Beyond Bell Labs

One of the ideas that I’m perennially kicking around is social support for science, or more precisely, “What kinds of science?” and “Why should the government support it?” When these questions are asked, the answer usually centers around some type of Basic (or Pure, or Fundamental) Research: Research without obvious applications, research that underlies other, more useful forms of science, research that should be funded by the government because, as a non-rival and non-excludable public good, it will be underfunded by the private sector. As conventional wisdom has it, basic research is a core input for economic innovation, and economic innovation is good for everybody. But really, when you look beyond the platitudes, what are we trying to do with science?

A recent New York Times profile on Bell Labs has brought my thoughts on the matter into sharp relief. You should really just read the whole piece, but if you’re not familiar with Bell Labs, they invented much of the 20^th century, including the semi-conductor, lasers, fiber optics, communications satellites, digital cameras, UNIX, and the C programming language. Why was Bell Labs so successful?

Quite intentionally, Bell Labs housed thinkers and doers under one roof. Purposefully mixed together on the transistor project were physicists, metallurgists and electrical engineers; side by side were specialists in theory, experimentation and manufacturing. Like an able concert hall conductor, he sought a harmony, and sometimes a tension, between scientific disciplines; between researchers and developers; and between soloists and groups… Bell Labs was sometimes caricatured as an ivory tower. But it is more aptly described as an ivory tower with a factory downstairs. It was clear to the researchers and engineers there that the ultimate aim of their organization was to transform new knowledge into new things.

[Mervin Kelley, Director of Bell Labs] gave his researchers not only freedom but also time. Lots of time — years to pursue what they felt was essential… In sum, he trusted people to create. And he trusted them to help one another create. To him, having at Bell Labs a number of scientific exemplars — “the guy who wrote the book,” as these standouts were often called, because they had in fact written the definitive book on a subject — was necessary. But so was putting them into the everyday mix. In an era before cubicles, all employees at Bell Labs were instructed to work with their doors open.

In essence, Bell Labs took the best in the world and aimed them towards “use-inspired basic research”, what science policy scholar, academic administrator, and NSF advisor Donald Stokes identified as Pasteur’s Quadrant. This kind of research aims at both a deeper understanding of the universe and immediate application to the social good, with Pasteur’s work on the bacterial origins of disease being the prototypical example. The standard narrative is that this type of ground-breaking, profitable, and socially useful research has ceased to occur. Stokes argues that Pasteur’s quadrant has no public advocate. The American scientific system as it exists in universities does “basic research“, using the policy justifications laid down in the cornerstone document of American science policy, Vannevar Bush’s Science: The Endless Frontier. Mission agencies, such as the Department of Defense, fund “applied science” that address pressing issues such as creating a plane invisible to radar, without concern for advancing theory. And since corporations have cut strategic research and development centers like Bell Labs or Xerox PARC in pursuit of short-term profits, nobody is doing what is actually the most significant type research.

Another explanation is that politics poisoned the Republic of Science. Instead of pursuing truth, scientists were forced to chase Federal grants that directed research towards conventional, less risky, and less appealing science. As PayPal founder Peter Thiel elucidates in a recent interview with Francis Fukuyama:

Peter Thiel: My libertarian views are qualified because I do think things worked better in the 1950s and 60s, but it’s an interesting question as to what went wrong with DARPA. It’s not like it has been defunded, so why has DARPA been doing so much less for the economy than it did forty or fifty years ago? Parts of it have become politicized. You can’t just write checks to the thirty smartest scientists in the United States. Instead there are bureaucratic processes, and I think the politicization of science—where a lot of scientists have to write grant applications, be subject to peer review, and have to get all these people to buy in—all this has been toxic, because the skills that make a great scientist and the skills that make a great politician are radically different. There are very few people who are both great scientists and great politicians. So a conservative account of what happened with science in the 20^th century is that we had a decentralized, non-governmental approach all the way through the 1930s and early 1940s. At that point, the government could accelerate and push things tremendously, but only at the price of politicizing it over a series of decades. Today we have a hundred times more scientists than we did in 1920, but their productivity per capita is less that it used to be.

