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Can High-Tech Academia Survive Silicon Valley's Talent Binge?
An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this year, Carnegie Mellon had one of the most capable robotics research centers in the world. Then, Uber hired away dozens of workers in a frantic push to jump start development of autonomous driving technology, which left CMU reeling. Now the NY Times asks whether such high-tech labs can continue to exist; Silicon Valley seems ready to flood such organizations with money whenever a vital new technology is almost ripe. "Carnegie Mellon's experience is a familiar one in the world of high-tech research. As a field matures, universities can wake up one day to find money flooding the premises; suddenly they're in a talent war with deep-pocketed firms from Silicon Valley. The impacts are also intellectual. When researchers leave for industry, their expertise winks off the map; they usually can't publish what they discover — or even talk about it over drinks with former colleagues. ... [Also], the intellectual register of their work changes. No more exploring hard, ''basic'' problems out of deep curiosity; they need to solve problems that will make their employers money."
What have they done for anyone, besides the occasional weekend sports game? Which is really just a way to take your money for a few brief moments of entertainment.
Do you buy your food at a university? No. Do you get your clothes from a university? No. Does a university pave your roads? Build your house? Cure your disease? No, of course not.
Let us get rid of the scourge of higher education, it is a parasite that does nothing for anyone.
If the professors want to make money, let them. It's not a requirement to sell your soul to the university, or to devote yourself to poverty in the name of higher-learning.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
This 'story' is just an attempt to create the illusion of a shortage of AI researchers. I think it's pretty clear that a) there is no such shortage, and b) if there were, then colleges, as teaching institutions, would be uniquely able to deal with it themselves.
All of this talent was started and cultivated out of the 2004 DARPA project. That was a decade ago. The technology is finally ready for prime time. It's no longer "10 years in the future".
What academia needs to do is figure out what needs to be done in 2025, not 2015.
A lot of R&D follows a pretty repeatable pattern.
Self driving cars are now in phase 2. Google, Uber, and Apple are going to push hard to get the first cars out the door ASAP. In 2 decades what was once PhD level math and controls classes will be an introductory class for freshmen.
Ultimately, part of me is screaming "Good! Who cares?!" inside.
That's because educational institutions should be staffed with people who have the burning desire to teach other people. It's not for everyone, but there's a big difference between the person who is really interested in a subject, and the person who is really interested in sharing knowledge about the subject with as many others as possible.
If an entire lab full of faculty was poached by corporations, that tells me those people were more interested in big paychecks and/or being a part of a commercial project than in teaching.
It's a big mistake for a college or university to go down the road of trying to pay more and more, to "compete" with businesses for staff. That just raises the price of tuition and puts the education out of reach of more people. Precisely what the schools should NOT be about. Maybe they need to consider more flexible options to let experts in these industries come in and teach 1 or 2 classes, part-time? Otherwise, maybe they're getting too specific with what they're teaching, if their workers keep getting pulled right out for very specific corporate projects. Seems to me you can run a technology or science lab that teaches all sorts of concepts useful to a person interested in building an autonomous vehicle, without running autonomous vehicle research labs themselves.
Usually private industry can outbid universities in terms of salary but lags behind in terms of academic freedom, access to talented colleagues.
However, usually there are sufficient (good) academics who opt for a poor (typically for post-docs and junior assistant professors), modest (assistant to associate professors) to adequate (associate and full professors) salary (depending on whether or where you can get tenure) in an academic atmosphere over a more highly paid job where you're just another employee.
It mostly works out in the long run. Of course there are blips when you get patented ideological nutcases like gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and even core staff are pushed out. But mostly it evens out. Even for valuable tech subjects.
Very good professors (full, associate, and assistant) often manage to combine academic work and consultancy (especially at technological institutes). Especially when they aren't bogged down by their teaching workload.
It is completely logical what is happening here. What is valued most by many people in our society? Yes, it's money. So what these people do is simply apply what our culture teaches: go and earn lots of money. In other societies (in the past , now , or in the future , or elsewhere on earth) other values were or could become the most principal ones : knowledge , education , honesty, ... . Apparently we value knowledge , but maybe not enough. If knowledge gathering would be considered as the highest good then our society would have taken measures to associate a very high value with it , easily attracting the best of our minds.
less is more
in my life. The threat to Academia is our non-stop budget cuts driven by right wing politics and an overall anti elitist attitude (even against people who are legitimately elite and contribute their talents to society). For what I wish was the last God Damned Time people who are that fucking smart are _not_ in it for the money. They're not in it for those fat fat gov't grants. These people are so much more intelligent than you and me that money is just a means to their intellectual ends. Einstein was a patent clerk for fucks sake.
