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Basically they say that productivity growth is sporadic, rather than continuous. I took this as a cautionary tale that we shouldn't be too hyped about the future. Keep your feet down to the earth, etc.
Just think for moment, only 50 years ago people had no idea about internet, smart phone, cell phone cd Rom, MP3, app, social media, YouTube, web page, pvr, Netflix, amazon and so one and so forth... after another 50 years, the world could be a very different place...
Same thing is already happening with technology. Progress in the last 10 years has been comparatively minimal, and it's definitely not speeding up. But at least we have IoT lightbulbs.
Isn't there an inevitable aspect of diminishing returns here? For example, you can't run Moore's Law forever since there are physical constraints to how close things on your chips can be. It is obvious that any problem to which people have not turned their attention to probably has lots of low hanging fruits that will give you 'progress' very quickly and relatively easily.
Although this may irritate Thiel given his libertarian philosophy, the reason is rather clearly the decline of focused public research initiatives. Whereas previously we had universities and government research arms inventing cyclotrons, rockets, GPS and internet systems, we now have an outcome where long term research, which requires a long time with unpredictable returns and a high chance of failure is cast aside i…
I agree with all that but I still wouldn't call Thiel any sort of libertarian. He spoke at the RNC, backed Trump and is in fact a registered Republican. Like many he waved a libertarian flag of convenience when that was fashionable but the dude's a right wing conservative. I wouldn't say these sort of conservatives are pessimistic about progress so much they are opposed to progress.
It was a pragmatic choice. Thiel is a libertarian.
>The Empire State Building was built in 15 months in 1932. It’s taken 12 years and counting to rebuild the World Trade Center. (Source: 36:00) This is more a commentary on a broken and toxic local political and regulatory climate in New York City than a point about a lack of engineering innovation. Still, perhaps that's part of what he's talking about for some of his critiques.
"Data from the National Safety Council from 1933 through 1997 indicate that deaths from unintentional work-related injuries declined 90%, from 37 per 100,000 workers to 4 per 100,000. The corresponding annual number of deaths decreased from 14,500 to 5100; during this same period, the workforce more than tripled, from 39 million to approximately 130 million." https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4822a1.htm
I'd recommend reading The Rise and Fall of American Growth for some useful numbers on this. Between 1870 and 1970 the standard of living increased so dramatically due to a few key inventions that the author calls "onetime" events. Technology since then has led to marginal improvements compared to, say, the widespread adoption of the filtered drinking water networks.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/books/review/the-power...
Isn't there an inevitable aspect of diminishing returns here? For example, you can't run Moore's Law forever since there are physical constraints to how close things on your chips can be. It is obvious that any problem to which people have not turned their attention to probably has lots of low hanging fruits that will give you 'progress' very quickly and relatively easily.
Just think for moment, only 50 years ago people had no idea about internet, smart phone, cell phone cd Rom, MP3, app, social media, YouTube, web page, pvr, Netflix, amazon and so one and so forth... after another 50 years, the world could be a very different place...
http://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/scifi/arthur-clarke-predict...
Similar feelings st the beginning of the 20th sentury... everything invented, nothing more to discover... bottom line, no body can predict the future and something amazing can be right around the corner...
Asimov has an excellent essay on the topic of scientific progress: http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm
Of course it's always possible we discover something new and groundbreaking in the laws of physics, but given that we're having to spend billions of dollars on accelerators and telescopes, it seems less and less likely that we'll find things as cheap and as useful as electricity or semiconductors.
Looking at life now compared to life in 1967, there are many differences, especially related to computer technology, but there are also many similarities. We still have ships, trains, cars, and planes. We still have roads. We still have schools. We still have houses. We still have plumbing for water and waste. We still have electricity. We still have jobs and commutes. We still have governments and corporations and money. For the most part, the structure of modern life has been pretty stable. Of course we cannot know the future, but it feels safe to me to expect similar stability over the next half century.
Isn't there an inevitable aspect of diminishing returns here? For example, you can't run Moore's Law forever since there are physical constraints to how close things on your chips can be. It is obvious that any problem to which people have not turned their attention to probably has lots of low hanging fruits that will give you 'progress' very quickly and relatively easily.
If you model technological invention as combinations of more fundamental technologies, then as your stock of technologies grows, the number of new combinations should grow exponentially.
The exponential growth predicted by this model is consistent with the increasing rates of growth from the 1700s through the 1900s.
That said, I agree it seems that technological innovation (or at least its impact) is slowing. The difference in life between 1870 and 1920 seems to me to be much bigger than the difference in life between 1970 and 2020. In our fifty years, we made tremendous progress in information technology. In their fifty years, they made tremendous progress with electricity, engines, plumbing, chemicals, & radio.
Peter Thiel's emphasis is that this stagnation is coming from overregulation. My own emphasis is that we figured out what seem to be the main laws of physics by the 1930s, developed the Standard Model in the 60s and 70s, and every fundamental physics discovery since then has been an evolutionary tweak, not a disruptive re-architecting. (I'm overgeneralizing, of course, but I think the idea stands.)