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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I'd love a brief explainer on why exactly Joi Ito and the Media Lab are supposed to be such a big deal.

My general impression is the Media Lab is sort of framed as the successor to the old AI lab, a kind of research crown jewel of MIT. Ito is its director and thus shares in its glory and builds on it. I've seen a variety of press releases over the years polishing and building that glory up. I've seen a lot of smart names associated with it over the years.

I'm not, professionally, interested in its research direction so I don't pay attention to its research really. :: spreads hands ::

It’s a fair question. Ever since the days of Nicholas Negroponte the Media Lab has been a triumph of style over substance. Nevertheless, it’s still an integral part of MIT.

Do you ever read the New York Times? He’s on the board. He’s also connected to half of SV. Check his Flickr account for the portraits.

I subscribe to the New York Times and still don't know how it was Joi Ito came to be so connected to it.

How does anyone, really?

https://www.nytco.com/board-of-directors/

Dunno about Joi Ito - his biggest claim to fame prior to directing the Media Lab seems to be as a venture capitalist who invested in Flickr, Kickstarter, Twitter, Six Apart, etc.

The Media Lab has a long history of innovations that you've probably heard of: E-ink, Formlabs (3D printers), RockBand/GuitarHero, the touchstick on IBM Thinkpads, OLPC, Lego Mindstorms, and Scratch were all developed there.

It's a short list, and some "inventions" are dubious at best. OLPC for instance.

Those were the ones I've heard of - the actual list is quite a bit longer, but includes a lot of B2B technologies in industries I don't care about.

That's pretty good for an organization with a budget of $75M and a permanent staff of 80. I'd be hard-pressed to think of an organization of similar size that's had greater impact - maybe YCombinator or Stanford's CS department. Bell Labs was orders of magnitude bigger - in their 1970s heyday they had 24,000 employees and a budget of around $6B in today's money.

Bell Labs can just show up in this competition, say 'the transistor', drop the mic and walk out. Media Lab has always been, by design, about outreach and demos and fundraising as much as (if not more than?) about research. Comparing it to real research institutions on the basis of research is never going to come out flattering.

Wasn’t Bell Labs innovating before that? Presumably with a smaller budget and smaller head count? Maybe still bigger than Media Lab. But if Bell Labs did some of their impressive stuff at say 5x budget and head count of Media Lab (using only inflation to do budget differences also prob will lead to an uneven comparison that isn’t fair. Not sure which way it would swing though). Then Bell Labs id think would still take the cake.

EDIT: Bell Labs started out with 4K employees so it was always an order of magnitude bigger.

Maybe Media Lab is the biggest innovator for its size. I don’t know if that means much though if it is. Bell Labs gets brought up probably because their influence and what they’ve done far far exceeds the budget and head count advantage.

The parent tweet said "innovations" which is not the same thing as "inventions," the word you used.

The extent of the Rock Band / Guitar Hero connection is that they were made by a company (Harmonix Music Systems) founded by two people who had been grad students at the Media Lab. They did indeed work on music tech while at the Media Lab, and the first Harmonix product, The Axe, was an outgrowth of that tech, although it only sold a few hundred copies. Guitar Hero came eight years later.

(I worked on all three projects.)

The red pointing stick in the ThinkPad was from IBM (or PARC), not from the Media Lab. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_stick#History

Also the Echo Nest which was bought by Spotify, Affectiva, Little Bits (created by Ayah Bdeir just after graduating), expansion microscopy. Limor from Adafruit did her master's thesis there. There have also been many smaller but interesting projects by graduates.

Do you know if Epstein invested in any of those startups?

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