Hopes up high, heads down low

It's crazy out there, but the work continues.

Nokia Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey

Apologies, as it’s been a minute. I’ve been trying to slow down and get a feel for just what the hell is going on out there. And I’ve failed. Things are moving fast—too fast—and I think it’s futile to try and keep up. I do think that’s at least partially by design.

I’m sure many of you can relate. Despite my attempts to take a measured mental approach to our current circumstances, I think it may be more beneficial to get swept up by the current of events and do my best to swim against the current—that is to say, nothing makes sense, it’s not going to make sense, and standing by trying to make sense of it all isn’t going to help. So, it’s probably best that I, you, we, and everyone, continue the work. In whatever form that is.

I was recently able to get a first-hand look at some of the work that is continuing to take place. It’s important work, too, and it’s happening as some of the people doing the work likely fear for their funding, their jobs, and in some cases, the possibility of being kidnapped and shipped off to some gulag in Central America.

Irregardless, as they say.

Last week, I was invited to visit Nokia Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. The place is absolutely gargantuan—it’s more like a college campus than a corporate office complex.It was all a part of Bell Labs’ 100th anniversary, taking place this year. 
For a bit of background: Bell Labs was founded in 1925, and is a massive complex housing a number of different research laboratories. It’s seriously massive. We—my fellow reporters and journalists on the media tour, roughly a dozen people or so—were led down hallways that stretched for a quarter of a mile—and oddly enough, I’d reckon that 90% of the place is empty. It used to house thousands of workers, but that was a different time.

Bell Labs is famous for developing and inventing all sorts of technologies: transistors, radio astronomy, Unix operating systems, several programming languages, solar panels, and more. The people working there have won several Nobel Prizes. In fact, some of the guys who’ve invented things we use every day are still walking around the place. It was originally owned and operated by AT&T, but over the past few decades, it has changed hands through a series of mergers and acquisitions. Most recently, it was acquired by Nokia in 2016. The labs themselves are also slated to be relocated to a newer building in New Brunswick, not far from Murray Hill, within a couple of years.
I’m not sure what will happen to the current campus, but hopefully, it’s put to good use. There’s a lot of history that deserves to be preserved.

However, as noted, the work at Bell Labs continues. I was a part of a media group that was able to tour several of the individual laboratories within—they’re all spread around the campus, and at some points, it took a solid ten or 15 minutes to walk between them through a series of labyrinthian hallways and buildings. I thought I was going to get lost and die in there—it seriously reminded me of the catacombs beneath Paris or something.

The labs we saw were not open to the public, so it was a cool chance to see some behind-the-scenes stuff. And those labs? They looked exactly how you might expect a scientific lab to look—wires, computer parts, binders, coffee mugs with quirky phrases left haphazardly on cluttered desks (“Yes, let me drop my problems and work on your problems” was one that I particularly liked), and in some areas, there were even autonomous robots zipping around. 

The researchers and scientists themselves were also reminiscent of the cast of “The Big Bang Theory.” It was clear that they weren’t used to having people invade their space, and explain what they were doing to dumb-dumbs like me. But they were all kind and welcoming. It was a great experience.

As for what I saw? One lab was working on undersea cable technology, which is especially important right now, as those cables have become targets for bad actors. We saw a live feed of the data and information moving through one of those cables in real-time—we weren’t allowed to know where the cable was, and they wouldn’t get more detailed other than telling us which continents the cable connected—and how technology is improving the cables.

We saw how Nokia was working on mining technology in Brazil. They had incorporated AI into a mining operation that provided real-time feedback and data from trucks and tractors all across the mine, and in one case, we saw how one truck was experiencing more stress on its chassis than usual. What was interesting about that was that the additional stress caused the truck to shimmy a bit, losing some ore out of the back on every trip, and over the course of a year, potentially losing the operation millions of dollars. Just because of a little shimmy—and there’s no way anyone would’ve really noticed that shimmy. But the AI did, and flagged it, helping keep the mine operating at a higher efficiency, and getting the truck into the garage to fix the chassis.

I was then taken to a robotics lab, where I saw how robots are being used to manage warehouse inventories through voice commands. Essentially, a researcher could verbally tell a robot to go find a specific box on a shelf with numerous boxes, and it could. If the box was missing, it could go track it down, or find a replacement. It was pretty rudimentary, but interesting, and the tech is already being used in warehouses around the country, with flying drones, in many cases.

Another lab was working on improving telecommunications arrays and technology. I’ll admit, most of it went over my head, but the team there had found some relatively simple ways to improve our telecom and cellular systems, which allow more data to flow freely, and increase internet speeds, among other things.

One researcher said something that stuck with me: “If the pandemic had happened a decade earlier, the whole country would’ve been crippled.” That’s to say that we simply wouldn’t have had the technological backbone and infrastructure to support millions of people working and going to school remotely. It all would’ve crashed.

But perhaps the most interesting part of the tour, and frankly, the one that convinced me to make the drive out there through Jersey traffic, was the quantum computing lab. I’ve written about this topic before, and how it’s blowing my mind. Well, they’re working on quantum computers at Bell Labs, and I had the chance to talk to some of the researchers working on it. I listened to a short lecture from the head of the lab while sitting within spitting distance of the computer’s refrigerator, which keeps the machinery cool—and it was colder than outer space, or approximately -450℉.

I got to sit down with a physicist, too, who helped me understand it all a bit better. I’m not confident that I could explain it to you all. Still, the physicist was confident that this technology would become more commercially viable within the next decade, and that could blow the lid off of things. If you thought AI was changing everything, quantum computing is going to be a whole other reality.

I did get to ask some of the people working in the various labs about their thoughts relating to what was going on outside of the campus’ walls. The place is largely dark and quiet, and it felt very insulated from the outside world—insulated enough to do important work without distraction. But given the tumult we’re all experiencing, and the possibility of some of the research needing to cease due to tariffs, losses of government grants, deportations, and more, I was curious if it was affecting the researchers.

After all, these people are doing important things—it’s the stuff we don’t think about, but allows us all to keep doing our own things without disruption on a daily basis. And if they can’t keep working, we’ll all suffer for it.

Surprisingly, they were all pretty upbeat. For now. They’re still getting after it. They’re still heads-down. They’re still optimistic about the technologies they’re working on, and how they could be used to improve our lives and solve problems.

I found it…inspiring? I’ve definitely had trouble focusing. I’m concerned about the future. And all of those big-picture worries have made it difficult to sit down and, you know, write about stock movements, or whatever is in front of me on any given day. 

But these people, who are actually working on important things, are still at it. They’re not letting it get to them. They’re disconnected—physically, in many respects, and mentally. They’re heads down. They know the stakes are high, and they’re getting it done, so far as I was able to tell. I can appreciate that. It’s a type of toughness and resiliency that I’ve been missing recently, and need to work on redeveloping and applying.

This is all to say that, yes, things are crazy. But the work continues.