Francis Fukuyama: You certainly can’t explain the survival of the shuttle program except in political terms.

Peter Thiel: It was an extraordinary program. It cost more and did less and was probably less safe than the original Apollo program. In 2011, when it finally ended, there was a sense of the space age being over. Not quite, but it’s very far off from what we had decades ago. You could argue that we had more or better-targeted funding in the 1950s and 1960s, but the other place where the regulatory situation is radically different is that technology is much more heavily regulated than it used to be. It’s much harder to get a new drug through the FDA process. It takes a billion dollars. I don’t even know if you could get the polio vaccine approved today.

The scholar in me must add that Peter Thiel’s understanding of American science policy is very ahistorical, if not flat-out wrong. The current science policy and science funding apparatus that Thiel rails against is inherited from the Cold War, and that system was in turn developed from the research system set up during World War II. During this time, the Office of Scientific Research and Development was able to direct a much smaller scientific community in developing radar, computers, and the atomic bomb because its director, Vannevar Bush, personally knew every scientist of importance in the nation. And even then, the system directed the lion’s share of grants towards a handful of top universities, including John Hopkins, MIT, and Caltech. Vannevar Bush, for all his talents as a scientist and administrator, thought that the digital computer and rocketry were just fads, and would never amount to anything. If Vannevar Bush had actually been given sole, long-term control of American science policy, he would have delayed many fruitful fields of research, and likely have been the subject of high-profile hearings on cronyism and corruption in science, not from malfeasance per se, but just from the nature of his management style (you can see an echo of this in the allegations around DARPA director Regina E Dugan and RedXDefense, LLC). The NSF and NIH are not perfect organizations by any means, but they have managed to avoid such massive and obvious failure over the past 50 years. Pretty good for agencies that haven't had a clear national goal since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

To return to the questions posed at the start of this essay, what is it about basic research that is important for innovation? I’d like to offer an operational definition of research: Research is what scientists do. And what is it that scientists do? At the highest level, ignoring the details of any particular field of research: They observe things; they measure things; they change conditions and see how the measurements change; they repeat the changes and the measurements; they develop some sort of theory about what’s going on; and then they write up their results.* Sometimes the results get written up as a journal article, in which case it’s basic research. Other times, they get written up as a patent application, in which case, it’s applied research. If nobody write about it, than nobody learns about it, and it dies. Publishing is at the heart of science. The Royal Society started as a club to share the results of 17^th century natural philosophers, and was widely emulated across the continent, which is why some scientific journals are still called the The Letters of Such and Such Organization.

What I want to draw out here is that neither articles nor patents fit neatly into Stokes’ concept of Pasteur’s Quadrant. Attempts like university technology transfer offices and the Bayh-Dole Act to bridge these forms of publishing are crude hacks to get both patents and articles out of the same body of work. While the form and content of a scientific article or patent is basically arbitrary, in that there’s no reason why they have to look the way that they do as opposed to some other form, there is something to the idea of a separation between Ideas and Things, and the different standards of scientific success to each realm. But is the minimization of Pasteur’s Quadrant and innovation merely an artifact of the publishing process? Again, I think not.

What is it that distinguishes “real science” from the kind of thing that’s done in a high-school classroom? What is it that distinguishes a scientist from a non-scientist? The questions are related: In a high-school experiment the answer is in the back of the book, while in a real experiment the answer is not yet known. And a scientist is somebody who has made a contribution to the collective body of knowledge by solving an unknown problem. Or to use an operational definition, a scientist is somebody who has earned their PhD by completing a dissertation and convincing a committee of current scientists of its validity and novelty.

