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Why Bell Labs worked so well, and could innovate so much, while today’s innovation, in spite of the huge private funding, goes in hype-and-fizzle cycles that leave relatively little behind, is a question I’ve been asking myself a lot in the past years.
And I think that the author of this article has hit the nail on its head on most of the reasons - but he didn’t take the last step in identifying the root cause.
What Bell Labs achieved within a few decades is probably unprecedented in human history:
They employed folks like Nyquist and Shannon, who laid the foundations of modern information theory and electronic engineering while they were employees at Bell.
They discovered the first evidence of the black hole at the center of our galaxy in the 1930s while analyzing static noise on shortwave transmissions.
They developed in 1937 the first speech codec and the first speech synthesizer.
They developed the photovoltaic cell in the 1940, and the first solar cell in the 1950s.
They built the first transistor in 1947.
They built the first large-scale electronic computers (from Model I in 1939 to Model VI in 1949).
They employed Karnaugh in the 1950s, who worked on the Karnaugh maps that we still study in engineering while he was an employee at Bell.
They contributed in 1956 (together with AT&T and the British and Canadian telephone companies) to the first transatlantic communications cable.
They developed the first electronic musics program in 1957.
They employed Kernighan, Thompson and Ritchie, who created UNIX and the C programming language while they were Bell employees.
And then their rate of innovation suddenly fizzled out after the 1980s.
I often hear that Bell could do what they did because they had plenty of funding. But I don’t think that’s the main reason. The author rightly points out that Google, Microsoft and Apple have already made much more profit than Bell has ever seen in its entire history. Yet, despite being awash with money, none of them has been as impactful as Bell. Nowadays those companies don’t even innovate much besides providing you with a new version of Android, of Windows or the iPhone every now and then. And they jump on the next hype wagon (social media, AR/VR, Blockchain, AI…) just to deliver half-baked products that (especially in Google’s case) are abandoned as soon as the hype bubble bursts.
Let alone singlehandedly spear innovation that can revolutionize an entire industry, let alone make groundbreaking discoveries that engineers will still study a century later.
So what was Bell’s recipe that Google and Apple, despite having much more money and talented people, can’t replicate? And what killed that magic?
Well, first of all Bell and Kelly had an innate talent in spotting the “geekiest” among us. They would often recruit from pools of enthusiasts that had built their own home-made radio transmitters for fun, rather than recruiting from the top business schools, or among those who can solve some very abstract and very standardized HackerRank problems.
And they knew how to manage those people. According to Kelly’s golden rule:
How do you manage genius? You don’t
Bell specifically recruited people that had that strange urge of tinkering and solving big problems, they were given their lab and all the funding that they needed, and they could work in peace. Often it took years before Kelly asked them how their work was progressing.
Compare it to a Ph.D today who needs to struggle for funding, needs to produce papers that get accepted in conferences, regardless of their level of quality, and must spend much more time on paperwork than on actual research.
Or to an engineer in a big tech company that has to provide daily updates about their progress, has to survive the next round of layoffs, has to go through endless loops of compliance, permissions and corporate bureaucracy in order to get anything done, has his/her performance evaluated every 3 months, and doesn’t even have control on what gets shipped - that control has been taken away from engineers and given to PMs and MBA folks.
Compare that way of working with today’s backlogs, metrics, micromanaging and struggle for a dignified salary or a stable job.
We can’t have the new Nyquist, Shannon or Ritchie today simply because, in science and engineering, we’ve moved all the controls away from the passionate technical folks that care about the long-term impact of their work, and handed them to greedy business folks who only care about short-term returns for their investors.
So we ended up with a culture that feels like talent must be managed, even micromanaged, otherwise talented people will start slacking off and spending their days on TikTok.
But, as Kelly eloquently put it:
“What stops a gifted mind from just slacking off?” is the wrong question to ask. The right question is, “Why would you expect information theory from someone who needs a babysitter?”
Or, as Peter Higgs (the Higgs boson guy) put it:
It’s difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964… Today I wouldn’t get an academic job. It’s as simple as that. I don’t think I would be regarded as productive enough.
Or, as Shannon himself put it:
I’ve always pursued my interests without much regard for final value or value to the world. I’ve spent lots of time on totally useless things.
So basically the most brilliant minds of the 20th century would be considered lazy slackers today and be put on a PIP because they don’t deliver enough code or write enough papers.
