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Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation?

danwang.co

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Re: Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation?

#91

Post by enraged_camel »

michaelochurch wrote: post #74

Technology has shitty leadership, and society as a whole has even worse leadership. Thiel is right. Global economic growth was 5-6% per year in the 1960s. Now it's around 4%. The main culprit: disinvestment in R&D. Those "cushy jobs" for engineers whom the MBA dickheads claimed "weren't earning their keep" were actually the R&D pushing the country (and the world) forward. Transportation is another thing we suck at, a…

>>Finally, the middle class has had its collective face ripped off by the Satanic Trinity (housing, healthcare, tuition costs). Things that used to be comparable to utility bills are now life-wrecking constraints and, because no one has any fucking savings anymore, entrepreneurship is at an all-time low.

This is why unconditional basic income is an absolute necessity, in my opinion. It's the only way to save the middle class.

If every individual received $1,000 per month from the government, they could start working part-time and have much more time and energy left for creative pursuits, including entrepreneurial endeavors.

As things stand though, most brilliant minds work for (and are wage-slaves of) corporations and all their work does is enrich the people at the top.

Re: Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation?

#92

Post by austenallred »

gone35 wrote: post #85
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #19

We're close to getting cars that can drive themselves. We have cars that can detect when the brakes are locking and fix it, so that you never go into a skid. We have railroad locomotives that can tell when an axle is just starting to slip, and cut the power to that one axle, so that the wheels never slip even at full power on slick rails. We have jet aircraft engines that can report when a part is getting close to fa…

Ok, I know it might be hard to fathom, but funnily enough, every single one of the technologies you mention --without exception-- harken back in (arguably) significant and non-trivial ways to technology or fully functional prototypes already in place by the 1970s, if not earlier. I'm not making this up. Look them up and see for yourself! (Yes, even autonomous cars [1]. And ABS [2]. And X-ray computed tomography [3])…

Isn't that just how technology works? We've technically had the Internet since the 1960s, but it has grown and developed and changed enough that the Internet we had in the 1960s wasn't really what we'd call "the Internet" today (the world wide web). It takes a long time for anything to go from the first time someone hacked together a semi-functioning prototype to widespread adoption, especially when it's the 0 to 1 type of innovation Thiel is so fond of.

Who is to say there are no technologies that are now in their infancy that won't reach widespread adoption 40 years from now? Who is to say what's in its infancy today won't be just as impressive or groundbreaking as what was in its infancy 40 years ago?

Re: Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation?

#93

Post by asdf11111 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #71
rpedela wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> plus the cost of wear on the onboard storage system (battery, etc.) That falls under vehicle maintenance and does not play into the cost of fuel. > it only means the cost of energy for a vehicle is equal to the cost of the same energy on the electric grid Yes, I was exaggerating but it is already pretty cheap. If memory serves, it is about $0.08/kWh in the US or $6.80 to charge Tesla's largest battery pack which is…

> > > plus the cost of wear on the onboard storage system (battery, etc.) > That falls under vehicle maintenance and does not play into the cost of fuel. Whenever you talk about "fuel" with an electric vehicle, you are doing so by loose analogy; the battery electrolytes are the closest thing to "fuel" in an electric vehicle. I suppose one could quibble over the degree to which the battery is analogous to the "fuel ta…

Unless I'm mistaken you're glossing over the fact that electric motors are significantly more efficient than combustion engines. An electric motor doesn't turn more than half of all the energy in the batteries into heat.

Re: Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation?

#94

Post by jeffreyrogers »

Thiel is more or less reiterating the points that the economist Tyler Cowen has been making for several years. I just read Zero to One and found it good, but not great. Cowen's book, Average is Over [1], covers much of the same ideas and is better reasoned. (Cowen's earlier book, The Great Stagnation, is also quite good).

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00C1N5WOI?btkr=1

Re: Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation?

