If Peter Thiel And Garry Kasparov Are Right, Then We're In Trouble • Hacker News Board

Re: If Peter Thiel And Garry Kasparov Are Right, Then We're In Trouble

#71

Post by Yoshino » Wed, Dec 05, 2012, 11:50 PM UTC

zanny wrote: post #49

hooande wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reasons your iPhone 5 lets you get directions, communicate and make dinner reservations are the global information infrastructure and the tcp/ip protocol, both products of a national innovation policy. I know that most people under 30 directly credit Steve Jobs for everything that they do on their phones. But it took a massive national investment to set up the basics of the internet, which provided the iphone wit…

As a 21 year old, I wanted to take offense to the Steve Jobs comment because he was a real jerk and the innovation came from the Woz's and not the Jobs, but given my limited interactions with others in my age group, the vast majority of them are pants on head dumb enough to have a shrine to honor turtlenecks.

Why so much hate? The foundations of Apple were built by Jobs and Woz. Several days ago someone else on HN pointed out that had it not been for Jobs, Woz probably would have been just another nameless, brilliant engineer at HP. Likewise, without Woz, Jobs probably would not have had a computer to sell.

Apple did not invent the graphical user interface or multitouch displays. However, you cannot deny that Jobs was a driving force behind the Lisa/Macintosh and the iPhone. Without those products, the technology innovations that supported them might still be languishing in expensive, niche markets.

Re: If Peter Thiel And Garry Kasparov Are Right, Then We're In Trouble

#72

Post by jstelly » Wed, Dec 05, 2012, 11:59 PM UTC

mathattack wrote: post #5

Several economists write about the Great Stagnation a lot at www.marginalrevolution.com. A couple things to think about: - There have been a lot of very smart people who have thought growth can't solve the world's problems. They've been wrong. For example.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus - This seems to have hit the great middle... The one downside of people getting hyper-productive with technol…

I am surprised that this article is not referencing Tyler Cowen's book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0525952713/ref=as_li_tf_tl?...

or at least his blog. It is a pretty interesting analysis that deserves serious consideration. He does point out that communications and the internet are a bright spot of hope in our otherwise slowly growing economy.

Re: If Peter Thiel And Garry Kasparov Are Right, Then We're In Trouble

#73

Post by nameless_noob » Thu, Dec 06, 2012, 2:02 AM UTC

http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/event/1403

Page to the actual debate that occured. There's a link on the right to the recording of it.

You know, just in case biases hid something

Re: If Peter Thiel And Garry Kasparov Are Right, Then We're In Trouble

#74

Post by cmccabe » Thu, Dec 06, 2012, 2:35 AM UTC

zxcdw wrote: post #69

jerf wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The reason your iPhone 5 lets you get directions, communicate and make dinner reservations is the global information infrastructure and the tcp/ip protocol, both products of a national innovation policy." And on you go in that vein, but that's massively reductionistic. For one thing, if that is so true, then why did the iPhone 5 not exist 30 years ago, which is still many years after those advances? The Internet and…

The argument about computers and computer technology being almost stagnant for the past 40 years is the science behind it. Look at programming languages. They still borrow from C very heavily. What major advancements have there been during the past 10-20 years? Look at operating systems. The Unix way of thinking and the fundamental concepts still live on, because they work. What advancements have there been to the fu…

What's the point of having a pissing match between engineers and scientists? You need both to push technology forward.

Science can lead to better engineering, but better engineering can also lead to better science as well. You don't get very far in astronomy unless your engineers can build telescopes. You don't get very far in computational biology without engineers to create microchips, write software, etc.

What was the use of spending all that effort to get to the moon? There wasn't much interesting up there, scientifically. And the ballistics used would have been familiar to Isaac Newton. But it turns out that going to the moon pushed forward a lot of fields, like materials science, aerodynamics, and so forth.

If you have only disdain for practical things, you end up like the ancient Greeks-- smart guys who were unwilling to get their hands dirty by actually doing an experiment or building a device. So, for example, they philosophized about what must be inside the human body, rather than actually looking. They discovered the steam engine but dismissed it as a toy.

If theoretical CS hasn't advanced that much in the last 30 years, maybe it's because there isn't that much left to discover there. And that would be fine. There's more than ever going on in computational biology, material science, chemistry, and so forth. Who knows. Maybe some grubby engineers will come up with a quantum computer, and then theoretical CS people will have something to do again. All we know for sure is that keeping an open mind and a reasonable-sized ego is the best way to approach the problem.

Re: If Peter Thiel And Garry Kasparov Are Right, Then We're In Trouble

#75

Post by mathattack » Thu, Dec 06, 2012, 12:36 PM UTC

jstelly wrote: post #72

mathattack wrote: post #5

Several economists write about the Great Stagnation a lot at www.marginalrevolution.com. A couple things to think about: - There have been a lot of very smart people who have thought growth can't solve the world's problems. They've been wrong. For example.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus - This seems to have hit the great middle... The one downside of people getting hyper-productive with technol…

I am surprised that this article is not referencing Tyler Cowen's book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0525952713/ref=as_li_tf_tl?... or at least his blog. It is a pretty interesting analysis that deserves serious consideration. He does point out that communications and the internet are a bright spot of hope in our otherwise slowly growing economy.

Yes - same authors. Thank you for the more precise link.

Re: If Peter Thiel And Garry Kasparov Are Right, Then We're In Trouble

#76

Post by mc32 » Fri, Dec 07, 2012, 9:32 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #70

ebiester wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commercial use of GPS wasn't allowed until 1996, and there has been some refinement of use in the last decade. Without GPS, there are no turn by turn directions, and there is no GPS without the space program. There is no GPS without the government funding of military technology, and allowing commercial use. There is no iPhone without Silicon Valley. There is no Silicon Valley without the massive amount of defense wor…

There's a lot of government involvement. There's a stonking amazing overwhelmingly lot of private involvement. There's no Silicon Valley without, you know, Silicon Valley . Not the place, the people, the companies, the innovation. Government has better PR, the people have the vast, vast bulk of the actual time and wealth poured in to these innovations.

Government and PR? I'm taking that with a grain of salt. First, lots of those programs were originally 'secret' so they would not publish information about them. The only PR-sy thing is perhaps some of the outward space-race stuff.

Government can do propaganda (sometimes), but they do not do good PR, IMO.