So the article is spot on in identifying why Bell could invent, within a few years, all it did, while Apple, despite having much more money, hasn’t really done anything new in the past decade. MBAs, deadlines, pseudo-objective metrics and short-termism killed scientific inquiry and engineering ingenuity.
But the author doesn’t go one step further and identify the root cause.
It correctly spots the business and organizational issues that exist in managing talent today, but it doesn’t go deeper into their economic roots.
You see, MBA graduates and CEOs didn’t destroy the spirit of scientific and engineering ingenuity spurred by the Industrial Revolution just because they’re evil. I mean, there’s a higher chance for someone who has climbed the whole corporate ladder to be a sociopath than there is for someone you randomly picked from the street, but not to the point where they would willingly tame and screw the most talented minds of their generation, and squeeze them into a Jira board or a metric that looks at the number of commits, out of pure sadism.
They did so because the financial incentives have drastically changed from the times of Bells Labs.
The Bells Labs were basically publicly funded. AT&T operated the telephone lines in the US, paid by everyone who used telephones, and they reinvested a 1% tax into R&D (the Bells Labs). And nobody expected a single dime of profits to come out from the Bells Labs.
And btw, R&D was real R&D with no strings attached at the time. In theory also my employer does R&D today - but we just ended up treating whatever narrow iterative feature requested by whatever random PM as “research and development”. It’s not like scientists have much freedom in what to research or engineers have much freedom in what to develop. R&D programs have mostly just become a way for large businesses to squeeze more money out of taxpayers, put it in their pockets, and not feel any moral obligation of contributing to anything other than their shareholders’ accounts.
And at the time the idea of people paying taxes, so talented people in their country could focus on inventing the computer, the Internet or putting someone on the moon, without the pressure of VCs asking for their dividends, or PMs asking them to migrate everything to another cloud infrastructure by next week, or to a new shiny framework that they’ve just heard in a conference, wasn’t seen as a socialist dystopia. It was before the neoliberal sociopaths of the Chicago school screwed up everything.
The America that invested into the Bell Labs and into the Apollo project was very different from today’s America. It knew that it was the government’s job to foster innovation and to create an environment where genuinely smart people could do great things without external pressure. That America hadn’t yet been infected by the perverse idea that the government should always be small, that it’s not the government’s job to make people’s lives better, and that it was the job of privately funded ventures seeking short-term returns to fund moonshots.
And, since nobody was expecting a dime back from Bell, nobody would put deadlines on talented people, nobody hired unqualified and arrogant business specialists to micromanage them, nobody would put them on a performance improvement plan if they were often late at their daily standups or didn’t commit enough lines of code in the previous quarter. So they had time to focus on how to solve some of the most complex problems that humans ever faced.
So they could invent the transistor, the programming infrastructure still used to this day, and lay the foundations of what engineers study today.
The most brilliant minds of our age don’t have this luxury. So they can’t revolutionarize our world like those in the 20th century did.
Somebody else sets their priorities and their deadlines.
They can’t think of moonshots because they’re forced to work on the next mobile app riding the next wave of hype that their investors want to release to market so they can get even richer.
They have to worry about companies trying to replace them with AI bots and business managers wanting to release products themselves by “vibe coding”, just to ask those smart people to clean up the mess they’ve done, just like babies who are incapable of cleaning up the food they’ve spilled on the floor.
They are seen as a cost, not as a resource. Kelly used to call himself a “patron” rather than a “manager”, and he trusted his employees, while today’s managers and investors mostly see their engineering resources as squishy blobs of flesh standing between their ambitious ideas and their money, and they can’t wait to replace them with robots that just fullfill all of their wishes.
Tech has become all about monetization nowadays and nothing about ingenuity.
As a result, there are way more brilliant minds (and way more money) in our age going towards solving the “convince people to click on this link” problem rather than solving the climate problem, for example.
Then of course they can’t invent the next transistor, or bring the next breakthrough in information theory.
Then of course all you get, after one year of the most brilliant minds of our generation working at the richest company that has ever existed, is just a new iPhone.
Hallowed is the name of Bell Labs. It falls from many an ambitious lip, seeking to conjure forth lost magic for their pet jar. Some zealots go further. They attempt the most venerated of summons — to materialize an Apollo.
All those dead kids on your social media feed are the fruit of a tree whose seed was planted after the second world war. That tree has been bearing more and more fruit, and it will continue to for as long as it remains standing. Because that's just the kind of tree it is. The only kind of tree it ever could have been.
