Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation?

I have often wondered what made the West so great during its golden age of innovation (and to answer what we're missing today) and think it can be attributed to a single-mindedness in our culture and leadership towards a common goal.

The Industrial Revolution (and American Revolution) would not have been possible without the overwhelmingly popular Age of Enlightenment (a cultural movement of intellectual reform that emphasized reason over tradition). Such multi-national cooperation and exchange of ideas had been previously unprecedented. The intellectuals of each country banded together because they had a common enemy (entrenched tradition, religion, and monarchy).

Similar patterns (large-scale cooperation towards a common goal) can be found in the Second Industrial Revolution, the Atomic Age, and the Space Race.

So the question remains: what singular goal(s) do we have today?

The Internet has a great deal of potential to be used as a vehicle for a new intellectual revolution that may drive a new age of progress. I've seen a few hints of this in the OSS community and Silicon Valley but so far neither have found a common goal that resonates strongly enough.

tl;dr : The want of progress is not specific enough to inspire. We need a new, overarching goal to drive the next age of progress.

EDIT:

Luckily, weapons systems are much more effective than they were in the 1970s, so I guess we will be able to fend off the poor.

EDIT2:

Look, downvote all you want...the elephant in the room is that the rewards and advances in technology are not and can not be distributed evenly. Even in a first-world nation such as the US, so many of the products listed in my parent post are out-of-reach of anyone without significant financial means. CT scans, for example--what does imaging matter if you can't afford it?

You think that the starving huddled masses are just going to sit outside the walls and go "Man, sure wish I could live there?". That's never how history has worked out, you nitwits.

We've gone from expensive, slow, geographically-constrained telegrams and short-range, anarchic CB radio to gigahertz communication, carrying gigabits of data in the pockets of 1.5 Gigapeople.

We have the ISS, in space, 257 miles above us, 24/7, docking several times weekly with spacecraft from several continents. We have GPS. We have a world-wide data network and speech-controlled word-processing and publishing so billions of people can write and deliver a book, paper, speech, etc. with pictures and diagrams complete with automatic language translation. The days of hand-staining long-exposure slide film for use in a projector are over.

We eradicated smallpox. We invented MRI, robotic surgery, Tamoxifen, Raloxifene. We have successfully transplanted hearts and lungs, livers, intestines, hands, arms, legs and even faces, bladders, ovaries and penises.

We've gone from one farmer supplying 57.7 people to 155 people.

Yes you can point to vast stretches of mediocre scientists and companies who are also-rans. That's just a condition of humanity. Not everyone can sequence the entire human genome. If someone wants much more miraculous results out of the natural world than what we have today, you're seeking mystical discoveries, not technological ones.