I think Peter Thiel's Zero to one does not specifically lament that the hoi polloi do not dream of space elevators. To me the core concern was a general risk averseness among investors, who prefer to diversify their portfolio among established investment products rather than figure out things from first principles and start up on new and better things. I read it as a critique of establishments where economists run things just by the accounting books instead of engineers who start from first principles and want to get things actually done.
Peter Thiel Is Wrong About the Future
81–90 of 141 posts
Re: Peter Thiel Is Wrong About the Future
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
"In other words, we would need to imagine what a project, that could be accomplished with half-a-million (or more) people working in cooperation toward a single end goal, would look like today. I can guarantee you that would look something along the lines of a partial terraforming of Mars." A vastly more realistic projection of what "a half million or more people working in cooperation towards a single end goal" coul…
If the West was in decline, it wouldn't still be the engine of science and innovation, which is exactly what it still is. In fact, the West dominates both categories to an extreme, despite the rise of China, India and Japan since the moon landing. The West still possesses by far and away the best universities and school systems. The US in particular, so dominates the top college rankings, others have a hard time gett…
You know, Rome around 300AD was top notch in science, technology, military achievements, art, political power and philosophy. It was also very obviously in decline. Just as we are. It's as obvious as a wart on a bald head.
For that matter, the Soviet Union was considered unstoppable by most people in the 1980; Samuelson predicted we'd soon be speaking Russian in that very year. Ever look at the ruins of the Soviet Union? The ones I looked at in Sevastopol look a lot like Detroit.
Read some history: it's good for you. You can start with the Kenneth Clark documentary on Western Civilization I linked above if you like.
Re: Peter Thiel Is Wrong About the Future
#83Thiel has some good points about the lack of progress. Rocketry is only slightly better than it was 45 years ago. We've hit the limit of chemical fuels, and weight reduction can only go so far. In comparison, 45 years took us from the Wright Flyer to the first jet aircraft. Fission power isn't much further along than it was 45 years ago, either. Nor is fusion power. Nor is power transmission. At the high-power end of…
45 years ago the internet was in it's infancy, only available to people at selected institutions. Why not count the internet as a great piece of progress?
Re: Peter Thiel Is Wrong About the Future
#84If you want Grand Engineering, why not get behind the Soviets? Their progress to space outclasses any other non-US country. So why is Russia a second world country, with world-class math, science, and comp-sci talent? Further: the 'softer' half of any Tech-accelerator - consumer apps or anything ad-based - would be a non-starter for venture capital if it were based in Russia. But Russians do have the ambition and ski…
Russia is a second world country because the terms "first world" and "second world" originated during the Cold War, with first world countries being aligned with the US and second world countries being aligned with Russia/the Soviet Union by definition. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_World
The common use of these terms has since shifted in meaning. To be honest, I haven't really heard people use the term "second world" in a long time.
Re: Peter Thiel Is Wrong About the Future
#85She's right, Thiel & Co. are entirely wrong. And not just subtly, but extremely wrong.
Here are some problems I have with Peter Thiel and other people that claim we're not making progress or pulling off 'moon shots':
The Large Hadron Collider
The International Space Station
Tesla and the advances coming to the auto market
The human genome
Mapping the human brain
Understanding stem cells, and the incredibly fast rate at which we're learning to grow new organs. Organ growing will be vastly more important than the Manhattan Project or the Hoover Dam, it's not even going to be a close comparison. In fact, it's a sick joke that anybody would be so confused as to think there's a comparison to be made.
Virtual reality, which is going to be an extraordinary accomplishment and lead to entirely new visualized space that will be so large, it's nearly impossible to comprehend for people today; it'll enable exploration and experiences for the visual and auditory on a scale that would be otherwise impossible for a person in the real physical space. It has begun, and will accelerate very quickly from here. Thiel & Co. either pretend this isn't coming, or are ignorant of just how immense it's going to be. VR is as much an accomplishment of the physical space, as it is the digital - the infrastructure that had/has to be put in place to make it possible at the scale it's about to be, tallies in the trillions of dollars cost wise. People are sitting around wondering what we're going to use all of our storage capabilities for - in less than 30 years VR space will consume more storage than the entire Internet combined today.
Digital currencies will generate (are generating) a once-per-century rebuild of the global economy when it comes to how we use / regard / store / secure money and wealth. This is a big deal, even if it's going to take decades to be fully realized. This breakthrough is only made possible by breakthroughs in the atomic space, nano scale manufacturing that is extraordinary all by itself.
Robotics, and the extremely fast pace at which it's gathering steam. This alone proves the progress worriers entirely wrong, it's going to be that big of a deal over the next two decades. The breakthroughs in this field have been astounding, even if they always seem incremental; measured in 10 year spans, it's remarkable frankly.
Solar power has gone from being so weak as to be a joke even just 20 years ago, to being powerful and cheap enough to be practical for many purposes. And it's only going to get cheaper and more powerful by the year forward. Efficiently harnessing the sun for energy, then building a huge global industry around it and deploying it, is an extraordinary accomplishment, every bit on par with The Manhattan Project; I'd argue it's a greater accomplishment in fact.