Essentially every professional scientist has a PhD (counter-examples welcome), and many scientists spend much of their time helping younger scientists earn their dissertations. Working backwards from our operational definition of science as what scientists do, and adding in the idea that all scientists have to earn a dissertation, I’d like to propose that basic research is any scientific problem posed such that a reasonably bright individual might be expected to solve it in the course of earning a PhD.

Where this gets tricky is that not all scientific problems are created equal. Some have clear and immediate applications (how do we cure this disease?), others are easy (what do cows eat?), some are opaque (what is ‘time’ made of?), and some are hard (how do we make net-energy-positive fusion?).** Most problems lie somewhere in between, but after several hundred years of directed scientific endeavor, I think that I can safely say that a lot of the low-lying fruit, easy problems with obvious applications, have been solved. What is left is either very hard or irrelevant to useful ends. Because basic research is operationally defined as solvable, it must therefore be irrelevant.

Basic research serves a clear purpose. We need a class of problems to separate people capable of doing science from those who cannot, and to separate good scientists from bad scientists (unless you trust Vannevar Bush and/or Peter Thiel to just write checks to the smartest scientists they know). There are creativity and problem solving-skills that a person in the process of formulating a novel hypothesis and proving original conclusions cannot be obtained by replicating known results. And demanding that every PhD candidate be an Einstein or a Watson or a Crick is unfair to the vast majority of very capable scientists who will never win the Nobel Prize.

Basic research is necessary for renewing and sustaining a vibrant scientific community, but I think that scientists by-and-large are not taking the training wheels off their research. There are plenty of reasons to spend a career doing basic research: hiring decisions are based on publications, grants frequently demand results in a year or two, and the psychological reward of completing a project or becoming the world expert in some sub-sub-sub-field all bias scientists towards ‘do-able’ basic research rather than high-impact problems that may take years and yield no result. But what was once a program to create new scientists has become the raison d’etre of science, to the detriment of both innovation and the public support of science.

These incentives are both perverse and pervasive. My colleague John Carter McKnight wrote in an astute post on research and impact that:

“The system – precisely like the Soviet economy (look, I’m not going Gresham’s law here – I actually have a master’s degree in Soviet economic systems. Don’t ask.) doesn’t require quality in output past a bare minimum of peer review (which like Soviet production standards is gamed – since we all need to produce volume, we’re incentivized to accept crap output from others in return for their accepting our crap output) but rather quantity. Basic human nature points to a race to the bottom, or producing to the minimum acceptable standard.”

While John was writing about the humanities, the same argument applies to the sciences, where 40% of papers are not even cited once. Even scientists find other’s basic research boring and irrelevant.

During the Enlightenment, natural philosophy was reserved for wealthy gentlemen and those experimentalists who could secure a patron. These days, Big Science projects like the Large Hadron Collider, the Human Genome Project, or research into alternative energy are beyond the abilities of any single individual—breakthroughs require collaborations of large groups of people over years if not decades. Yet at the same time, big projects require consensus and generate their own momentum; they are ill-suited towards nimble, intellectual ventures. What kinds of institutions support good science?

Bell Labs was great in its time, but was ignominiously shut down in 2008, and no other company has stepped up. The Manhattan Project was a major success, but at any time other than a national emergency would have ended the careers of everybody involved due to waste and duplication of effort (four sites, three methods of separating fissile material, and two bomb designs). The government’s networks of in-house laboratories run by the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, NASA, and the National Institutes of Health don’t have the same kind of prestige or success that Bell Labs once held. This might be because they’re just as beholden to the yearly Congressional budget cycle as corporate labs are to quarterly reports, with the impossibility of becoming rich or famous, or it might be because they’re typically funded at a compromise level that stifles success and encourages conservatism rather than economy (what’s the tally on abandoned NASA rockets since the Space Shuttle?). The logics of maximizing short-term political benefit (aka Congressional pork) while holding down long-term costs has gotten us fiascos like the Joint Strike Fighter, a space agency that cares more about holding onto decaying facilities than doing science, and a glut of NIH lab space. Fiddling with these big institutions at the margins is just that, fiddling.