Yes, Academia is severely threatened right now; but not by better job offers...
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...is just the state subsidising high-risk / long-term ventures so that private enterprise can reap more easy profit.
I'm not sure what the solution is. We could give contracts to researchers preventing a move into private industry, or require businesses to somehow pay for use of research, but that's just acting as Preventer of People or Preventer of Information. We could identify at an earlier stage in the university employment process which researchers are likely to jump ship, and never employ them (there is a glut of sufficiently talented people that this can easily be done - and the best researchers are NOT by any stretch of the imagination those who are most interested in following the money). We could demand more money from private industry for universities, but that'll encourage them to act even more short-sightedly. We could move to the left a bit and stop fussing over the existence of cooperatively-owned high-tech industry - how about universities form companies belonging both to the university and the research team but do NOT float/sell them? - but that's hardly likely to happen in the USofA.
The summary glosses over the character of CMU itself. CMU is a research focused, selective private university that operates in large part from public and private grants and research contracts. It is not a public land-grant university set up to provide education opportunity to the general population. Teaching is a responsibility, but obtaining grant funding, then producing marketable research to obtain more grant funding, is a much bigger priority.
In addition, CMU benefits from patents. Just because there is public funding for the research, does not prevent the faculty and university from patenting the technology developed on the research projects. So the "raid" of CMU by Uber will likely result in another windfall later to CMU from patent licenses.
Taking all the good out of creativity and innovation... These people are real blood suckers
Really? The 1960s had talent when you had to work from basic physics to make one transistor computers.... Nowadays, you just copy and paste and you're a programmer.
Come on.
As Slashdot knows, the STEM shortage isn't a shortage of talented people, it is a shortage of jobs, so less people do it. In the 90s, my physics professors lamented less people coming in to physics. This is because there isn't a lot of jobs in physics like there is with computers.
If big business starts poaching smart people, more people will have incentive to get an education. It's not like university research is going away, but there will just be different faces as always. The net gain for society is more R&D and more educated folk.
I probably worked with some of those guys who got in with Uber when I also worked with the self driving car down Carnegie Mellon. Good for them.
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Part of the problem is that it takes experience to get experience. There are only a few top positions that have access to plenty of resources. Thus, only a few get a chance to learn how to work in such conditions where they have a lot of leverage, meaning those with the talent AND experience leveraging a lot of resources are very limited in number and thus highly sought after. You can't find that combo with a written test.
Warren Buffett can take bigger risks than medium-sized investors, and uses that capability to "gamble smartly" in a way the rest cannot (unless they risk crashing their company). He has the necessary skill, experience, and leverage, putting him at a big advantage over those with just 2 of those traits.
It's a kind of bottleneck at the intersection of skill and experience.
Table-ized A.I.
What a terrible problem: your organization dedicated to furthering human knowledge was too successful and now has to train a new crop of employees.
Just to be really clear, places like Carnegie Mellon are not education focused institutions, they're research focused. We are absolutely not talking about people with a passion for classroom work. In the early 1990s, the federal government removed the requirements and incentives for contractors to dedicate significant budget to basic research. In many cases, new funding for research would only be available to universities. The idea was to shift all basic research to the univerisities. The people we're talking about are the folks who would have been employed at a large company doing government funded R&D in the 1980s. Now, they're doing government funded R&D at universities. For about 5-6 years in the late 90s, that worked well. Since the dot com bust, it has not...
The amount of spending on academic basic research in the US exceeded the total amount spent on startup companies in the US every year from 2000 to 2013. That's a horrible inversion of capital that implied the university-first research system was failing. It's about time we saw some of this work turn the corner into commercialization, along with a restoration of economic sanity to R&D.
Examples like this show that our new system may be viable long term.
From time to time, a group of researchers split off and make products that are useful right away (as opposed to research focused maybe 5 years or further out), and I think that's AWESOME. Why wouldn't it be great?
Look at some examples from Stanford University: SUN Microsystems was founded in 1982 as "Stanford University Network" created by Andy Bechtolsheim as a graduate student at Stanford. SUN productized RISC systems, NFS, Unix, etc. Really great stuff. This didn't bother or hurt Stanford one bit, just made it a more attractive place for future entrepreneurs to attend/work for a while.
In the same 1982, Jim Clark was an (associate?) professor at Stanford doing research in 3D graphics, and he split off Stanford and formed Silicon Graphics with his graduate student team (Tom Davis, Rocky Rhodes, Kurt Akeley, etc) that they basically had created without taking any personal risk while working at Stanford. Nothing but great news for Stanford, people FLOCKED to join the university that produced that talented team.
A couple years later in 1984, Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner were running the Stanford University computer systems and they split off forming Cisco.
