Comment by analog31

This is obviously an overly simple narrative, but one real factor: the Bell Labs model was built around giving brilliant people a lab and a bunch of funding, and leaving them on their own to explore for a while. Lots of blue sky goofy research, a lot of which ended up being useful. That has its own problems, including “which few brilliant minds get this opportunity?” and “how do we make the researchers accountable for actually getting something done?”

These are both reasonable questions about equitability and accountability. Unfortunately the solution we chose is a proliferation of bureaucracies that micromanage funding allocation and use. Some widely acknowledged consequences are 1) researchers spend more and more time writing grants and reports, and less and less doing research, and 2) the funding agencies (public and private, but especially public) are conservative and overwhelmingly fund work that they know will succeed. In practice that encourages monothink and endless incremental improvements on things that we already know how to do, and disincentives dissent, creativity, and real blue sky novel ideas.

Everyone loves to say they support creative ground breaking ideas, but that requires letting smart people sit around and think for a long time. And however smart they are, results are not guaranteed. The bureaucratic process is always going to prefer short term thinking with clear “deliverables”, even when it’s detrimental to progress.

Those were all ultimately for profit companies. You can only get so far with basic science if some bean counter is looking for a return on investment in the near future.

What those companies did is notable, but I think you are overselling their contributions to science. We've gotten way more scientific advancement from publicly funded science. There are private companies allowed to do R&D all over the world. Publicly funded independed science research is what has set the US apart.

That's a good question, and I'd also add the Manhattan Project, the NIH, the NSF, NOAA, Fermilab, NIST, NCAR, and academic research including the state "land grant" universities. Every complex system has failure modes, but there must be success stories to learn from in all of those programs.

Disclosure: My education was funded by NSF, and I now work for a company that sells stuff for government funded research, though not exclusively.

Bell Labs, which blew the rest away, was entirely government-subsidized in the form of the AT&T monopoly on telephone service. I'm not sure if AT&T was required to run Bell Labs or if it was just an enlightened policy that they were able to implement because of their unique circumstances, though.

Those places grew out of an approach that had its origins in WW2. It was pretty obvious to the powers that be the USA won because science and engineering produced more and better weapons, transport and logistics than the enemy could. They eventually squashed both Germany and Japan with sheer industrial might.

Post WW2, the USA continued the same approach by adopting the Vannevar Bush model, which boiled down to the USA pouring money into basic research, which is never profitable. That fed the companies like the ones you list, who were willing to make bets on medium-term things that might return a profit in a decade or so. If the USA's dominance of world science and engineering in the later 20th century is any indication, it worked a treat.

The Vannevar Bush model started to be wound back in the Reagan years, and Trump seems bent on excising it entirely. Other countries noticed its success. Most OECD countries put a few percent of public money into basic research now. The country that seems to have really taken the lesson to heart is China. They've gone way beyond what the Vannevar Bush model did even in its heyday. The end result is they dominate some areas of science and engineering and consequently manufacturing now (who here remembers Huawei was the brains behind 5G), and now the USA has thrown in the towel that dominance will grow to cover most areas in time. The gap between the West and China on AI and semiconductors is at most a few years.

The USA is crying China is cheating with subsidies and yes that's true - for example it seems the AI models are mostly developed using public money, whereas the USA is relying on VC funding to do the same. The USA's funding of AI development will very likely slow down after the IPOs happen and the companies must become profitable. China's funding of AI won't slow down.

This is the result of a policy choice China made long ago in the Deng Xiaoping era, back in the 1980s. It's taken 40 years to bear fruit, but my it is fruiting vigorously now. The USA position is also a consequence of policy choices it's been making over the last 40 or so years, starting in the Reagan era.

If you want to see how far this has gone, look up: https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/aspis-critical-technology-... It makes for sobering reading. Some key metrics they measured:

- Research Leadership: China leads the world in high-impact research in 69 out of 74 critical technologies.

- Recent Overtakings: China recently overtook the US in foundational AI and biotech fields, including Natural Language Processing (NLP) and genetic engineering.

- Monopoly Risk: ASPI tracks 41 technologies where China's research concentration is so high it poses a severe future monopoly risk, largely driven by massive hubs like the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

There is now little doubt how this will pan out over the next few decades. The USA and the rest of the West end up buying products made in China, using Chinese technology, and protected by a Chinese patent wall. They will wonder what happened. They will try and recover by going to Chinese universities, and adopting parts of Chinese culture. It won't be a big change for most of the West - the name on the label just changed from the USA to China. It will come as a hell of a shock to most of the USA.

The ironic thing will be - the change has very little to do with the things people will focus on, like who manufactures what, or patent walls, or political systems, or excellence in universities. China pulled that off by adopting some key USA policies, while the USA abandoned those same policies.