I think there’s something to these operational definitions, so let’s try and operational question. “How can we encourage worthwhile science while minimizing the long tail of boring crap?” The New York Times article that lead this piece talked about linking ivory-tower theories to the factory floor, and giving smart people time and freedom. I’ve talked about articles, patents, salaries, and other incentives. A great article in the New Yorker by Jonah Lehrer says that architecture itself can inhibit or produce creative thinking. But all of this is missing something key. To paraphrase Clausewitz, “Science is done by human beings." Human beings grow up, grow old, and die; scientific institutions are designed to live forever. What if immortal scientific institutions are failing science as a human endeavor?

Bell Labs managed to draw in the best minds of an entire generation, and then slowly faded away. The engineers that built the Apollo project couldn’t find a worthy successor for their energies. From Steve Jobs to the Lockheed Skunk Works or the classic The Soul of a New Machine, we see charismatic leaders taking teams of dedicated young engineers to the breaking point and beyond in pursuit of real innovation, and those teams falling apart afterwards. When I was applying to grad school, a mentor told me “Don’t go to [University X]. They did some great work in the early 90s, but they haven’t moved since.” Scientific institutions, as real entities staffed by human beings rather than abstract generators of knowledge, have a life-cycle.

The age of Nobel Prize winners and first-grant awards has been slowly rising, and while the exact causes and effects are uncertain, I think that might be one indicator that the institution of science is slowing down. In a scientific version of the Peter Principle, we take the best scientists and promote them into administration where they spend their time writing grants and herding post-docs rather than doing science. We make young scientists jump through an ever more complex series of hoops to get access to the good equipment and the big questions. The structure of science has become pyramidal, and old men guard the top. It’s no wonder that so much research is trivial, conservative, and aimed at the next rung in the career ladder rather than shaking the foundations of knowledge.

So this is my humble proposal for fixing science. Stop trying to turn undergrads into grad students into professors into emeriti. Stop running the whole endeavor like some sort of backwards business, with metrics for impact within a department and no reward for doing anything outside your little field. Stop making the reproduction of the social structure of science the highest goal of science.

What if we just gave large groups of young people some basic training, equivalent to passing comps in a PhD program, and then let them lose in the lab? I’m not talking about small scale here. Why not throw open the doors to the Goddard Space Flight Center and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to the brightest and most ambitious hackerspace DIYers and say “All this is yours. Show me something cool.” Let them govern themselves through some kind of Parecon system, with only a minimal level of government oversight. If an experiment fails, well, science is uncertain. If they haven’t done anything worthwhile in 5 years, well, maybe their funding should be cut.

One of the basic principles here (and this might be naïve), is that people can actually work together in good faith towards common goals. I remember from my time at Caltech, where collaborative work was a core principle, that people naturally formed study groups with others that they could work well with. Make the core group of each lab similar in age and experience to deliberately minimize the effects of bad expert knowledge and hierarchies based on authority rather than expertise (Clarke’s First Law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.) If somebody isn’t cut out for science, they’ll be gently eased out. Real peer review, rather than the kabuki theater currently practiced by the journals.

What I want make explicit is that each of these labs is by design a temporary entity. They’ll attract a flourishing community at their founding, and then slowly be pared down to basic core. While they might be centers of scientific learning, I wouldn’t let young scientists spend more than a few years at a lab, and labs would be barred from recruiting. Each generation must make its own scientific center. And when any given lab is haunted by just a few old-timers, throw open the doors to a new generation of scientists to hack ancient experimental equipment and learn from the Freeman Dyson-types hanging around.

