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Comment by mtraven | Hacker News Reader

> The magic companies of the last century are the ones who could do both, allowing people to have side projects that don't immediately show commercial promise. Bell Labs was a lot like this. So was PARC. And Google to some degree.

Those past companies could afford to create creative playgrounds because they were monopolies or near monopolies. That is about the only way to create a situation where "nobody is looking over your shoulder". Google enjoyed that status for awhile but now seems to be in fierce competition with Facebook and Apple, so maybe not as much any more.

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Well, it's really because they had an independent and consistent source of income. That's a quality of monopolies, but you can get it other ways. For universities, it's an endowment. For governments, taxes.

I don't really know how much money it takes. The MIT Media Lab was pretty cheap to get started, relatively. Google makes less profit than Apple, but they're still able to run Google[x]. Larry+Sergey don't seem to use revenue as a primary signal for success, so I'm not that worried.

The constraint seems to be people who are bright, determined, imaginative, and rebellious enough to ditch the status quo.

This is why I'm an advocate for basic income. It would let the imaginative actually try to imagine rather than do grueling soulless work to eat.

And all the "unimaginative" folks would be the serfs, paying for the "imaginative".

No thanks.

If you notice the pattern of innovation, its usually not driven by a bunch of dreamers trying to think of the next big idea. Its driven by people trying to solve a very specific problem and finding a solution that is more generally applicable.

The electronic telegraph was created as an electronic method of replacing the old optical telegraph systems.

The cathode ray tube was discovered in order to observe the waveform electricity for physicists.

The solid-state transistor was discovered at Bell Labs as a replacement for the vacuum tube amplifier.

UNIX was created at Bell Labs as a programming environment to create programs to drive the telephone exchange.

Follow the chain of innovation and this pattern appears over and over. Solve a specific problem, find a general solution.

That's quite wrong about Unix. http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/hist.html

I can't speak as confidently about the rest, but the impression I get is that people like Gauss were hacking up telegraphs very soon after enough basic components and knowledge were in place; i.e. the gating factor was not the need for better communications but the new knowledge out of left field. Likewise the CRT seems motivated by curiosity more than technological problem-solving: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathode_ray#History The Bell Labs transistor seems to fit your model, though I wonder about the Lilienfield patent 20 years earlier: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_transistor

"Invention is the mother of necessity" looks like a better fit for most of these examples.

We should also move to a 4 day work week and "give" that extra day to another person. With the efficiency gains over the last 50 years it doesn't make sense to continue the 5+ day work week.

Not sure that the Media Lab was that cheap, but it did innovate in funding in a big way (by creating industry consortia in sectors that were not accustomed to funding research, like newspapers).

I think it was worth that much just to put Minsky and Papert under the same roof.

Hmm, that would be an interesting way to justify government granted monopolies. They need to devote X% of their operating budget to R&D, possibly with some special constraints on any patents that come out of that.

That's simply not cool, you will also get much worse service for much higher price than in the rest of the world.

Taxes are more fair in this regard.

I'm working under the assumption that if government granted monopolies will happen, getting a bit more of a benefit out of it may be worthwhile.

Generally I'm also of the idea that monopolies are bad, but I'm not knowledgeable enough in the subject to know whether there's possibly a short time frame (5-10 years?) where a monopoly is actually has enough benefits (or can have enough benefits if the right constraints are placed) to society to make it desirable.

Indeed, I think that was how Bell Labs was created.

sound like you're talking about patents :)

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