins for the ideas of the past.
Bell Labs and Xerox PARC are examples of this.
So while there were not significant pressures to produce products there was a culture of working on relevant problems or in areas connected to relevant problems. ... rather than going full open-loop gazing deep into the category theory of their navels -- which appears to be an occasional failure mode of academia.
In working with academics in niche areas there often is a thirst for applications-- like you've found some interesting idea but where to go next? What constraints need to be solved for to make this interesting property into something useful. Applications would be a good guide if anyone would provide some, but the connections often don't exist. Part of the magic sauce of Bell labs must have been this enormous science and engineering driven industrial corporation that could just flood real problems at people who needed them.
They were also allowed to explore areas where they reasonably believed value might exist without being forced to ship quarterly or being forced to pursue and sell their pursuit of what would be sexy to investors
Rather than Problems in search of a solution, possibly related to this technology.
Maybe Bell Labs was lucky to be the right place and right time for a lot of briliant people.
High corporate profit taxes lead to lots of innovation because what else are you gonna do with all that money? Give it to the govt? No no, better pay a bunch of super smart people to just do stuff, maybe they’ll find something.
Everything else is downstream of that
https://slate.com/business/2012/07/xerox-parc-and-bell-labs-...
With high corporate tax rates companies are incentivized to invest in tax deductible expenses like: research, employee training and retention benefits, building factories, etc.
Higher taxes are good for the country. Lower taxes are only good for wealthy individuals, and only in the short term.
That sort of topic requires an active argument of the form "this is why they did that". IE, identifying how Bell's owners and operators were profiting from the work. It probably wasn't by running skunkworks and research labs.
And, carthago delenda est, the big change in the US has been the transition to a service economy and financialisation. Since research isn't likely to help that sort of economy but is in an industrial economy this change seems like an obvious candidate for why it got rolled back. Doing research while trying to be a cutting edge producer makes sense.
Yet Bell Labs was jointly owned by AT&T, which provided telephone service, and Western Electric, which made the equipment used by AT&T to provide telephone service.
Maybe your claim is the opposite of the evidence.
I also think dividends should not be taxed by corporations, and only taxed as ordinary income by stock holders.
I’ve been told I’m a crazy socialist.
How else are they supposed to raise the stock price without actually improving the business in any way?
(I know it's more than just a "mindset" and is driven by real, rational financial incentives, but nonetheless it's a cultural phenomenon.)
Even if you set up Bell2 Labs, the people you're hiring are still the standard 21st century STEM workers/academics.
Perhaps Bell2 Labs would do better if set up in Japan?
Also, companies would rather spend money on acquisitions than retention, and that choice keeps reinforcing the cycle.
They also hired literally thousands upon thousands of researchers.
Consider that fusion power is an inevitability, but you don’t know who’s name will be associated with it, nor the correct stock to invest in prior to their success.
Hindsight is always 20/20, remember?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_L._Ackoff
Contrast this with the NIH, where the science also has a goal - improving human health - but the system to be improved was not engineered. Curing a disease, which has a natural origin, is quite different from improving communications channel capacity.
I suspect that managing engineering research is much more amenable to process analysis than research on biological systems.
And you work at a phone company, and phone companies have interesting problems. I'm sure at some point everyone there felt somewhat obligated to do something to contribute. And there's plenty of interesting things to do at the phone company.
Then the MBAs come in, try to reduce the "lose some" with tightly managed processes and you slowly start losing the wins.
A similar thing happened at my company. During summer they would let people go at noon on Fridays resulting in a 36 hour week. Productivity stayed the same, people were happy. New VP comes in "won't we be more productive if we worked Friday afternoon?", back to 40 hours. Productivity still the same, people less happy, more people leaving.
Oh but how true this still is today!
https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/
Sadly our academic institutions and how they are funded by the govt is also hyper focused with grants and goals required to "prevent waste" and require specific results - serving as blinders to wifer ranging exploitation
Modern companies are under much tighter control.
Government funding tends to have a problem with bureaucratic overreach, the need to persuade committees mostly composed of old ossified has-beens, and the need to produce papers at any cost to "prove" you are not slacking off.
France redistributes over 50 per cent of domestic GDP. It has some scientific successes (as measured, say, by Nobel Prizes), but not dramatically more than other comparably developed countries.
Sure, LLMs are impressive, but they don’t yet feel as foundational as Unix, transistors, GUIs, editors, or word processors. But give it a few decades, and who knows? In hindsight, we might look at OpenAI, Anthropic, or DeepMind with the same awe we reserve for Bell Labs and PARC today.
So for example, rather than succintly stating: "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog", this author adopts the style more akin to: "The quick brown fox, which grew up Oakville near the rushing river, jumped, or, leaped mightily, over the lazy dog rather than simply walking around the dog like most would do normally".
Similar to Blaise Pascal's sentiment: 'I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.'
Indeed, Thomas Jefferson writes about this skill: “The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”
As a counter, readers of this board love some Tolkien, yet that writing goes on and on and on and on with so much extra text
This describes the majority of all literature, works of the written word, and perhaps human communication in general. For Tolkien, it could be argued that the whole purpose of his books is to entertain with the medium of language, so all that "extra text" is not extra at all, since they're all supposed to be there to be appreciated and enjoyed. If you took away the "extra", there would be no literature there, just a plot summary.
It wasn't just extra prose. I found it genuinely difficult to read.