This is just a utopian sketch, not a practical plan, and there are lots of open questions. Without strong ties to commercial or political end-users, might science just drift off into solipsistic irrelevance? Would breaking up labs by generation inspire true interdisciplinary research, or merely deprive junior scientists of expert mentoring? How would the funding and governing mechanism really work, and how would we prevent corruption and pathological accumulations of power? I don’t have good answers to these questions, but I think that there might be something to linking the dynamics of scientific (and economic and political) institutions to human cycles rather than some arbitrary standard of knowledge. And could it really be worse—more expensive, less innovative, and less personally fulfilling—than the current system?

((And I wouldn’t drag you, my loyal readers, through 3500 words on science policy without some kind of payoff in the form of a speculative proposal))

*I fully expect you guys to tear this definition to shreds.

**And yes, I’m blurring the lines between science and technology here. You know what I mean, deal with it.

Between Innovation and Evolution

Breakthrough has my second blog, on innovation and technological evolution. Is evolutionary economics worthwhile, or just more psuedo-scientific bunk?

Policy-makers seeking to ignite the engines of economic growth are turning to a new theory of "innovation economics," which focuses on technological evolution and its supporting institutions. However, the axiom that "innovation drives economic growth" derives mostly from the observation that conventional explanations of growth based on capital and population fail to explain differences in economic outcomes, not incontrovertible evidence. Failure and innovation seem to run hand-in-hand. Fantastically innovative technologies, from the SAGE air defense network, to the Concorde SST, and EV-1 electric car became technological turkeys when they failed in the market. Entrepreneurs have a failure rate approaching 80%. Neoclassic economics--the doctrine that innovation economics seeks to replace--grew up crippled because it borrowed from an incomplete model of equilibrium physics, using the First Law of Thermodynamics, but not the Second Law. Similarly, without a better understanding of the forces behind technological evolution, innovation economics will develop as a fundamentally flawed theory. There is a difference between faster evolution, and real improvements in quality of life. Read the rest.

Sputnik vs Spudnut: One of these things in not like the other

Predrag Boksic | perceptron

Ever want to punch yourself in the metaphorical nuts? Check out Sarah Palin's facebook page, where she communicates with her hordes of slobbering followers. The latest missive is entitled Sputnik vs Sputnut, and is a direct response to Obama's State of the Union.

"Now, in a recent interview I mentioned analogies that could relate to solutions to our economic challenges, including the difference between a communist government’s “Sputnik” and the private sector’s “Spudnut.” The analogies I mentioned obviously aren’t comparable in size, but highlight a clear difference in economic focus: big government command and control economies vs. America’s small businesses...

I believe and trust in the strength of America’s private sector. But I sometimes fear that the current administration in Washington distrusts or discounts the individuals who have built this country; hence their belief that only a distant bureaucratic elite in D.C. can make decisions for our small businesses that will provide American opportunity. This administration’s thinking is wrong. We don’t need a command and control economy that “invests” our money in their half-baked ideas. We need freedom, reward for hard work, and a re-invigorated sense of personal responsibility and work ethic, especially among our young people."

Well, I'm not an expert (wait, I am an expert), but let me put it this way. One of these things is a national endeavor that pushed the known limits of science and engineering, explored the universe, demonstrated national prestige and power, inspired a generation, lead to whole new industries, and produced an immense degree of wealth through commercial spin-offs, while the other one is a donut made with potato flour.

I don't agree with the necessity for freedom, rewards, a sense of personal responsibility, and work ethic, and that the young are the future, but magic ingredient in the tasty fried concoction* that is our future is vision. Because small business owners think on their scale, they think small. Yes, Google and Apple and Facebook and so on, but the government built the internet, the government funded the science that made the microprocessor possible, and I guarantee you that the government will have a hefty hand in whatever comes next. And as for our young people, while apparently Sarah Palin herself isn't actually anti-education, calls to eliminate the Department of Education, no national standards or nonsensical, mechanistic national standard, and making the quality of a school entirely related to the wealth of the surrounding neighborhood, creating generational cycles of poverty, is not the way to go about it. Businesses don't have the long-term vision, incentives, or capabilities to ensure America's prosperity into the future. I can't guarantee that large scale Federal projects will save this country, but I can ensure you that to reflexively squash them all is to doom us to mediocrity.

