Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation?

Again, for the issue of growing the economy and standard of living through more exploitation of what's on the shelves of the research libraries and the well trained workers in that material, I believe that the bottleneck is, really, with the non-technical suits, the guys with, maybe, a Harvard English or history major, maybe a law school degree, maybe an MBA, but with no real technical qualifications. So, these guys won't bet their careers on technical material they don't understand. Before 1940, the suits could understand enough about, say, radio and cars.

So, do all the pure/applied research you want, those suits won't let, or at least won't help, the results see the light of day.

We did a lot of pure research because (A) that is what the academic world most respects and, thus, for their careers, most researchers wanted to pursue, (B) US research, including workers with pasts in pure research, were a super big help in winning WWII and doing well in the Cold War, (C) the US DoD really liked and respected both pure and applied research, (D) Congress was eager to fund research as part of helping US national security. Part of the rationale for Congress funding pure research was that (A) the leading researchers told Congress that that was the research to fund and (B) the pure researchers were the profs who trained the worker bees for the more applied research -- so Congress was still happy.

What we fund now via NSF and NIH is not too shabby. If someone actually has some good work background and a really good proposal, then likely they can get funded.

But, with some exceptions, take some research results and a proposal for a product to Silicon Valley or the suits in a large company will, get either silence or laughs. Again, the suits want next to nothing to do with research results.

Or, journals will give a serious review of a submitted research paper, but the suits won't get past the title page.

There wasn't an "Internet" in the 1960s, or at least, not until the very end. The various components: TCP/IP networking, BGP, ethernet, ATM, protocols, Unix, etc., simply didn't exist.

There were some computers which could communicate over modems at 300 - 9600 baud or so, at distance.

The technologies which enabled the Internet were being developed in the 1960s. As of 1977, this was the entire ARPANET, about 53 nodes by my count: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Arpanet_logical_map,_march...

The real guts started filling in during the 1980s, particularly BSD Unix (with a TCP/IP stack), Perl, and by the end of the decade, the first Web server and clients.

The difference between technological developments of the latter half of the 20th century and those from 1800 - 1950, is that the former involved new sources of energy, new means of producing and distributing it, and exceptional advances in materials. From 1950 onward most major advances have been in information processing and communications, though the Green Revolution likely also counts. Nothing to sneeze at, but limited all the same: information processing lets you change how you manage matter, but the overall impact is still restricted to the theoretical maximum efficiency of those physical processes.

Faith that technology will provide us with an unlimited future is ... wishful thinking.

And now you're committing the fallacy of argument from emotional intimidation by using sarcasm.

There are times when your sarcasm would acutally be a valid point and not sarcasm, but this is not one.