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The End of the Computer Age

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Re: The End of the Computer Age

#21

Post by sologoub »

_bxg1 wrote: post #14
fadisaleh wrote: post #13

"...the iPhones that distract us from our environment also distract us from how strangely old and unchanging our environment is, how you're riding a subway that's 100 years old. And I think sort of a healthier sort of progress would happen on many different fronts." This quote stood out to me. It seems like we silently concluded that the physical world has evolved enough, developed enough, even though there's a ton o…

I think the market is what silently concluded that the physical world has evolved enough; software isn't more important, just more profitable. And because the United States is allergic to public spending, that's all that matters.

NYC seems to be just fine at redeveloping. So the problem is regional (though very widespread).

Re: The End of the Computer Age

#22

Post by josephg »

blueyes wrote: post #6

Thiel's talk starts around 10m40s, after the throat-clearing intro. This is not his most articulate talk, fwiw. Thiel's smart and sometimes very clear, but not here. This feels off the cuff, where he's falling back on pot shots and sound bites.

Its very long, but I enjoyed Thiel on The Portal (Eric Weinstein's podcast) a few months back:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1-peter-thiel/id146999...

I don't know how this compares to talks he's given, but there were a lot of small ideas in there which I thought were really interesting - like the idea that we're in a period of relative technological stagnation compared to a couple decades ago. And how obvious this observation seems to both Thiel and Weinstein.

Re: The End of the Computer Age

#23

Post by kiba »

mcphage wrote: post #16
_bxg1 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the market is what silently concluded that the physical world has evolved enough; software isn't more important, just more profitable. And because the United States is allergic to public spending, that's all that matters.

> And because the United States is allergic to public spending, that's all that matters. I don't think it's the spending that the US is allergic to, it's the collecting the money to spend.

Are you sure it isn't endless spending on new roads and destruction of tax base by expanding the suburbs?

Re: The End of the Computer Age

#24

Post by bamboozled »

davidivadavid wrote: post #8
TheRealPomax wrote: post #3

"And so, if we were to rightsize the scaling for our intellectual life, you should describe Harvard, not as one of the thousands of great universities, you should describe it as a Studio 54 nightclub" is really all you need to take away from this. Not for what it says, but for the desperate attempt of those words to make any real sense. Although don't miss out on gems like: "But in practice, the main AI applications…

I'm not sure what's unclear about what he's saying. a) Harvard is a pure signaling mechanism that doesn't provide education as much as exclusionary credentials. b) AI/Big data is a way to solve the economic calculation problem that was once seen as one of the main theoretical hurdles against communism. That a country like China favors AI and punishes crypto tells you something (that it's a communist dictatorship). It…

I also liked the fact that he points out he'd like to see innovation not just "in some iPhone app" but more broadly in different fields.

I think this is a good point, there isn't enough going on in other areas, like he said people ride the 100 year old subway distracted by their iPhones not realizing the world around them is unchanging mostly.

It's true in some ways, who will build or even demand the better faster subways of the future if 99% of the people don't even realize they're on the subway.

Re: The End of the Computer Age

#25

Post by chrisco255 »

sologoub wrote: post #20
fadisaleh wrote: post #13

"...the iPhones that distract us from our environment also distract us from how strangely old and unchanging our environment is, how you're riding a subway that's 100 years old. And I think sort of a healthier sort of progress would happen on many different fronts." This quote stood out to me. It seems like we silently concluded that the physical world has evolved enough, developed enough, even though there's a ton o…

In California (can’t speak for other states), much of that “stuck in ” is largely driven by NIMBYs and at what point the place became more or less affluent. SV seems to have figured out that some land can be redeveloped into apartments relatively recently, but otherwise it looks like 60s was a pretty active development era and most of that stuff is still here. By contrast, in LA much of 50s - 60s sprawl has been repl…

I don't know why you're getting downvoted, because it's absolutely true that much of CA is stuck in the mid 20th century in terms of real estate development. The zoning laws and NIMBY-ism are very important to call out for restricting progress. Somebody above tried to blame the market. It isn't the market when you own a piece of property but you are restricted to building a single-family home that meets 200 different regulations and restrictions so tight that you only end up with cookie cutter homes in a neighborhood of cul-de-sacs. It's not just CA that suffers from this but it's certainly the most extreme case. Zoning laws are among the key reasons why city design has stagnated. There's little wiggle room for innovation. And if you look at attempts to build high speed rail, for example, and the debacle that is with the amount of money spent and the never-ending construction and you compare that to the achievements of the early 20th century and it looks like a sad situation.

