Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation?

#111

Post by deciplex » Fri, Sep 19, 2014, 1:10 AM UTC

adamjs wrote: post #53

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…

I agree some progress has occurred since 1970, but the pace of totally new ideas has slowed considerably. We're in the Age of Moderate Improvement. 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 America…

To my mind, this is a side effect of the 'Capitalism, right or wrong' zeitgeist we have today. Capital markets are fantastic for allocating resources, but if you leave them to their own devices, that's all they do. They allocate resources to the entities that want them and have the means to acquire them. They coordinate action, to be sure, but they don't coordinate action in the broader sense that you're describing here. We have to hope for the Elon Musks of the world to drive progress, but while there are actually a lot of Elon Musks, most of them did not have the foresight to co-found Paypal.

Re: Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation?

#112

Post by theworst » Fri, Sep 19, 2014, 1:24 AM UTC

turar wrote: post #68

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…

>> Desktop computers. Laptops. Cell phones. CT scanners. The internet. The Large Hadron Collider. The Hubble Space Telescope. Progress has slowed since the 1970s? Really? A lot of these were actually invented/designed in the 70s or earlier, or are iterations of breakthrough ideas from those years. He's talking about actual breakthrough innovations.

If you're going to count stuff invented before 1970 that didn't make it to market for 20+ years, then you also have to count all the technology that is being developed today but won't be market ready for 20 years. Carbon nanotubes, nanomachines, genetically customized medicine, Turing capable AI, etc.

Of course, since we don't know which of those technologies will be viable, we mentally don't count them.

Re: Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation?

#113

Post by noir_lord » Fri, Sep 19, 2014, 1:28 AM UTC

bsder wrote: post #95

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 n…

I agree.

The 20th Century was the century of the computer, the 21st will be the century of the gene sequencer.

We are surrounded by a cornucopia of time tested solutions to problems and we now have the processing power to really start to understand them.

We can now sequence in days on hardware costing less than a family care things that used to take 3 billion dollars and take a decade, to say progress has stopped is asinine in the extreme.

Re: Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation?

#114

Post by noir_lord » Fri, Sep 19, 2014, 1:30 AM UTC

chillingeffect wrote: post #59

Has technological progress slowed since the 1970s? I think there's evidence technology is moving along quite quickly: 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 sever…

I was reading today of the first person to have a 3D printed skull implanted that was an exact physical replica of the one she originally had before disease deformed it.

That lady would have died 20 years ago, now she is expected to live.

Progress has stopped....bollocks we may not do showy grandscale stuff anymore but the sheer rate of improvement across so many fields is there if you look.

Re: Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation?

#115

Post by zanny » Fri, Sep 19, 2014, 1:42 AM UTC

api wrote: post #35

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?

GMOs are a more complex subject, but as for nuclear power I tend to think that the lack of progress has caused its failure to be adopted rather than the other way around. Look at the nuke plants we're building. They are still overgrown 1950s submarine reactors that only make use if about 3% of the useful energy in fissile fuel. The rest is "waste," and reprocessing that waste is expensive and cumbersome. They're also…

There are better designs out there, the constantly touted Thorium reactors being one, but just lower grade Uranium burning plants are another common and unused modern design.

Re: Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation?

#116

Post by zanny » Fri, Sep 19, 2014, 1:49 AM UTC

> because there’s no one in the system who has any idea what to do with the money

Hey look, validation of my outlook on basic income.

Links the go-to source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM

For some reason, we seem to have forgotten that the best investment is in people. You want your innovation, all the potential is trapped living on scraps a day in soul crushing poverty or near-poverty, while you move around your trillions with nothing to spend it on - because you are literally running out of things to get you more money, because nobody else has any left to give.

Re: Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation?

#117

Post by ethbro » Fri, Sep 19, 2014, 1:50 AM UTC

adamjs wrote: post #53

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…

I agree some progress has occurred since 1970, but the pace of totally new ideas has slowed considerably. We're in the Age of Moderate Improvement. 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 America…

If you're going to look at it that way, could you not say that one of the principles of the Age of Enlightenment was that every man (and as Cosmos nicely noted, every woman, albeit more discretely) had a responsibility to explore?

