First there was a book, The idea factory by Jon Gertner in 2012. It details some history of Bell Labs. Then there is a blog, why Bell Labs worked? shown up in the hackernews in early May. At last another blog on that blog. Below is a summary.
Why Bell Labs worked so well, and could innovate so much, while today’s innovation, in spite of the huge private funding, goes in hype-and-fizzle cycles that leave relatively little behind? A sad note is Bell Labs’s rate of innovation fizzled out after 1980s.
Bell Labs did have plenty of funding. But this is not the main reason. First of all, Bell and Kelly had an innate talent in spotting the “geekiest” among us. And they knew NOT to manage them. According to Kelly’s golden rule: “How do you manage genius? You don’t.” As Kelly eloquently put it: “What stops a gifted mind from just slacking off?” is the wrong question to ask. The right question is, “Why would you expect information theory from someone who needs a babysitter?”
MBA culture (a metrics obsessed culture that is obsessed with narrowly defined productivity, MBA graduates and CEOs) destroyed the spirit of scientific and engineering ingenuity not because they are evil but because the financial incentives changed drastically from the times of Bell Labs. Nobody expected a single dime of profits to come out from the Bells Labs. The America that invested into the Bell Labs and into the Apollo project was very different from today’s America.
Peter Higgs: By the time he retired in 1996, he was uncomfortable with the new academic culture. “After I retired it was quite a long time before I went back to my department. I thought I was well out of it. It wasn’t my way of doing things any more. Today I wouldn’t get an academic job. It’s as simple as that. I don’t think I would be regarded as productive enough.”
People who can survive this system aren’t necessarily the same as people who can do great work. Most of the great names of the past would be considered unemployable today.
And, since nobody was expecting a dime back from Bell, nobody would put deadlines on talented people, nobody hired unqualified and arrogant business specialists to micromanage them, nobody would put them on a performance improvement plan if they were often late at their daily standups or didn’t commit enough lines of code in the previous quarter. So they had time to focus on how to solve some of the most complex problems that humans ever faced. So they could invent the transistor, the programming infrastructure still used to this day, and lay the foundations of what engineers study today. Tech has become all about monetization nowadays and nothing about ingenuity.
A side note on neoliberalism
Is the end of Bell Labs’ glory because of the start of neoliberalism?
Chicago macro-economic theory rejected Keynesianism in favor of monetarism until the mid-1970s, when it turned to new classical macro-economics heavily based on the concept of rational expectations.
Neoliberalism is a political and economic ideology that advocates for free-market capitalism, which became dominant in policy-making from the late 20th century onward. It originated among European liberal scholars during 1930s shaped bt Great Depression. It is designed to counter the volatility of free markets.
In the context of policymaking, neoliberalism is often used to describe a paradigm shift that was said to follow the failure of the post-war consensus and neo-Keynesian economics to address the stagflation of the 1970s, though the causal factors were purely external, which no economic modality has shown to be able to handle. The Dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War also facilitated the rise of neoliberalism in the United States, the United Kingdom and around the world.
AI is hot, but how long it will last?
AI in the end is just a complicated computer program. No more no less. All the computers, and all electronics are feasible only after the control of electrons is possible. It is physics at working.
Life, the real-world intelligence happens through the chemical reactions inside an self-organized system.
Who are we? Just a name supported by the birth time and place. This is purely physics in time and space. But what are we? Can we explain all the chemical reactions happened and happening within our body along the time, from birth to death? No. Have we created an artificial life in a lab? No. Then, the way to created intelligence is still long.
We have gene-engineered medicine such as covid-19 vaccine. We have gene-therapy to counter some changes caused by virus. We created some animals or plants with partial gene-modification. Still there is no artificial life regardless of how simple created in the lab.
Another thing is about awake and dreaming: the activity of different awaring modes. The consciousness as we know is just a little like the iceberg above the water.