Re: The End of the Computer Age

#26

Post by taneq »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #3

"And so, if we were to rightsize the scaling for our intellectual life, you should describe Harvard, not as one of the thousands of great universities, you should describe it as a Studio 54 nightclub" is really all you need to take away from this. Not for what it says, but for the desperate attempt of those words to make any real sense. Although don't miss out on gems like: "But in practice, the main AI applications…

> And then, it is literally communist because China loves AI; it hates crypto. And so that, I think, tells you something.

China also loves cheap r/c cars, does that make them communist?

Re: The End of the Computer Age

#27

Post by larnmar »

mcphage wrote: post #16
_bxg1 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the market is what silently concluded that the physical world has evolved enough; software isn't more important, just more profitable. And because the United States is allergic to public spending, that's all that matters.

> And because the United States is allergic to public spending, that's all that matters. I don't think it's the spending that the US is allergic to, it's the collecting the money to spend.

Not at all! Every year the US and it’s various state and local governments collect trillions... and then proceed to spend it on some other crap.

Re: The End of the Computer Age

#28

Post by chrisco255 »

Animats wrote: post #15

It reads like a long rant on Reddit. I'm a lot less impressed with Thiel now. His fascination with "scale" is interesting. Some of the problems we have today come from the conquest of scale. It used to be that big companies couldn't get out of their own way. This limited how big a company could get before smaller competitors were more efficient. With computers and networks, businesses can now be scaled to national, i…

Scale in tech has been solved, because it's trivial to reproduce a software program. It's not like manufacturing. We've got a dozen or so large automobile manufacturers that are all thriving. There's five big tech companies: Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. And three big telcos is an improvement over the early 20th century that Thiel is idealizing when AT&T was the only game in town. But Thiel himself is a supporter of monopolies and wrote a whole book on the virtues of them in "Zero To One".

One thing I feel as though we lack is more visionary entrepreneurs in some of these other fields (or if we don't, they're not very visible). In the early 20th century, you had breakthrough after breakthrough. You had Edison, Tesla, Einstein, Ford, Disney, Eastman (Kodak), Sarnoff (radio), Fisher (washing machine), the Wright Bros, and on and on...so many breakthrough entrepreneurs, scientists and technologists in such a small window of time.

If we tried to point to people alive today who have the same impact as the ones mentioned above, we'd probably name Musk. In the early 20th century, we had hundreds of Elon Musks.

Re: The End of the Computer Age

#29

Post by droithomme »

fadisaleh wrote: post #13

"...the iPhones that distract us from our environment also distract us from how strangely old and unchanging our environment is, how you're riding a subway that's 100 years old. And I think sort of a healthier sort of progress would happen on many different fronts." This quote stood out to me. It seems like we silently concluded that the physical world has evolved enough, developed enough, even though there's a ton o…

> you're riding a subway that's 100 years old ... a healthier sort of progress would happen on many different fronts

Is he saying there is something wrong with electric subways? It seems an excellent solution to transport in a dense urban area. And metros have kept up with technology fairly well. What is the better solution to the subway for the problem it solves in the places it solves them?

Yes, we've had subways for over 100 years. And trains in general. Freight trains are very efficient ways of moving things. How old is the hammer or the shovel? Pretty old. And both work well.

He mentions also that some extension of a NYC subway cost $3.8 billion a mile. Yeah that's expensive. No doubt they ran into horrific problems drilling the tunnel. B-1 bomber program spent $40 billion and delivered 20 aircraft at a program cost of $2 billion each (much more than the claimed cost, but this is the actual cost). Likewise the B-2 ran $1 billion each. Was this mile of subway worth more than two B-1 bombers? I'd say yes but others may say no.

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