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That would be an interesting paradigm shift...
...assuming there are such advancements to be made.
The author is actually suggesting that Thiel and Kasparov are probably wrong, and the current economic situation could be explained by simpler means (results of a financial meltdown as opposed to running out of things to invent).
I'm inclined to put more faith in the economist pushing the simple and previously observed cause than the big names pushing a doomsday scenario.
I think they're both right: because there is more than one problem facing us. The press like to focus on one issue at a time. Europe last week, US elections yesterday, fiscal cliff today and China tomorrow. The reality is that there are many major problems. Off the top of my head: -- * People these days have everything they need. There are very few must-have items to spur sales * The inventions so far cover a lot of…
What has Peter Thiel built that is so earth-changing? (And don't say Paypal.) He sure likes to talk a lot, but I'm waiting for him to come up with the next game-changing, once-a-millennium innovation. It isn't hedge funds or other financial trickery.
I think this is fairly evident due to the continuing list of articles about jobs that make the front page here - the "skills gap" that's not a skills gap, but a problem with hiring practices; the one a few weeks ago about the manufacturer that wants to pay skilled math and science students $10 an hour and wonders why they go work in service jobs; the service jobs that are now carefully managed to the minute by software so no one is idle on the job and are 90% part-time to extract the best work from their employees at the lowest cost.
Startups aren't a fix for this, they make the problems worse - how many Saas startups have a business proposition of making something more efficient (Salesforce, Workday as the biggest and most obvious) which results in a need for less people to do that work? How many people does a place like Facebook employ compared to Google, or Google to Microsoft, or MS to GE or Chevron?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
off-topic: you should edit your comment to get rid of the three spaces before your bullet point. The three spaces indicates pre-formatted text, so it won't line wrap. It creates scrollbars on your comment, so less people will be able to read your points.
I do it deliberately, as I have very poor vision and find it impossible to read block text these days. Please excuse my preference for commenting this way.
I think if you just discount all modern innovations then it's easy to say nothing has changed of note. My TV looks better than ever. Should I just discount that as progress because it's still a picture displayed in my living room? If you suggest the iPhone 5 which allows me to get anywhere without planning with turn by turn directions, communicate with family on the road, make dinner reservations, and answer a work r…
Take just one example in 3D printing. When this technology matures, the result will be no less profound than the invention of spare parts (hard to believe, but the idea of standardized parts that could be replaced when worn out is relatively new - few hundred years). Imagine a house that builds (or prints) itself?
Today that technology is already getting a lot of adoption in aerospace, where the waste produced by machining is so expensive, it makes the costs of new technologies look like a bargain.
Another good example is our ability to process data. The old saying goes: "Knowledge is power". Well, today we can process petabytes of data and extract knowledge out of it as routinely as flying from SF to NY...
I think if you just discount all modern innovations then it's easy to say nothing has changed of note. My TV looks better than ever. Should I just discount that as progress because it's still a picture displayed in my living room? If you suggest the iPhone 5 which allows me to get anywhere without planning with turn by turn directions, communicate with family on the road, make dinner reservations, and answer a work r…
The reasons your iPhone 5 lets you get directions, communicate and make dinner reservations are the global information infrastructure and the tcp/ip protocol, both products of a national innovation policy. I know that most people under 30 directly credit Steve Jobs for everything that they do on their phones. But it took a massive national investment to set up the basics of the internet, which provided the iphone wit…
And on you go in that vein, but that's massively reductionistic. For one thing, if that is so true, then why did the iPhone 5 not exist 30 years ago, which is still many years after those advances?
The Internet and TCP, as important as they may be, are still vanishingly small components in the huge collection of things we call the iPhone 5, with all of its huge stack of software, the huge stack of hardware and work to miniaturize it, the hardware necessary to feed it wireless signals, the huge software stack that requires, and on and on it goes. The reason the iPhone 5 didn't exist 30 years ago is quite simply that the society of 1982 simply couldn't afford it, and it took decades to put together everything that was necessary so it was affordable. Dozens of iterations on dozens of technologies, consistently improved over decades by a crew of tens of thousands of people. Nobody could even conceive of what it would take to centrally manage this massive set of resources.
If you could graph the amount of work put in to make things like the iPhone, if you could even define such a thing halfway sensibly, you'd have a hard time finding the sliver that represents the government work done on TCP/IP. It's an insult to the hundreds of thousands of other people who have done so much for you to pretend that that tiny little sliver was so much more important than everything they did.
The government has a huge role in providing the stable environment necessary to safely do that work and the fair playing ground to compete on, but the government's direct involvement in the creation of the iPhone is negligible. And if we account for patent shenanigans, possibly negative. (One massive stupid patent lawsuit can pay for an awful lot of research, after all.)