*(damn you spudnut, you've made me hungry, and all the donut shops are closed now)

Towards a Closed Loop Economy

Innovation is Serious Business. It's the key to prosperity, national security, health, jobs, you name it, innovation will solve it. But for all the talk that gets thrown around about innovation, and innovation policy (at least in the circles I run in), one question which is largely unaddressed is: Can we innovate in any direction we want, or are there historical patterns that describe how technological change produces the social, political, and economic outcomes were aiming for?

The study of economic history is called cliometrics, and one of the seminal works in the field is Chris Freeman and Francisco Louca's As Time Goes By: From the Industrial Revolutions to the Information Revolution. Freeman and Louca develop a theory of innovation centered around Kondratiev Waves, decades long cycles of economic development driven by a “carrier branch technology.” They identify five Kondratiev Waves: water powered machinery, the steam engine, electrification, motorization, and computerization. Kondratiev waves display common characteristics, the carrier branch technology allows vastly more efficient use of resources, while creating new demands for raw materials, new technological innovations, and new forms of social organization. However, each wave's upswing is followed by a downswing, a structural adjustment as the limits of the technology are reached, and the quest for further profits and efficiencies instead leads to the elimination of jobs, and associated social and political unrest. I'll use the steam engine as the canonical example.

Steam engines were initially developed to pump water out of coal mines, and were relatively bulky and immobile. Improved metallurgy and machine tools allowed the creation of lighter, more efficient steam engines capable of driving locomotives on railroads around 1820. Railroads created a new market for coal, which was become cheaper thanks to better mining techniques, but more importantly, made it much easier to bring coal to market. Factories, which previously had to be located by fast flowing rivers, could now be moved closer to population centers and raw materials. Travel became a mass commodity, and millions of people could travel between cities cheaply and easily on a network of new railroads and steamships. Entrepreneurs became extremely wealthy, while many investors went broke in speculative bubbles. The sheer scale of railroad enterprises (thousands of employees as opposed to hundreds, and geographic dispersion) required new techniques of rational management, for example, the Harvard Business School was founded to train railroad executives, while timezones were imposed so that a nationwide train schedule could be coordinated. By 1870, market pressures had forced the creation of massive conglomerates, run by Gilded Age robber barons. Recession and labor unrest reverberated around the world, and wealth production did not begin in earnest until the start of the next Kondratiev wave in the 1890s, when electrification provided a host of new opportunities. Similar stories can be told about each of the other Kondratiev waves.

So what's the take away, the relevance to modern life? Kondratiev waves last about 50 years, in total. The start of the computer age can reasonably be traced back to the invention of the integrated circuit in 1959, or more realistically, the IBM S/360 in 1964, which was the first widely available general purpose computer. The exact date isn't important, what matters is that now, fifty years later, we've reached a point of saturation in terms of computers. Micro-controllers are in literally every possible device. 4.6 billion people have cell phones. Computer chip manufacturing is a cut-throat business conducted on the thinnest of margins. These facts are clear signs of a mature technology, and the downslope of a Kondratiev wave. The economic and political side matches as well. We're seeing persistent unemployment and social unrest the world over, from the United States, to Greece, to Egypt. While the proximate cause of the most recent recession was financial mismanagement (made possible in large part by the computerization of the financial sector, I might note), it seems more plausible that in fact we're experiencing a structural adjustment. Computerization is tapped out as a primary driver of economic growth. Incremental innovation in computers and related technologies will not restore prosperity. What is needed now is a new carrier branch technology.

Carrier branch technologies are big, they fundamentally alter every aspect of production and social organization. What in the pipeline might fit the bill? Nanotechnology is a perennial favorite, but molecular assembly is fifteen years away, and has been since 1986. Human enhancement and biotech is important, but I'm not sure how much it drives at the "means of production." Clean energy might work, but replacing coal plants with solar plants, and gasoline with batteries, doesn't seem big enough for a Kondratiev wave.

