/sci/ - Science & Math » Thread #13173277

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Anonymous Sat 22 May 21:36:18 2021 No.13173277 View Reply Original Report

Quoted By: >>13173298 >>13173304 >>13173316 >>13173372 >>13173439 >>13173464 >>13173576 >>13173633

Is there a modern equivalent of bell labs/ skunk works/ Los alamos ranch? I know they exist in to this day but is there something similar now? Maybe something like open source blockchain or a nonprofit like openAI is as close as we can get.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 22 May 2021 21:41:26 No.13173298 Report

Quoted By:

>>13173277
DeepMind, OpenAI and maybe Neuralink are our modern day instantiations of the institutions you mentioned. That kind of sucks. It goes to show that the rate of innovation is slowing down

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 22 May 2021 21:43:01 No.13173304 Report

Quoted By:

>>13173277
we have the math monk monastery, but it's difficult to locate

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 22 May 2021 21:43:36 No.13173308 Report

Quoted By:

theres a government research lab at the northwest corner of the westernmost aleutian island, but i don't know what they do there.
if you want to find out where the important labs are you might tease the information out of the internet by watching origins and destinations of military flights on ads-b exchange for a week, seems doubtful they'd publicize their secret labs

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 22 May 2021 21:47:21 No.13173316 Report

Quoted By:

>>13173277
Diversity and inclusion are more important now.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 22 May 2021 21:48:44 No.13173324 Report

Quoted By: >>13173340 >>13173377

I don't know of any genuine skunk works anymore. The trap of being a data driven culture now is that every research activity needs to show tangible results and ROI. There must be a plan beforehand with a concrete goal and fixed budget. In true skunk works you lock some geniuses in a room and tell them to just invent stuff. Pretty much everything great from the 60s and 70s game about in this manner.

Today you could never have this. Everything is fucked up by people like project managers and their god damned spreadsheets trying to track every single thing you do. Executives and shareholders expect every cent of their money will be spent on things that show a quick profit with little if any risk. Fuck this gay future.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 22 May 2021 21:53:24 No.13173340 Report

Quoted By:

>>13173324
Sounds like you just have a problem with capitalism desu

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 22 May 2021 21:54:40 No.13173342 Report

Quoted By:

OP here. I like reading stories about these places and just feel that if the same was to happen now it would be in a basement in facebook or microsoft and it would never see the light of day.

I like reading about Hamming's accounts in bell labs but maybe the world is just getting too specialised. Was the invention of C and zone melting and stealth planes organic and would happen in any environment or was it only enabled by the culture of these places?

I don't think anyone knows but maybe when we come to the end of the data driven age and we need some more ingenuity we will get to see more creative people doing work like this,

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 22 May 2021 22:07:54 No.13173372 Report

Quoted By: >>13173382

>>13173277
If they are equivalent, why would you possibly know of them in your own present time? Retarded question.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 22 May 2021 22:10:09 No.13173377 Report

Quoted By:

>>13173324
this

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 22 May 2021 22:13:23 No.13173382 Report

Quoted By: >>13173399 >>13173439

>>13173372
Bell labs was just the R&D division of one of the biggest companies in the world. Of course people knew about it back then. I'm asking if there is something like that these days. I know you wouldn't know the answer since you obviously can't even read.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 22 May 2021 22:19:37 No.13173399 Report

Quoted By: >>13173439

>>13173382
Of course there is but the pace of technological progress has slowed and its not as spectacular. I dont know why the fuck people expected an exponential explosion in technology. After we discovered computers it all went pretty fast for a while but now we've flattened the curve out again.

There is another angle to this as well - nowadays the military industrial complex is under far greater scrutiny. The other day I forget which FAGMAN was doing it but they were working on AI controlled armed drones and people threw a fit about it and the military shitcanned the whole thing. If things with China escalate enough to inspire coherence in the West there will be things like skunkworks again.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 22 May 2021 22:34:58 No.13173439 Report

Quoted By: >>13173523

>>13173399
I'm sure the government research is going on; just under black budgets. They can't not research it

>>13173382
I love how they would always bring it back to the telephone.
> launch the first satellite
> the echo, just a reflector that bounces signals off
> Time to test the system... pick up the telephone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkLb4zBhDiI

>>13173277
It's happening, but lots of it is hiding in plain sight, or behind corporate walls. Companies like Amazon and Apple spend a shit-ton of money every year reaching stuff that applies to their individual fields; meanwhile the university system acts as almost a clearing house for these independent organizations to communicate.