#95

Post by bsder »

jostmey wrote: post #26

Yeah, we went to the moon and then what happened? Genetic engineering has been around since the 70's but society has largely rejected its applications. And consider the Energy sector - when was the last nuclear power plant constructed in the United States?

> Genetic engineering has been around since the 70's but society has largely rejected its applications.

I would argue this. The human genome project was the turning point where we moved from biology as alchemy to biology as science.

There are still tenured biology professors who hang onto ideas that have been completely disproven by genetic sequencing.

We're just starting to see the benefits of genetic engineering now.

Re: Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation?

#96

Post by jotm »

angersock wrote: post #57
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #19

We're close to getting cars that can drive themselves. We have cars that can detect when the brakes are locking and fix it, so that you never go into a skid. We have railroad locomotives that can tell when an axle is just starting to slip, and cut the power to that one axle, so that the wheels never slip even at full power on slick rails. We have jet aircraft engines that can report when a part is getting close to fa…

And yet over 3B ( billion ) people are below the poverty line... 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 l…

People are quick to downvote when it's inconvenient to their vision of the world.

What he says is true, and innovation seems to affect fewer and fewer people - the rest can only dream of it.

Good drugs are being banned, electric cars are being laughed at by people who can't fathom that an electric motor can put out the same performance as a V6, smartphones can be used as full digital assistants yet they're used for phone calls/Skype and alarms, SpaceX - what's that, etc.

Not to mention that "over 3B (billion) people are below the poverty line..." as angersock said.

Those who are lucky enough to be touched by innovation surround themselves in a bubble and dismiss everyone else.

Re: Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation?

#97

Post by RobPfeifer »

The real reason - it gives him a differentiated brand which drives certain types of entrepreneurs to Founder's Fund. Since he started down this branding exercise with that New Yorker piece in 2011, I'm sure he gets much more inbound interest at Founder's Fund. Plus, his hedge fund was being wound down, making him refocus on his VC brand. Everything with a grain of salt people!

Re: Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation?

#99

Post by eli_gottlieb »

kjjw wrote: post #23
api wrote: post #3

"I sort-of date the end of rapid technological progress to the late-60s or early-70s. At that point something more or less broke in this country and in the western world more generally which has put us into a zone where there’s much slower technological progress." I've believed for years that we entered something like a minor dark age (dim age?) on or about 1970, and that computers have become synonymous with "techno…

Here's another idea I have no evidence for. Maybe it is a compounding problem, maybe it is the problem, maybe it's total nonsense. Perhaps we are seeing the affect of an increase in difficulty of pushing the boundaries of basic science, and the difficulties of interpreting that new basic science, and thus of applying it to anything that will enhance our lives, our economies, so on. How many people could really get to…

>How many people could really get to grips with Newtonian physics? I'd hazard a guess that a reasonable percentage of the world's population, given boundless resources for education, lots of time, etc, would be able to get their heads around it. > >Now, how many people in the world, under the same circumstances, are capable of understanding QFT, to the point of doing something with it in the applied space? I think the percentage just dropped drastically.

You know what? I don't think so. I think that the borderline for raw intelligence necessary to understand modern physics and mathematics hasn't actually gotten much higher, but we academics like maintaining our sense of belonging to an intellectual elite so strongly that we've simply neglected to work on improving how we teach the deeper material. After all, if a student fails to understand, it's because he's stupid, inferior, and destined to change majors into Journalism, so we don't have to try.

Re: Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation?

#100

Post by mullingitover »

acchow wrote: post #55
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #19

We're close to getting cars that can drive themselves. We have cars that can detect when the brakes are locking and fix it, so that you never go into a skid. We have railroad locomotives that can tell when an axle is just starting to slip, and cut the power to that one axle, so that the wheels never slip even at full power on slick rails. We have jet aircraft engines that can report when a part is getting close to fa…

Not to mention, whatever we are doing as a society seems to have dramatically reduced the rates of crime (especially violent crime).

Unconscionable rates of incarceration?
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