This makes me nostalgic for something that I never had and doesn't seem to exist anymore, labs unburdened by either the red tape of government or academia, or alternately, the pressure for results and profits that many startups seem to slaved to. Is there a 21st century equivalent of Bell Labs out there somewhere? Asking for a friend.
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I believe Microsoft Research is the closest thing to the old Bell Labs or the old Xerox PARC that exists today, but I’ve heard that even MSR has changed (though this is just hearsay). I’ve heard historically researchers at MSR had a wide degree of freedom, and there has been many interesting projects coming out of there, my favorites being Singularity and Midori. Once again I don’t know how free the lab culture is, and I also don’t know the lab’s performance review criteria.
I’ve been reading lots of history books and interesting narratives. It seems like some sort of result-oriented pressure or a resource-based constraint has nearly always been the case with R&D and inventions. If Bell Labs is about laid back experimentation, I guess it’s more of an exception that proves the rule in these things. Even Google tends to feel the pressure of interest rates going up and lots of the more laid back stuff being thrown off as ”zero interest rate phenomenon” moonshot bets.