If Peter Thiel And Garry Kasparov Are Right, Then We're In Trouble

Firstly lets look at things such as manned flight, radio transmissions and other innovations in the late 19th century that are now critical today. These eureka moments in science and engineering were traditionally brought about by a few people and their relative complexity is low. Look at the innovations we're seeing in physics today and you're talking about teams of people across multiple generations attempting to solve problems our ancestors couldn't even imagine. Electricity producing fusion reactors like ITER (and later DEMO)? Not a chance. They were too busy trying to get manned flight to work. Breaking the speed of sound in air? No way. Putting men on the moon? Not a chance.

Here's the thing, we (as a planet) could put men on the moon. Granted we're not as ready as the USA in 1969, but given the need it could be achieved. Putting a man on mars? Well that's a lot further away much further than the moon is with a whole new raft of unsolved problems.

I can immediately think of two areas where growth is as great and immediate in the field now as it was in physics in the early 20th century - nanotechnology and biotechnology. If you look at how much of Physics we understand, and our understanding of what we can and can't manipulate versus biology you can see that there's plenty of space for innovation.

I would also make a case for disruptive versus iterative innovation. The automobile has come a long way in 100 years but is essentially the same thing, a horseless carriage that takes the driver and passengers from point A to point B. We have however had massive amounts of iterative innovation in speed, fuel management, safety and so on. The same with air travel with demands and needs changing and planes changing to accomodate. Sure, it may look like a plane but the insides of an A380 are very different to a DC-3.

If the 20th century was the century of physics, I'd say the 21st is the century of nanochemistry and biomechanics. I suspect (although have no real proof) that we don't see the changes on the same scale because our quality of life, education and so on has been brought up by such a level already that improvements have less of a social impact in the west. There's no need for a cure for smallpox anymore. Disabilities from Polio have been down in the west for decades. Diseases like SARS and H5N1 that could've wiped us out in the early 20th century like the Spanish Flu have so far been contained.

There is no iPhone without Silicon Valley. There is no Silicon Valley without the massive amount of defense work that was done in the area in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. (See: Steve Blank's stories as but one evidence.) Much of the work on smaller electronics was originally military funded - no one else had the R&D funding to do so.

Without the government, it is likely the development of something like ARPANET would have been delayed a decade, perhaps more. I'm not saying the internet wouldn't exist, but it would have been delayed and certainly would have looked a lot more like AOL and Compuserve than the integrated system we have now.

I'd say that there is a lot of government involvement that we're talking about.

Perhaps the real problem: 1. The human mind or a team w/ communications between members can only handle so much information. 2. The toolboxes available to innovators working different stripes of the tech spectrum become riddled with complexity over time.

The solution: 1. As tools are aggregated and abstracted, this reduces information needing to be understood, allowing indies/teams to get a handle and get creative with their work. 2. As thinking/psychology approaches improve and as communication systems improve, the ability for the same people to process the relevant information also improves.

The internet has done a very good job with increasing information processing (by humans!), and other fields are being influenced by this success.

If we apply human ingenuity to it, it's challenging but believable to can support this in terms of food and energy for the next 50 years at least, and beyond that time frame it's likely that the world population stabilizes.

You might find many signs of decline such as the crude humor on TV sitcoms, the disappearance of defined benefit pensions, or Facebook and Zynga as "tittytainment" for the masses. You could say we'll never have another Einstein or Feynman, that we'll never have a satisfying paradigm for deterministic chaos with more than three degrees of freedom, etc. You might also point out very real problems we'll face dealing with global warming, terrorism, cybercrime, unemployment.

However there are so many exciting things I see going on today. The space program is more exciting today than it was in the 1960s. When I go to the west coast I see cool new restaurants that start in Hollywood, set up another location in L.A., then San Diego and the next thing you know it's a national chain with 50 locations. I think of all the cool little handmade things you can buy on Etsy.

I think there's still going to be a rapprochement between the FIRE (Financial, Insurance and Real Estate) industry and the real of the economy, but I think lots of people are doing big and little things that make life better and more interesting.