Je ne fais pas zazen,Je m’assoisLorsque je suis disposé à entendre, alors, j’écris les mots affichés à mon esprit,Les mots sont ma récolte,Ce que je ramène avec moi du pays de l’assise,Ils sont les…
Thanks to a landscape that I was allowed to glimpse,above the low wall of consciousness, a country of vast lands and seas,of eye-widening blue-greens. Thanks to the evening sitting, I read again th…
Canada's RCMP are reportedly investigating Canadian citizens who have served with the IDF for war crimes. Yes, please. www.ynetnews.com/article/hykg...
Canada quietly probing citizens over alleged war crimes committed while serving in the IDF during Gaza war; launched in 2024, investigation remains unannounced; Jewish community voices concern: 'Canada is becoming more hostile toward us by the d…
When seen as the spicy autocorrect that it is, this LLM behaviour makes so much sense on every level: it has doubtless been trained on zillions examples of people getting called out on BS and rationalising or trying to present the most PR-friendly damage control answer they could. We're basically seeing a somewhat-weighted average of every single fibber confession on the internet… 😐
It's believed that no doctor in US history was ever convicted of crimes based on false fabricated evidence using 40,000 stolen patient records from an entirely different office until Dr. Vilasini Ganesh MD.
As I said elsewhere, Cambridge (home of Harvard) and the rest of Massachusetts, where I live, is part of the front lines of the ICE Wars. They are targeting us, Somerville, Boston, Lowell, Worcester, Medford etc because we have been the most Euro-Friendly State in the country. We have more foreign exchange students than the rest of the country, more visitors and frankly a history of 250+ years of opposing Tyranny. Trump fears us. He has ICE raiding here to try to frighten and suppress potential revolts to his reign of cruelty. Like every dictator he wants to eliminate or control Academia to control the narrative and prevent revolts against his suppression as smart people can see thru his lies, schemes anc crimes. Harvard being the Preeminent Law school in the country is his greatest threat as they are the people who will force justice upon him if lives out this term.
I attended College in Philly, Beaver College was a school that had a good number of Foreign students. In Grad School at Duquesne Univ my first year grad school room-mate was a 50yrs old Indian student, from India. She was getting an extra degree in Childhood Psych. We had fun at first, with her helping me wear one of her Sari's...(however as I was 20yrs old I kept typical College student hours which were not conducive to her studies, so I got a single after that) But I feel for these Foreign students and the BS they are going thru.
The world continues to look more and more like the beginning of a dystopian sci-fi/horror and the freakiest thing is that so many are still oblivious youtube.com/watch?v=CqNwYbnuk3…
This is completely outrageous. Under the veil of sanctioning Russia, the EU has just started to severely punish its own citizens and journalists from third c...
We cover all the latest news headlines from the UK and around the world.Subscribe here: http://youtube.com/@5minuteschool?sub_confirmation=1Business Enquirie...
>> The new resolution, seen by AFP, "demands an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire in Gaza respected by all parties."
>> It also calls for the "immediate, dignified and unconditional release of all hostages held by Hamas and other groups."
>> … the resolution additionally demands the lifting of all restrictions on the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza.
>> It will be put to vote at 4:00 pm Wednesday (2000 GMT), but several diplomats indicated to AFP that they expected the United States to wield its veto power.
>> They added that the representatives from the 10 elected members of the Council, who will introduce the text, tried in vain to negotiate with the American side…
UNITED STATES: The UN Security Council will vote Wednesday on a resolution calling for a ceasefire and unrestricted humanitarian access in Gaza, a measure expec
There is absolutely nothing to stop the UN from disbanding the current UNSC and forming a new one without the United States, or at the very least stripping Russia and the US of their veto powers. Even if it was formed as part of the UN charter then hell, fucking change the charter! Rip the fucking charter up and start something new that reflects today's reality and not the reality of 80 years ago. 2025 is a vastly different world than 1945.
>> The new resolution, seen by AFP, "demands an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire in Gaza respected by all parties."
>> It also calls for the "immediate, dignified and unconditional release of all hostages held by Hamas and other groups."
>> … the resolution additionally demands the lifting of all restrictions on the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza.
>> It will be put to vote at 4:00 pm Wednesday (2000 GMT), but several diplomats indicated to AFP that they expected the United States to wield its veto power.
