Comment by gsf_emergency

[I wish HN could host more long-running threads like SO as these topics require substantial back & forth]

Lasers? Information theory? Transistors?? Silicon tech in general? If you think hype-&-wishful-thinking-driven Google now or ever can be compared with Bell Labs.. you might just be a recent immigrant. The atmosphere at BL, I'm told, was way different. More an indefinite excitement (what can we do with quantum??) rather than the definite, closely guarded, superstition of Thiel ("quantum computing is the next big secret!!")

(Or maybe it's just that old subdued Jewish atheism of the East Coast vs the neurotic ambitious religiosity of California!)

I'm less biased against your low-hanging fruit framework.. still, I suspect that a rival framework based on the minimal attention paid to teaching undergrads at American universities would surpass it. I.e. materials science knowledge base has been spreading only about as quickly as the Baumol cost disease

2 other issues,

Even if there are low-hanging fruits in STEMM (of which I think there are still aplenty), infotech and especially advertising fruits are thought to be strewn all over the floor.

With AI, both thinkers & doers get into this weird emo haze of hubris+laziness, expecting neuro-furniture rearrangement to turn magically into paradigm shifts