
The Rise and Fall of Industrial Research Labs - yorp
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/1/181626-the-rise-and-fall-of-industrial-research-labs/fulltext
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greggarious
This article seems a bit hyperbolic.

Yes, the Silicon Valley branch has shut down, but MSR's main office in
Washington is still open and doing great research. It's probably the best
industrial lab that's still running.

I also have interned at PARC (no longer "Xerox PARC", but still kicking). I
was given remarkable freedom both by my direct supervisor and the division
manager.

Down the road, HP labs was still going (though a few of their staff had
migrated to PARC). Likewise, IBM and Bell Labs still are going.

And Google seems to be really spinning up their research. I won't comment on
specifics in a public forum, but I've noticed signals that they're taking
basic research seriously. (They used to be very short term, product oriented)

~~~
anonetal
I agree that MSR is probably the best CS industrial lab out there right now,
but I think Moshe's point is that even the rest of the MSR is probably a bit
wary right now given what (and how it) happened to MSR SV. I don't think HP,
IBM, and Bell Labs (with a few specific and localized exceptions) are doing
basic research as they were doing a few years ago (or in Bell Lab's case, a
few decades ago). Maybe you are right about Google, but generally speaking,
there are very few papers from Google Research (relative to their strength).

~~~
DrDimension
Agree. It matters because nothing undermines scientific integrity and
productivity like financial insecurity.

------
jacquesm
I think it's more that the low hanging fruit has been plucked than that there
is a 'fall' of industrial research labs. Just like with technology in the
early 20th century there was a golden age where advances were relatively quick
and dramatic because the fields were brand new. Once the field matures it
takes more effort to get up to speed on what has already been learned and
evolutionary progress rather than revolutionary takes over.

And so far we seem to be doing pretty good with that level of progress. Any
faster than this and I'm not sure we'd be able to properly integrate
technology into our culture and society before it had become obsolete already.

Just look at for instance the succession of audio recording and distribution
methods to get an idea of that: the gramophone record lasted for many decades,
CDs succeeded them and lasted for a couple of decades, digital formats are
dying out about as fast as they are being created (with the exception of mp3).

At some point you're going to have problems of interoperability simply because
of the speed of progress (we're seeing something quite close to that on the
browser front right now).

~~~
aragot
To explain this acceleration of technology, let's remind the exponential
growth of population: _There are more people on Earth than dead population
since the birth of times_

So there's as much potential for science advance in 1 lifespan as since the
wake of Humanity.

~~~
danieltillett
>To explain this acceleration of technology, let's remind the exponential
growth of population: There are more people on Earth than dead population
since the birth of times

Actually there have been around 100 billion people born over this history of
human kind. Given a bit over 7 billion people are still alive that suggests
most people ever born are dead.

As an aside I have heard this suggested as an argument that the probability of
death is not one. If only ~93% of all the people born have ever died then you
can't be certain that everyone born will die.

------
Zigurd
I'm usually on the side of pointing out the squishyness in some numbers, like
US productivity and GDP. But we seem not to be in a crisis or even decline in
corporate research. Microsoft and Google and, to a limited extent Facebook
have taken over from IBM and Xerox and Bell Labs.

The Bell Labs business model was highly artificial, and that artificiality was
used as an argument not to break up AT&T. Current structures are more
sustainable.

Some ways of structuring corporate research are new: At Google, and at
startups funded by Founders Fund, you will find R&D that's been selected for
impact.

~~~
angersock
Bell Labs got us microwave communications, lasers, transistors, Unix, C, awk,
Plan 9, fiber optics, and a bunch of other things.

The new "sustainable" structures, frankly, aren't even a substitute.

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sgnelson
[http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/1/181626-the-rise-and-
fal...](http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/1/181626-the-rise-and-fall-of-
industrial-research-labs/fulltext)

For those of us who don't want to have to read the mobile version.

~~~
lukastsai
[https://getscroll.com/r/h1h6t](https://getscroll.com/r/h1h6t)

------
DrDimension
Why fritter away all that money on fundamental scientific research when you
can spend 2.5 billion for fucking _Minecraft_?

------
michaelochurch
Being in technology, you have a front-row seat to the concept of _elective
decline_ , or the idea that civilization's decline is often a collective but
intentional choice, rather than the result of external stress. It seems sad,
to a historian, that a great empire would "collapse" (an affair that usually
happen imperceptibly over hundreds of years) but the reality is that it's the
unintended product of millions of individuals making self-interested and
possibly self-beneficial decisions... that end up not keeping up or advancing
the civilization. At some point, they just decide that it's not worth it to be
civilized anymore, and investment ceases.

