Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation?

I think the U.S. pulled out of these two wars because they were stupid in the first place and became fiscally unstrategic at a straggering scale... Like we could have paid for Kyoto worldwide with that kind of money. Just washed down the drain, and we're not done dealing with the geopolitical costs, not to mention the human costs.

Also, Afghanistan is in Central Asia.

I agree with the rest of your point on oil innovation, even if it's just driving us faster towards the next anoxic event...

They're called compilers. Programmers still have jobs.

There was a time (ca. 2008) where oil price rises were predicted to continue to $500/bbl or more by, er, well now.

Peak oil. We've been at/around 85 million barrels per day for about ten years. It seems to be more of a plateau, not exponential decline. However, prices are going up and so is environmental harm in getting the stuff, and those trends show no sign of slowing.

We still have to get off the shit. We just have more time than the doomsayers (always a minority even in "peak oil"-aware circles) thought. Whether we have 10 or 150 years before an oil-powered economy becomes unsustainable, it's not good for the planet to be belching all that carbon into the atmosphere.

This is the important bit, and it matters a lot more than some of the anecdata the original post mentioned. Commercial airliners haven't got faster than Concorde, they've got slower. They've also got smaller wingspans and less buoyancy than Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose. As impressive as the engineering accomplishments were, they optimized for the wrong goals; today's airliners might not be as interesting but they are fuel efficient, reliable and don't need to float. And regular people fly on them, regularly.

The billions that gets spent on making aero engines 1% more efficient every year might not be as glamorous as Concorde, but cheaper tickets for the general public (and satellite internet in BA1 for those senior executives rich enough to have previously considered Concorde on that route) actually delivered better outcomes.

If instead of looking at progression in maximum speeds one looks at how much people fly, we're in a phase of acceleration.

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.

His thesis is (roughly): What we are currently doing is rapidly increasing the interconnectedness or the networking density of our society almost worldwide (e.g. social networks Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, you name it) and the devices we use (e.g. IoT), we have also increased spontaneous activities in these networks (e.g. web 2.0 services where people can be interactive), additionally we have implemented functions that enable circular stimulus in these networks (retweet and share functions). If these 3 effects come together there is the tendency that these systems will carry signals that resonate and amplify themselfs. It is almost impossible to forecast when and how this happens, because these networks are non-linear. If you post something that resonates with a lot of people you can be very powerful from one moment to another. Technology is only the enabler here and I have no doubt that this has a huge impact on society - see the revolution in Egypt for example. One outcome is a shift of power, because it is really hard to control these networks. Even though we have very sophisticated mass-surveilance most events happen very uncontrolled.