>> They added that the representatives from the 10 elected members of the Council, who will introduce the text, tried in vain to negotiate with the American side…
UNITED STATES: The UN Security Council will vote Wednesday on a resolution calling for a ceasefire and unrestricted humanitarian access in Gaza, a measure expec
Exciting night here in So. Cal. We are having a storm full of lightning, thunder and hail. An unusual occurrence here. Lightning hit two different Palm trees and was very low. Power out in places and flash floods. My son lives in Wichita and they are having the same.
"As someone who has spent their entire career and most of their life participating and creating online, this sucks. It feels like someone just harvested lumber from a forest I helped grow, and now wants to sell me the furniture they made with it."
"It’s worth saying it out loud as an affirmation: making things is not about the destination, but about the journey. The journey is what you put into creation: the thought, the mistakes, the sweat, the time, the lived experiences, the refinement in technique. What you get back is knowledge. The output is an artifact of that knowledge. When you get that artifact without the journey, you make nothing, you learn nothing."
@Pacific NW Viking I wouldn't count it as a Good movie but it certainly was widely watched, "Grease". That said, only movie I really enjoyed that he was in was Pulp Fiction.
The manufacturing sector in China has slipped into contraction in May, marking its lowest level since September 2022, as the impact of tariffs continues to weigh heavily on the industry despite a temporary trade truce with the U.S.
Thinking about possible "Laws of Generative AI" in the same vein as Asimov's "Laws of Robotics". There will need to be more than three, and at least one could result in Big Tech CEOs being subject to long prison sentences if they keep treating users and the community at large in the same ways as they currently are doing. Open to suggestions.
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As one unelected judge after another rules against the Trump agenda, Republicans must decide if they want to abide by the will of the people. Executive orders are easily undone by the next administration, but codified law is far harder to undo. Yet House Republicans have largely been sitting on their hands, seemingly content to watch a term-limited Trump crank out executive orders while the minority Democrats go judge-shopping to undo the will of the American people. patriotpost.us/articles/117772…
As one anonymous and unelected judge after another rules against the Trump agenda, Republicans must decide whether they want to abide by the will of the American people.
Tim Pool just continues to suck down that big daddy government trust the plan Trump Juice straight from Orange Man's dick. Is anyone paying him to be pro-Israel, pro-Peter Thiel, pro-technocrat, or is he just that stupid?
Kid Starver’s flagship plan to transform the armed forces has been undermined in less than 24 hours after Nato demanded the Government spend 3.5 per cent of GDP on defence.
This has been the craziest and scariest week . The pneumonia had returned as soon as my mother got out of the rehab facility. We took her to a bigger hospital and they put her on antibiotics and she became and still is delirious they call it delirium. the underlying infection and dope they give her has made her almost like mentally sick. I'm sad for my brother and sister because she is crying for them & asking what I did to them and why im hiding them . Her eyes are wide open but blank
They're right there in the room too. On yhe other had the most remarkable thing happened this morning and keeps happening. With the greatest of clarity she can recite the Hail Marry and Lords Prayer and Bible verses verbally without speech impedance or sounding deaf. When she does it she's looking off into the corner of the room as if praying to or with someone.the Dr says it the mind working overtime but I don't believe him. Its amazing and yet so painful to see all if this.
The craziest thing is once she prays it's like a weight bring lifted off of all us we feel better..i thought it would be the other way around..she'd feel better. The nurse from Africa a Christian says it's a wonder and a message. But what ? My faith and belief are not good enough for me to on the inside of the message I guess. But i am grateful shes here and thank God for her life. I Thank you all for listening and we will fight on . My prayers are with all of you
There is hope for the future as long as there are kids like these. High school students uncovered and raised about 500 forgotten veteran grave markers at Mount Calvary Cemetery for Memorial Day! thegatewaypundit.com/2025/06/b…
A group of high school students in New York recently volunteered to restore the gravestones of hundreds of veterans at Mount Calvary Cemetery in the western part of the state.
@UptownGirl We don't know WHAT it is until the Senate finishes hacking it up and then until the Resolution process finishes, anything you got a bill 3,000 pages you can count on a lot of unrelated tyrannical bullshit that has no business being there but that gets through anyway because nobody has time to read.
I want a collection of old arcade games like all the Mortal Kombat games, NBA Jam, Ninja Gaiden, Atomic Runner, Altered Beast, DieHard arcade, NARC, TMNT arcade, Golden Axe 1-3 etc.
GOGG 
デイヴ
in reply to Alfie Kohn • • •