One of the more promising new uses is using quantum computers and AI to predict the arrangement of molecules in test drugs. The almost exponential time savings from the traditional brute force method will me an acceleration in chemistry

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 22 May 2021 22:41:42 No.13173464 Report

Quoted By: >>13173488

>>13173277
Not an exact equivalent, but most of the large silicon valley companies (e.g. Google) have research divisions that are pretty free and not driven by immediate profitability.
I think there's a lot more focus nowadays though. Bell labs did tons of different shit, I imagine if you went into a Google lab the vast majority of people are working on some kind of AI. It's one of the few fields left where there's still obvious spectacular progress to be made.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 22 May 2021 22:48:57 No.13173488 Report

Quoted By:

>>13173464
>have research divisions that are pretty free and not driven by immediate profitability.
That is the key. The free movement of science pays dividends later. For example... Bell Labs set up as a way to further phone tech. And what do they do? They invent the transistor.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 22 May 2021 22:52:43 No.13173503 Report

Quoted By: >>13173526

megaprojects are usually coordinated between multiple institutions, there's no need to keep everyone in a single place anymore

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 22 May 2021 22:57:44 No.13173523 Report

Quoted By: >>13173570

>>13173439
This video was a great watch. In one interview i saw that the goal of Bell labs was to improve phone technology and since it was a problem rich environment they had lots of angles of attack. And since AT&T was a regulated monopoly even a fraction of it's budget was enough to do incredible amounts of work

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 22 May 2021 22:59:01 No.13173526 Report

Quoted By:

>>13173503
That's a very good point. I guess the world of open source and international scientific collaboration on all scales is similar to what these labs used to do. Now you don't need to share an office to have a conversation with someone from a certain field about your ideas

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 22 May 2021 23:21:31 No.13173570 Report

Quoted By: >>13173584

>>13173523
from a "history of the world as seen through technology" angle, AT&T had a huge footprint on the 20th century. However, for romantic reasons, the history of General Electric is so much more fun:
> Started by Thomas Edison
> One of the original 12 dow stocks
> they decided to get into radio, so they bought Marconi's company
> Tweak it and rename it RCA
> Now they're selling the radios, need to create the content
> Form NBC

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 22 May 2021 23:23:58 No.13173576 Report

Quoted By:

>>13173277
>Is there a modern equivalent of bell labs
literally google

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 22 May 2021 23:26:47 No.13173584 Report

Quoted By: >>13173600

>>13173570
I think the Bell labs story is easier to romaticise since not only did the scientists make great progress and but they were just a small wing of a big company that didn't necessarily give them direction from what I know. Like some people getting a wage and just working on whatever motivated them.

The history of these businesses sure are fun I'm going to look up some videos about the start of GE.

Anonymous

Anonymous Sat 22 May 2021 23:32:30 No.13173600 Report

Quoted By:

>>13173584
What's interesting is that the change between what you are describing and the loss of that is exactly what killed the newspaper business.

For most of the 20th century, an editor could let a reporter spend a week working on a story with no guarantee that a story would even come out of it. This allowed a lot more meat on the bone, and created the environment where early investigative reporters could chase good stories without fear of having to produce quickly or otherwise justify their jobs.

These days, you have to meat your production numbers, which forces reporters to only follow stories that take less than 8 hours to find research and write

Anonymous

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Anonymous Sat 22 May 2021 23:45:37 No.13173633 Report

Quoted By:

>>13173277
Facebook and Google both have somewhat private research laboratories.

One of last years ICPC presentations was in my country, was done by a lad from facebook, explaining how they're developing an algorithms to store code data based on usage.

You have to be in the know for these things anon, they'll only really be public decades after the research has been: stolen, publicized, recreated, or the patents have expired.

Just get a maths/comp sci combo degree and a good masters and see if they can let you into the secret club.
;)

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