Rose colored glasses of history, but I would hazard to say that the average knowledge + ambition + creativity of a person today is far lower than in the various retrospective golden ages.

... you can't find a genius and then teach him or her. You teach everyone, then genius blooms.

Re: Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation?

#118

Post by FD3SA » Fri, Sep 19, 2014, 1:59 AM UTC

FiatLuxDave wrote: post #86

FD3SA wrote: post #39

The takeaway from Thiel's fairly accurate assessment of broad technological progress is the following: You get what you incentivize. Winner-take-all free market capitalism is not synonymous with advanced, century-long research and development projects at the national scale. Our current socioeconomic system rewards convincing others to depart with their money in the quickest way possible. Ponzi-schemes, marketing, fin…

As someone who was working at a fusion startup when Musk was doing PayPal, your post hit a bit close to home for this particular idiot. Had I known back then that I would have been better off doing an internet startup and then later do a fusion startup with the petty cash fund, I would obviously have chosen that route. But like most founders, I thought I could actually succeed, or why else try? The real issue with in…

For the record I'm a die-hard scientist at heart and hold individuals who attempt to tackle the greatest scientific and technological challenges (e.g. fusion) in the absolute highest esteem. I understand that at the moment, the VC funded route is undoubtedly the only logical path. However, that doesn't change the fact that it is extremely sub-optimal in the long run. In a different era, you would have your own lab after a quick run through academia and ample funding to pursue your research. You would not be restricted to working on an ITER style mega project.

I would be willing to accept the end of those times if the alternative (VC funded startups) was superior. Alas, when it comes to large problems, I fear it may be a massive step back.

The oncoming wave of labor automation should spark a new debate about how we want to reorganize our societies to adapt to such drastic changes. I'm hoping that at this point, we can begin to emphasize the importance of research as a fundamental human endeavor.

Re: Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation?

#119

Post by a_bonobo » Fri, Sep 19, 2014, 2:14 AM UTC

jostmey wrote: post #38

maxerickson wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of animal feed in the US is GMO. (For starters, roundup ready field corn and soy).

That is true but Genetic Engineering has largely been limited to cross-breeding plants. You truly lack imagination if think that roundup resistant crops represent the pinnacle of Genetic Engineering.

One of my favorite current genetic engineering programs is to turn rice from a C_3 plant into a C_4 plant.

C_4 plants have a more complicated photosynthesis system allowing them to fix CO_2 more efficiently, and since C_4 seems to have evolved relatively recent they are still rare. Only about 5% of all plants are C_4, but they fixate 30% of carbon fixated by plants!

If we could engineer rice into a C_4 plant, we'd a) get faster growing rice with more yield and b) since rice is grown all over the world, we'd with one stroke get rid of a massive amount of carbon from the atmosphere. No-one has tried to do this before (it's a bit like ripping out a car's engine you know very little about and replacing it by a more sophisticated engine you know very little about), but they're hopeful to have 'prototype' C_4 rice plants by 2016. Edit: It's being funded by the Gates foundation and several governments so it's not a pipe dream.

It's one of the most exciting and 'grand' projects in plant biotech at the moment!

Re: Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation?

#120

Post by foldr » Fri, Sep 19, 2014, 2:17 AM UTC

api wrote: post #13

fidotron wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cold war having gone by the tipping point was also a very large factor. This tied into the moonrace, and the spin off innovations from that. As a side note, It has always annoyed me that there's a loud contingent of people that object to human space travel on the basis it's not the most efficient way to conduct science, because that is not the point of it. It is a signal of intent, throwing the baton far into the…

> It has always annoyed me that there's a loud contingent of people that object to human space travel on the basis it's not the most efficient way to conduct science... Sometimes I actually blame Skepticism. I'm not talking about skepticism mind you, but Skepticism-- the capital-S variety that became so popular in science starting in the 1970s as a reaction against things like the new age and the resurgence of religi…

I guess the photo you linked to might have some kind of emotional impact on some people, but it doesn't actually tell us anything we didn't know 500 years ago.