Yeah, that's the point of my next sentence. Why would someone who comes up with information theory want to give it to an employer?
I think an answer to that was a lot clearer in the 1960's when going from idea to product was much harder.
I think an answer to that was a lot clearer in the 1960's when going from idea to product was much harder.
Why would someone who is not motivated by financial gain care?
> I was motivated more by curiosity. I was never motivated by the desire for money, financial gain. I wasn't trying to do something big so that I could get a bigger salary.
— Claude Shannon
What products could Shanon have made only knowing information theory? Or CSRO knowing only ODFM solved multipath? Did Bob Metcalf make more money when everyone had Ethernet or if he'd licensed it much more exclusively?
It's very hard for a single fundamental result to be a durable competitive advantage compared to wider licensing on nicer terms. That's particularly true when much else goes into the product.
Sure, licensing information theory is a bit of a stretch, but Shannon literally built one of the first artificial intelligence machines [1]. 2025 Shannon would've been totally fine building his own company.
If you see these idols through their singular achievements, then yes of course it's hard to imagine them outside the context of a lab, but rarely are these innovators one trick ponies.
By the way, Bob Metcalfe did indeed start his own company and became pretty successful in doing so.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon#Artificial_Inte...
I do think there is a lot less low hanging fruit which makes the comparison apples and oranges. Google is like Bell Labs today, and what did they invent? LLMs? Compare that to information theory, the transistor, Unix, etc.
Yep, agree with this statement. That's exactly what I think happened.
Quite the opposite, always a mad rush towards profit at any cost.
That almost seems like a problem! We shouldn't reward a prospective Claude Shannon for moving away from fundamental breakthroughs in favor of applied research that can go into a product. We're really failing to incentivize discovering fundamentals like information theory.
When an employer or occupation provides a fully respectable career for life, that's your job and it's fully respectable to have that be your life's work from that point onward, plus information theory doesn't represent the full 1% of what Shannon had to offer anyway :)