This comic [backup link] provides a hint. It tells the Malthusian story of reindeer on St. Matthew Island, where the population expanded exponentially until they hit their resource limit, and collapsed. While the only thing more predictable than a Malthusian prediction is that it will be overturned, the central tenet that in the long run, Earth is a finite system, is a physical fact. So let me speculate, what if the outputs of the economy were identical to the inputs? What if the human economy was a closed loop, taking in only sunlight, and producing the absolute minimum of waste? Stop burning fossile fuels, stop mining metals, stop depleting fisheries and upsetting nutrient cycles, and focus on minimizing

This would require the re-engineering of almost material artifact, every large scale technological system. The amount of human effort would be staggering, millions if not billions of jobs would be created. The potential benefits are large, not only would we be saving the planet, but we'd be growing the economy, because turning trash into wealth is the very definition of alchemy. Moving to a closed loop economy is not just ecologically sound, it's also cost efficient. As Neal Stephenson recently pointed out, sucking resources out of the ground and lighting them on fire as a way to create energy is a method that appears, from the point of view of hypothetical alien anthropologists, to be insane.

The actual policies involved in transitioning to a closed loop economy are far from easy. There are entrenched interests opposing any such shift. Not only is it cheaper to extract resources from the ground, and use the atmosphere as a carbon dump, but humans intrinsically enjoy being part of the larger world. As I've been thinking about this, the image of domed cities and hydroponic farms came to mind, a classic sci-fi dystopia. But as a start, we need to begin collecting information about the total life-cycles of products, and encouraging greater amounts of recycling. We need to identify what technological changes can be done easily, and what will be hard. There will be normative and cultural shifts; consumerism is not compatible with a closed loop economy However, in terms of the grand challenges of the future, the big economic picture, the creation of public policy and the role of individuals, there are steps that can be taken. This is the innovation we need, not only for prosperity, but for survival.

Innovation, but why?

Ancient peoples worshiped many gods, but modern civilization bows before a single principle: Innovation. As President Obama said in Tuesday's State of the Union address, “In America, innovation doesn't just change our lives. It is how we make our living.” He went on to use the word innovation ten more times, making it the major theme of his speech. Innovation is more than just a word, its influence can be seen in the ways that major institutions, such as business and the military, have re-organized themselves around a state of permanent innovation. In the following, I will examine two paths to this state, and its consequence for the scientific community and society at large.

Carlson traces the development of the corporate research and development lab. The first innovators were inventors, craftsmen who improved devices increment by increment. But as a systemic source of innovation, these small inventors typical of Industrial revolution were hobbled by a lack of capital, and the limitations of human knowledge. While tinkering with existing devices and principles was within the reach of many ambitious craftsmen, truly novel principles and the means to bring advanced technologies to market were out of reach.

Carlson traces the dawn of institutional innovation to the telegraph. As Western Union spread across the country, competing with local firms, railroads, financiers, and anti-trust lawyers, it became apparent that the difference between profit and extinct lay in harnessing the latest in electronics technology, usually by buying patents off of private inventors. Thomas Edison parlayed his success as an inventor into an immense private workshop, however General Electric and its chief scientist, Elihu Thompson, created the modern model of corporate R&D in 1900. Frustrated by the amount of coordination between scattered factories required to build an experimental car, he convinced the GE board to create a permanent lab conducting basic research.

At first, the purpose of the lab was purely defensive, to protect GE products from superior competitors. But as time passed, industrialists realized that new knowledge could be used offensively, to create new markets, to trade with competitors, and to improve public standing. Compared to the 'random genius' of inventors, management preferred scientific innovation because it seemed predictable and controllable. This basic pattern, with the added details of intra-industry collaboration and Federal support of risky technologies, has continued through the 21^st century, although in real terms, large R&D labs have been responsible for surprisingly few breakthroughs, with much of the most creative work coming from smaller companies, a model best demonstrated in biotech and computers, where small start-ups with one piece of very valuable IP are purchased and developed by larger conglomerates.

