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Comment by blutoot

13 hours ago

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If you are (obviously) interested in the matter you might find one of the Bell Labs articles discussed on HN:

"Why Bell Labs Worked" [1]

"The Influence of Bell Labs" [2]

"Bringing back the golden days of Bell Labs" [3]

"Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home" [4] or

"Innovation and the Bell Labs Miracle" [5]

interesting too.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43957010 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42275944 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32352584 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39077867 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3635489

  • I became interested in the matter reading this thread and vaguely remember reading a couple of the articles. Saved them all in NotebookLM to get an audio overview and to read later. Thanks!

I always take a bird's eye kind of view on things like that, because however close I get, it always loops around to make no sense.

> is massively monopolistic and have unbounded discretionary research budget

that is the case for most megacorps. if you look at all the financial instruments.

modern monopolies are not equal to single corporation domination. modern monopolies are portfolios who do business using the same methods and strategies.

the problem is that private interests strive mostly for control, not money or progress. if they have to spend a lot of money to stay in control of (their (share of the)) segments, they will do that, which is why stuff like the current graph of investments of, by and for AI companies and the industries works.

A modern equivalent and "breadth" of a Bell Labs (et. al) kind of R&D speed could not be controlled and would 100% result in actual Artificial Intelligence vs all those white labelababbebel (sry) AI toys we get now.

Post WW I and II "business psychology" have build a culture that cannot thrive in a free world (free as in undisturbed and left to all devices available) for a variety of reasons, but mostly because of elements with a medieval/dark-age kind of aggressive tendency to come to power and maintain it that way.

In other words: not having a Bell Labs kind of setup anymore ensures that the variety of approaches taken on large scales aka industry-wide or systemic, remains narrow enough.