The smart phone is more important than the Hoover Dam. The technology, the people, the science, and the industry that it required as a whole is a moon shot. Extreme improvements in communication and knowledge acquisition - what the smart phone represents - are at least as important as energy or going to the moon; I'd argue more important.
People arguing about the low value of Twitter / WhatsApp / Instagram / Facebook, may have a problem in social thinking or social understanding. I think they make the mistake of failing to understand just how important communication and expression is for human beings, and it likely derives from an engineering brain bias.
Re: Peter Thiel Is Wrong About the Future
#86The most depressing thing is that our generation can achieve so much more. We have more scientists, more engineers and much larger economies than babyboomer generation. But most of these money ends up corruption in underdeveloped countries and in wars and busted healthcare system in developed countries. For example US spent 1 trillion dollars [1] just for stupid Iraq war alone. With same amount of money we could have vaccinated kids of entire world, could have had multiple missions to Mars, permanent bases on moon, accelerated research on all kind of diseases, funded more research on fusion and alternate power sources, and could have built sanitation facilities for all in multiple under developed countries for free - and even then we would have some money left over. Just 1 trillion dollars is more than enough to make huge progress on all of these front but we spend it out on wars and busted healthcare system.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War
Re: Peter Thiel Is Wrong About the Future
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
So the argument is that monopolies are ok so long as they are won fair and square? Umm... ok.
AFAIU, Thiel doesn't say monopolies are good. He says the pursuit of monopolies drives progress: “Monopolies drive progress. The promise of years or even decades of monopoly profits provides a powerful incentive to innovate.” http://www.technologyreview.com/review/531491/the-contrarian...
This idea is frankly retarded. I am not saying you have had it. This is directed at You. To say that monopolies drive progress strikes me as an anthropomorphisation of the motivations of innovators. Did AT&T Microsoft and Ford drive progress? Hardly. They existed when progress occurred but to attribute it do them is generous. Most progress is driven by the artists and scientists on the edge, they rarely see the fruits of their labor, the riches are picked up by the second and third waves of adopters.
Maybe monopolies refine innovations?
Re: Peter Thiel Is Wrong About the Future
#88> “There’s an automatic perception ... that everything’s dangerous,” Stephenson mused at a recent event in Los Angeles, citing the Stonehenge example, “and that there’s some cosmic balance at work--that if there’s an advance somewhere it must have a terrible cost. Am I the only one who thinks this is a good thing? We should be worrying about trade-offs. There are myriad examples from the past (DDT, Thalidomide, Chern…
I think you are just proving the author's point.
The author is saying that people living today are overly concerned about the environmental effects of experimenting with new technologies when compared with people in the recent past.
You, being a person living today, have just expressed that you are overly concerned about the environmental effects of experimenting with new technologies. That's not a criticism, we are all a product of the time we live in.
That's not to say that people in the past had no concern about the environment, it's just that they weighted the costs and benefits differently to modern people when comparing anticipated benefits for humanity against potential environmental effects.
The author correlates this different weighting with increased technological progress in the past. I think that is very hard to measure as it really depends on what you value.
I agree that you can list examples of people racing ahead to use new technologies and there being negative consequences. But what about all the times that humans raced ahead with new technologies and there were positive consequences? If we didn't race ahead would we be better off or worse off overall? When you delay implementing a technology due to concern about the potential side effects you make people worse off in the interim than what they would have been if you went ahead. We can never really know what all the consequences of our actions will be until we act.
Re: Peter Thiel Is Wrong About the Future
#89If you want Grand Engineering, why not get behind the Soviets? Their progress to space outclasses any other non-US country. So why is Russia a second world country, with world-class math, science, and comp-sci talent? Further: the 'softer' half of any Tech-accelerator - consumer apps or anything ad-based - would be a non-starter for venture capital if it were based in Russia. But Russians do have the ambition and ski…
> So why is Russia a second world country
Because the First/Second world distinction was about being aligned with (and getting financial, technical and cultural support of) respectively the US and the USSR, with the "third world" being unaligned and unsupported "battlegrounds" countries.
Re: Peter Thiel Is Wrong About the Future
#90The most depressing thing is that our generation can achieve so much more. We have more scientists, more engineers and much larger economies than babyboomer generation. But most of these money ends up corruption in underdeveloped countries and in wars and busted healthcare system in developed countries. For example US spent 1 trillion dollars [1] just for stupid Iraq war alone . With same amount of money we could hav…
The problem is easy to identify: Our various forms of government are simply obsolete. In the case of the US you have very small groups of people interested in nothing more than the survival of their respective political clans. Despite what they say, they consistently fail to represent us and always, always, always make decisions based on their own self interest (or that of their party).
Remember: Governments and politicians cause and fight wars. It's politicians, not the people, who make a mess out of society and the world. I can't think of many wars that were not the product of politicians run amuck.
I am not proposing anarchy. That helps nobody. Yet I do think we need to collectively figure out how to correct the political landscape in order to ensure that politicians understand they work for us and always towards the common good (whatever that means).