Comment by GlibMonkeyDeath
2 years ago
The farmer lost his monopoly on wheat, so he couldn't feed that wildly expensive goose any more. It isn't greed when the farmer would go out of business feeding his goose, especially when those golden eggs wouldn't necessarily help his farming business directly.
I think that what happened is Bayh-Dole legislation passed c.1980 which allowed corporations to exclusively license patents generated with taxpayer funds at public and private universities, so they lost their incentive to maintain large privately-funded research centers, which used to be valuable because they'd have exclusive control of any patents. A side-effect of Bayh-Dole was the gradual conversion of academic institutions into for-profit commercial operations, especially in the STEM fields like chemistry, engineering, medical research, etc. - with accompanying declines in academic integrity, open data sharing, etc.
Eliminating Bayh-Dole would mean university-based patents generated with taxpayer funds would be available to any interested party under a non-exclusive licensing program, and then corporations would again be incentivized to maintain private research centers - which IIRC also served a tax-writeoff function for AT&T in Bell Lab's heyday.
It's also the case that corporate labs that genuinely did research tended to be a byproduct of companies that were essentially monopolies to some degree in some way. Even if a bit idealized, Bell Labs was certainly like this. (From an old movie. Ma Bell: We don't care we don't have to we're the phone company.)
At least some of the 80s vintage corporate labs like DEC were being increasingly folded into the broader engineering organizations as their parents became less dominant. Essentially corporate research labs are a creature of organizations that have some long-term play money. Or at least that's the idea. I'd note that some of the current work going on in quantum computing has a lineage that dates back to some pretty fundamental research done in corporate labs in the 1960s.
Yeah, it's economics. Research labs can be allowed to be independent and do whatever experimental stuff when there are resources to go around, such as when you're holding an inalienable stranglehold on an entire sector of the economy. Every decade or so there's a good chance they lay you a golden egg but mostly they're just sitting there and going to conferences in Lapland or something. When someone in government goes 'wait a minute, this is terrible' and you become just a normal company again, you kill off what doesn't immediately contribute at the expense of some foresight.
Currently leading tech research? Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, NVIDIA, Intel, and for some ungodly reason, Elon Musk with his government grants and Teslabucks. These are all effective monopolies in several sectors to the point where dethroning any of them is going to require either a massive change in the world through new technology or extensive multi-governmental legal action. These companies have the ability to spend a lot of money on something stupid (for the ones we have seen in the public eye, see Stadia, Metaverse, Itanium, we had Plan 9 as Bell's last hurrah into the void, these types of stupid things.) which loses it for the promise of an eventual golden egg. As a theory I'd say this is a pretty good one considering that it extends well into the modern day.
Ideally, we'd probably fund research in some better way, but I have no clue how the hell that would even work. Until then, the future comes in the form of price fixing and anti-competitive practices.
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