Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Well, I was a terrible architect, but I turned out to be a pretty good engineer, and this was at a time when computer science didn’t exist. At Princeton, I walked in, and I said, “Look, I think I’d rather do computers.” Well, they talked to me for a bit, and they put me in their advanced class, and then that’s sort of how it happened. So whatever you think you’re going to do, you may do something very different. I just naturally liked computer science. I graduated with a degree in electrical engineering, but I did none of the EE classes, so never asked me to repair anything. [laughter] Now early on, you were an intern at Bell Labs, and also PARC, which belonged to Xerox, and I think of those two institutions as stemming from earlier glory years of American science. Is it fair to think of your career as in some sense, you’re the person who spans those two eras, the Bell Labs-PARC era of doing things, and then the tech era of manipulating information, and that your ability to bring expertise from those two areas together is what has made you a unique figure? Is that a fair assessment of how you fit into the picture? It’s very flattering. I would say I’m defined by luck, and I think almost anyone who’s successful has to start by saying they were lucky — lucky of birth, lucky of having intellectual and intelligent family home life, upbringing, global upbringing, etcetera. I was lucky because when I worked at Bell Labs, I wrote a program called Lex, which is still in use today, which is disturbing, given that was 40 years ago. [laughter] And the people at the time — you have this notion that some of the tech industry is like it is now, it was then. Back then it was just technical nerds, right? There was no business context. There’s no formation. Just really interesting stuff. And Bell Labs, of course, came out of a monopoly agreement around AT&T, and as part of the way the monopoly was set up, Bell Labs was funded to do interesting things. About 90 percent of what Bell Labs did was related to signal processing and telephony. Remember I didn’t take those classes in college? But the 10 percent that did pure research and computer science ultimately had this enormous impact. Xerox PARC came out of a similar structure. Xerox, at the time, was a structural monopoly, although not a legal one, because they were the only people building xerographic copiers, and so they had the ability to create these research centers. And during this sort of golden age of research centers, this is where a lot of American science happened because they had enough money — universities didn’t have it. Today, you wouldn’t create a separate lab on the hill today. We’ve been through this in my career, now over 40 years. I’ve tried to set up these research labs and they don’t work when they’re separate. So at Google, when we did the same thing, what we did is, we created integrated labs that, actually — there’s not much distinction between the research part and the product development part. Indeed, the researchers and the developers work as a team.…

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