A few years later in 1998 Stanford professor Mendel Rosenblum, with his Stanford grad student Ed Bugnion, and some others spun up VMware.
The list goes on and on for Stanford alone.
All these really awesome people came up with solid ideas in academia that were applicable in the next few years as viable products, then these people stepped up to form companies and make products I buy and use every day (or I use their descendant products) and these people formed companies that employed a lot of good people (I worked at Silicon Graphics for four really fun years), putting out solid products and making enough money to let some of us save up and do our own startups in time.
Seriously, this is really positive stuff. Why is anybody afraid of a team stepping up and out of academia? Usually it just means the possibility of a product that will make my life better. Heck, succeed or fail, I've seen some of those early guys back in the University system helping out again and finishing their PhDs they started years earlier when they got distracted (Rocky Rhodes, Ed Bugnion, etc). And there always seems to be a flood of new blood feeding up into the University, earlier successes CONTRIBUTE to recruitment to these Universities, it is a selling point that Stanford has produced some great companies.
If Uber grabs up a lot of great people from Carnegie Mellon, a flood of 18 and 22 year olds will flow in to replace them and get trained up. And I say good for EVERYBODY.
I find this a nonsensical question. Aren't most people basically at the end of their Academic career once they get their PhD? That means grant money ran out, so they need to look for a post-doc or a teaching position. Since there is only one professor or a few per research group, that just leaves no options for the others, even very bright ones once they reach 30-35 years of age.
If a deep pockets company buys out the whole research group, that's something else. But even University research teams are smart enough to patent their own technology. And that's how Academia works, you build your research on top of that of others.
OMG someone got hired from Uni! Is there some petition I can sign to prevent people in Uni getting hired?
Talented and educated people have jobs available, and we're trying to figure out why that's bad?
Well, except that if you are half-way through graduate school, you might have just been torpedoed and suffer a multi-year setback. If I recall correctly, CMU had something on the order of US$19M in robotics research grants from various organizations. (19M might not be the right number, but it was around that, or somewhere in the 20's, my memory is fuzzy.) That's funding for a lot of graduate students. Uber hired away PI's representing something like 40% of that. So, you lose your principal investigator, your thesis advisor, your RA stipend, probably most of your committee, and oh by the way: you need to start over at ground zero on a new topic, too, once you find another advisor. Good luck with that, since everybody you know is going to be scrambling for what ever scraps are left.
But, hey, you still get to live in Pittsburgh.
So, you lose your principal investigator, your thesis advisor, your RA stipend, probably most of your committee, and oh by the way: you need to start over at ground zero on a new topic, too, once you find another advisor. Good luck with that, since everybody you know is going to be scrambling for what ever scraps are left.
That exact situation happened to me. Thrice I finally said, "To heck with it!" and got a real job. Now I finally know what a healthy sleep schedule, home ownership, and having plenty of money in the bank (and other investments) feels like.
I find this a nonsensical question. Aren't most people basically at the end of their Academic career once they get their PhD? That means grant money ran out, so they need to look for a post-doc or a teaching position. Since there is only one professor or a few per research group, that just leaves no options for the others, even very bright ones once they reach 30-35 years of age.
Grad school dropout here. Every 30-something Ph.D. I know is either underemployed in a minimum wage job, on food stamps, living with their parents, or some combination thereof. That's why I dropped out. Funny how those Ph.D.s close so many doors for them come interview time.
Great example of technology funded by Public Money ending up in corporate hands for Private Profit.
Ask anyone trying to get any academic position at a top tier university, the competition is fierce. At best, the universities are losing established talent only temporarily. The people who left will return, and with their newly acquired industry experience and networks, they will make academic positions even harder to get.
tl;dr - the universities aren't the victims here, new grads and prospective academics are.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Its not uncommon for over a hundred qualified PhDs to apply for a tenure track professorship at even mid level state universities, much less the Stanfords and CMUs. By staying on for PhD the person has already expressed a commitment to the academic side, forgoing up to a million dollars in salary during a 5-8 year PHD period.
For supporting first class industrial research. Older scientists remember when Bell Labs, IBM, Xerox, Exxon etc did world class R&D. They still do, but on a much reduced scale after the financial restructurings of the 1990s. The new guys with huge piles of cash have stepped in to do some of this.
I am enrolling for a scholarship at RMIT for a PhD in artificial intelligence. The key to my survival is the research which is already completed is for a seed artificial intelligence. Once the research is put on paper it will be available to all and tech companies would then only fight fight over nothing because the AI models the seed AI generates could do almost everything. And I will be in a penthouse drinking fine scotch. Cheers! Oh and free AI for everybody in 2016!