A second side of institutional innovation is the military, which supports up to half of the basic research conducted in America. War and technology have long been closely intertwined, as brilliant explored by William McNeill in The Pursuit of Power. Perhaps the first noteworthy institutionalization of innovation was the British shipbuilding industry circa 1900, where an “Iron Triangle” of shipyards, admirals, and hawkish liberal politicians pushed steel to its limits with ever more powerful battleships. But it was not until WW1 that innovative warfare had its first chance to shine. Innovation was applied haphazardly, in the form of machine guns, poison gas, aircraft, tanks, submarines and anti-submarine warfare, but there was little coordination between scientists and soldiers. A new weapon would make an initial splash, but quickly add to the stalemate. The war was eventually decided by a German economic collapse.

Many of the scientific institution of WW1 were dismantled in the interwar years, but WW2 was above and beyond a war won by cutting edge science. Radar, operations research, airpower, and of course the atomic bomb were all products of Allied scientific knowledge, while jet fighters and rockets rolled off of Nazi lines at the close of the war. Federally supported labs, and defense companies who sold solely to the government proliferated, too many to name. With an obvious and immediate clash between the Allies and the Soviet Union at hand, neither side disarmed their scientific apparatus. Both sides sought to avoid a qualitative defeat, or worse, technological surprise, investing ever larger sums in military R&D, and leading to the domineering “military-industrial complex” of President Eisenhower's farewell address.

For scientists, these twin processes have been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, science has obtained a great deal of funding from industrial and military sources, orders of magnitude more than the pure 'pursuit of truth'. Yet, scientists have lost their autonomy, tied either to market forces or military imperatives. Biomedicine has improved healthcare, but also exponentially increased costs. The process of introducing a new drug is more akin to marketing than science or medicine. Through the military, “Science has known sin,” to paraphrase Oppenheimer's haunting phrase. Where for a period from about 1850 to 1945, the scientist could truly claim to represent a universal humanity, working towards the ends of destruction has permanently damaged scientific prestige and credibility. The values of science are subordinated towards petty, nationalist ends.

For society, pursuit of innovation has lead to the threat of man-made extinction through nuclear war. The process of action-reaction in the arms race brings us ever closer to the brink of annihilation. From the market side, the permanent churning of the basic constituents of society has created an immense dislocation. Skills and jobs can become obsolete in less than a decade. With new-found material wealth came a crass materialism. The objects around us change constantly, their principles of operation becoming ever more opaque. The deep sense of unease pervading American society might be reasonably traced to chronic future shock. Innovation is a god, but it has become Moloch, concerned solely with profit and military might.

So, to return to the State of the Union. I've read it several times, and I feel conflicted. It's a good speech, certainly, and I agree with many of the specific policies he outlines for a continued investment in innovation, yet there is a certain hollowness to it, a failure to grapple with the crux of why we innovate. The main drive to innovate is material, the jobs of the 21^st century should be located in America, yet we don't know that innovation will bring back jobs, at best we know from the lessons of the past that a failure to innovate will mean the loss of more jobs. But the ultimate hollowness came at the end. President Obama made a deliberate callback to the space race, with the phrase “Sputnik moment,” but President Kennedy knew where we were going; the moon, in ten years.

Obama's answer to Kennedy, “I'm not sure how we'll reach that better place beyond the horizon, but I know we'll get there. I know we will.”

That's certainly true. We'll definitely make it to the future the old-fashioned way, by living it, one day at a time. But that's no guarantee that the future will be any place we want to live. Right now, all we have is a notion that America must be wealthier than China. As individuals, as a nation, and as a species, we must decide what is beyond that horizon, and we must build the institutions of governance to take us there.