Since the 1970s, we've seen elective decline in the U.S., in science, and in
technology. Abstractly people _want_ scientific progress, but no one wants to
pay for it, and people within the masses would rather be guided by their
resentment of academics than fight back when academic or research jobs get
cut. When state legislatures cut funding for public universities, the hoi
polloi don't care because their resentment for professors is stronger than
their sense of a need to keep up the society.

One might hope for Silicon Valley to be better, and look to it for leadership,
and it may have kept its integrity for longer, but the current "M&A has
replaced R&D" era is just fucking disgusting. It's easy to focus the hatred on
a few unlikeable celebrity founders (and I've done my share of that) but the
truth is that the problem is really deep and probably unalterable. We have a
front-row seat, if we work in science and technology in the U.S., for elective
decline-- why it happens, the individual actors who push it forward (not
_wanting_ decline, but valuing self-interest more), and the often one-way
erosion of trust that tends to make it irreversible-- but we have no power to
change it. And, just as one might read about a civilization that collapsed
3,000 years ago and think, "They would have been fine if they just <X>", we
can easily come up with solutions that will work but never see implementation,
because (as seems to be a constant of human organizations) the wrong people
are in charge.

~~~
SamReidHughes
What do you mean by a decline in scientific progress? The rate at which
science is done? Per capita? Do you perceive some kind of long-term trend?
Spending per capita on R&D by the U.S. was moving upwards last I checked,
maybe that was just in the Bush administration, but I'm missing the trendline
here. And what sort of oh-so-important research do you think we're missing out
on that could be better parallelized with more funding?

What does "civilization" have to do with some trend in U.S. science funding,
that probably doesn't exist? If you think the U.S. is in technological
decline... how come oil production has drastically increased? Why are cars so
much safer now? If people don't want to spend money on science and technology,
why do we spend more on education than any other nation? Why should we infer
anything from state legislatures' funding of universities, from which the best
and brightest move out of state, which make more sense to fund nationally?

I'm glad you've heard of words like "civilization," "civilized," "hoi polloi,"
and "fucking." Next time, try saying reality-based things with them instead of
antiplatitudes pulled from thin-air.

~~~
mwhite
> If you think the U.S. is in technological decline... how come oil production
> has drastically increased?

I read a fair amount about energy issues, but mainly for my own understanding
and less so to be able to readily explain it, so forgive me if I get something
wrong and for the lack of citations, but I believe it's basically that the
increase in oil production is pretty much completely due to unconventional
sources like shale oil (and fracking for natural gas) which have a much lower
Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI), which means they're only profitable
when the price of oil is very high.

What expecting these unconventional sources to save the day fails to account
for is that they are still very finite, and more importantly, that when the
price of oil gets high enough, it hurts the economy, which then decreases
demand for oil, which causes the price to drop, which makes it unprofitable to
operate and/or develop new unconventional wells until the price rises again
due to low supply. This cycle is not really compatible with a healthy economy.
We are seeing the beginning of this as we speak, with oil companies laying off
people because shale oil isn't profitable at current prices.

Also, the technology for shale oil and fracking has been around for a long
time, so it's not exactly technological innovation, just a new source that
became profitable to exploit as easily accessible oil becomes scarcer and
prices are high.

> And what sort of oh-so-important research do you think we're missing out on
> that could be better parallelized with more funding?

Maybe space travel?

Or viable renewable energy that could actually sustain civilization?

[http://energyskeptic.com/2014/science-no-single-or-
combinati...](http://energyskeptic.com/2014/science-no-single-or-combination-
of-alternative-energy-resources-can-replace-fossil-fuels/)
[http://energyskeptic.com/2014/why-fusion-will-never-work-
and...](http://energyskeptic.com/2014/why-fusion-will-never-work-and-fry-
planet-if-it-did/)

~~~
nostrademons
That cycle is how capitalism _works_ , for any good which requires a large
capital investment for financial returns that drop whenever there's excessive
competition in the market. Historically, we've seen it with textiles,
railroads, steamboats, automobiles, office parks, farm crops, telecoms, and
airlines. If we actually got space travel and viable renewable energy, we'd
almost certainly see it with them as well.

No, it's not pleasant for the people who are laid off or businesses that fail.
But basically the entire financial industry has evolved to smooth out the
peaks and valleys of this cycle, providing the capital to get the boom started
and then recycling the carcasses of overcapacity into productive uses when the
boom ends. It's business as usual for a capitalist economy.

