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Peter Thiel Is Wrong About the Future

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Re: Peter Thiel Is Wrong About the Future

#41

Post by lmg643 »

tokenadult wrote: post #10

I remember reading the book You Will Go to the Moon in childhood, just as Virginia Postrel, the author of the essay here, did. She is right that most people in our era were not as excited about the space program as she and I were: "The reason mid-20th-century Americans were optimistic about the future wasn’t that science-fiction writers told cool stories about space travel. Science-fiction glamour in fact worked on o…

My main concern with Peter Thiel praising monopolies is that the nuance of the message will get lost - "earning monopoly through radical innovation" - but the core message remains - monopoly = profit. People will start to pat themselves on the back for acquiring all their competitors, skewing regulations in their favor, and a variety of other sleazy business tactics. I suspect most large business CEOs already understand that monopoly = profits, so Thiel is just making it respectable to talk about by casting it in the light of innovation.

Re: Peter Thiel Is Wrong About the Future

#42

Post by danieltillett »

ForHackernews wrote: post #36
danieltillett wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Kurzweil is not respected in the AI community. I have never heard of Moravec. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Moravec I don’t care what people think about when (or if) we achieve AGI, I want to know why they think a particular date. What analysis have they done to reach their conclusion?

> I want to know why they think a particular date. What analysis have they done to reach their conclusion? Kurzweil is terrified of his own mortality and counting on "The Singularity" to allow him to upload his immortal ~soul~ consciousness into a computer. That's why he's predicting a date within his lifespan.

This may well be true, but what analysis has he done to support this. The only detailed analysis I have seen from anyone is from Moravec. I have been through his analysis and I can’t find any flaw with it.

Re: Peter Thiel Is Wrong About the Future

#43

Post by danieltillett »

darkmighty wrote: post #37
bhashkarsharma wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow! That far? I feel sad. Kurzweil had me hopeful that I'd be able to use it in next 30 years.

From Terence Tao: "The funny thing about AI is that it’s a moving target. In the seventies, someone might ask “what are the goals of AI?” And you might say, “Oh, we want a computer who can beat a chess master, or who can understand actual language speech, or who can search a whole database very quickly.” We do all that now, like face recognition. All these things that we thought were AI, we can do them. But once you…

This is known in religion as "god of the gaps”. We will know when we have true AI as the it will tell us and not take no for an answer :)

Re: Peter Thiel Is Wrong About the Future

#44

Post by danieltillett »

bhashkarsharma wrote: post #32
tlear wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might as well say that we gona create a Warp drive by 2100. Jump necessary for AI advancement makes settlement on Mars an easy problem. We are so far from that we really have no idea how far it is. Human level AI when it happens and it probably will will most likely be at a stage where current tech would seem something out of Ancient Greeks time if not Stone age.

Wow! That far? I feel sad. Kurzweil had me hopeful that I'd be able to use it in next 30 years.

If you want to feel happy again read “Robot” or "Mind Children” by Hans Moravec. He has some pretty good arguments based on human vision that support a AGI around 2030 to 2040 assuming Moore’s Law (the general not specific law) hold.

Re: Peter Thiel Is Wrong About the Future

#45

Post by danieltillett »

Houshalter wrote: post #33
foobarqux wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because everyone else does?

http://www.sophia.de/pdf/2014_PT-AI_polls.pdf >We thus designed a brief questionnaire and distributed it to four groups of experts in 2012/2013. The median estimate of respondents was for a one in two chance that high-level machine intelligence will be developed around 2040-2050, rising to a nine in ten chance by 2075. Experts expect that systems will move on to superintelligence in less than 30 years thereafter. The…

Thanks for this. Not that a gaggle of experts is always right, but this is a lot sooner than 2100. I am surprised that for someone that is so interested in technology that Thiel would push off AGI into distant future.

Re: Peter Thiel Is Wrong About the Future

#46

Post by thathonkey »

lmg643 wrote: post #41
tokenadult wrote: post #10

I remember reading the book You Will Go to the Moon in childhood, just as Virginia Postrel, the author of the essay here, did. She is right that most people in our era were not as excited about the space program as she and I were: "The reason mid-20th-century Americans were optimistic about the future wasn’t that science-fiction writers told cool stories about space travel. Science-fiction glamour in fact worked on o…

My main concern with Peter Thiel praising monopolies is that the nuance of the message will get lost - "earning monopoly through radical innovation" - but the core message remains - monopoly = profit. People will start to pat themselves on the back for acquiring all their competitors, skewing regulations in their favor, and a variety of other sleazy business tactics. I suspect most large business CEOs already underst…

So the argument is that monopolies are ok so long as they are won fair and square? Umm... ok.

Re: Peter Thiel Is Wrong About the Future

#47

Post by refurb »

foobarqux wrote: post #35
seanflyon wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder though if the real problem isn't the decline in wage parity since ~1970. It's not that innovation's stopped, but the rate at which people can afford new innovation has slowed since more and more people can't afford anything but basic necessities. Parity is not purchasing power. Inflation adjusted wages for the bottom quintile are up 20% from 1970. The poor/middle-class getting poorer has only happened sinc…

Middle class income has been flat since the 70s and discretionary income has decreased.

Do you have a source? It's true that household income has been flat since the 1970's, but the nature of households has changed, there are a lot more single parents where there used to be two income earners.

If you look at income on a per person basis, we're much higher (in inflation adjusted terms) than we were in the 1970s.

Re: Peter Thiel Is Wrong About the Future

#48

Post by ilaksh »

The environmental movement was an important course correction. But now we have gone too far to one side to the point where society doesn't recognize the value of progress or humanity itself. We need to incorporate those environmentally conscious attitudes into a more subtle, balanced, and fair assessment of our place in the universe and our ability to grow.

Re: Peter Thiel Is Wrong About the Future

#49

Post by skybrian »

canjobear wrote: post #34

I really appreciate many points in this article, especially showing that people in the 60s thought that they were in just as much of a decline as we do now. But there's also a weird anti-environmentalism threaded through the article. Toward the end, the author lists things that we now think are bad, as an example of how we've become pessimistic. Including: "New subdivisions represented a threat to the landscape rathe…

I didn't read it that way. I think her point was that we have a lot of good reasons to look at the possible downsides of potential advances, rather than naively assuming they won't have side effects.
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