Ask HN: What is the current day Xerox Park / Bell Labs?

It doesn't really exist -- public funding (which drove blue sky research in both these places along with funding the Arpanet work done at BBN & elsewhere, PLATO, etc) dried up in the late 70s. No company can (or has the incentives to) invest in undirected research the way Bell did with Bell Labs (though RCA was a peer of Bell's at the time), because nobody has a government-granted nationwide monopoly on communications infrastructure peered with a legitimate fear that their monopoly position will be lost forever due to sudden changes in the whims of legislators.

Some ex-PARC folks tried to continue in the spirit of PARC's work at the Viewpoints Research Institute (after Kay tried and failed to do it in the private sector at Apple and Atari). Ex-Bell Labs folks (at least in computing) seem to end up at Google or at Microsoft Research, but it seems like they're only given the leeway they have because they already have clout from Bell Labs...

Microsoft, Facebook, and Google all have skunkworks departments doing blue-sky research, but they all seem to have a lot more oversight & pressure to productize. Over in academia, the MIT Media Lab was trying to be their equivalent of PARC, but the emphasis on creating demos to wow tech journalists has just reproduced the worst parts of SV pitch culture.