
Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation? - digisth
http://danwang.co/why-is-peter-thiel-pessimistic-about-technological-innovation/
======
api
"I sort-of date the end of rapid technological progress to the late-60s or
early-70s. At that point something more or less broke in this country and in
the western world more generally which has put us into a zone where there’s
much slower technological progress."

I've believed for years that we entered something like a minor dark age (dim
age?) on or about 1970, and that computers have become synonymous with
"technology" because it was the only sector that didn't get the memo.
Everything else basically stopped cold around 1970, and some fields (e.g.
aerospace) have actually gone into reverse.

I am very heartened to see people with the fame and fortune of Peter Thiel et.
al. raising this issue and basically agreeing, but I have yet to see an
explanation that truly seems to work.

Peter I think oversells libertarianism when he blames regulation-- while
regulation slows progress by increasing costs and making experimentation hard,
free markets' reluctance to invest in "zero to one" ideas _also_ slows
progress. Nearly all the "zero to one" stories I am familiar with were
government funded, usually in a time of war or threat of war. VCs and other
investors normally want to fund "one to N" ideas because there is at least a
provable market there and the hard stuff is mostly done already.

I've got some other ideas but I'm curious about what HN thinks.

~~~
fidotron
The cold war having gone by the tipping point was also a very large factor.
This tied into the moonrace, and the spin off innovations from that.

As a side note, It has always annoyed me that there's a loud contingent of
people that object to human space travel on the basis it's not the most
efficient way to conduct science, because that is not the point of it. It is a
signal of intent, throwing the baton far into the future and hoping to reach
it and somehow making it, with innumerable side benefits. What we've lost is
the entire will for moonshots, and no one in society is engaged in anything
like it.

Sometimes I'm an ultra libertarian too, but I suspect the reason Thiel
wouldn't follow this reasoning is purely on the basis of who was doing the
spending in that era.

~~~
api
> It has always annoyed me that there's a loud contingent of people that
> object to human space travel on the basis it's not the most efficient way to
> conduct science...

Sometimes I actually blame Skepticism.

I'm not talking about skepticism mind you, but Skepticism-- the capital-S
variety that became so popular in science starting in the 1970s as a reaction
against things like the new age and the resurgence of religious
fundamentalism. Rather than an attempt to keep the candle of science burning,
I've started seeing Skeptics as another manifestation of the general turn
toward superstition that occurred on or around this time. Theirs is the
superstition of the known-- the belief that that which is not presently
understood cannot possibly exist. Skepticism also usually fellow-travels with
the kind of deep conservatism you're talking about. Head over to Skeptic
boards and you'll see that the general opinion is anti-manned-space-flight for
exactly the reasons you state-- it's not the most science for the buck, etc.
It also usually fellow-travels with eco-doomerism for the simple reason that
no comprehensive solutions to our current energy problems are known therefore
they cannot possibly exist. (That which is not known can't possibly exist,
remember?) Skepticism raised a generation of scientists whose first instinct
is to tear things down and narrow the range of possibility.

My personal big overarching theory on the dark age of the 70s is that there
was a broad shift toward conservatism and fundamentalism across the entire
spectrum of human thought: right and left, scientific and mystical, etc. As
for why I'm not sure, but I suspect that fear was a big part of it. Lovecraft
said it best:

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human
mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in
the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should
voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto
harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge
will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position
therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the
deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." \- H.P. Lovecraft,
"The Call of Cthulhu"

That's exactly what I think happened: we fled from the deadly light into a
whole grab bag of comforting, pessimistic, conservative absolutisms.
Apocalyptic fiction is so popular for the same reason-- people find it
comforting in a weird way. If we're all doomed then at least we know what the
outcome will be... unlike more optimistic visions of the future that end with
black voids like "the singularity," human genetic metamorphosis, alien
contact, the birth of AI or other post-human intelligence, etc. I think
there's a part of us that finds the unknown more terrifying than death and
that secretly hopes that WWIII or ecological collapse will save us from the
great unknown outcome of progress and exploration.

If I had to stick a marker in the ground, I'd place it at the moment everyone
saw that earth rise shot:

[http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/946xvariable_...](http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/946xvariable_height/public/images/297755main_GPN-2001-000009_full.jpg)

See any gods in there? See anything that cares about us? Nope. All I see is a
tiny grain of sand in an endless black void of nothingness. We are basically
dust mites living on that grain of sand. This photo basically proves that we
know very little about where we are, where we come from, and where we are
going. People looked at that picture and said it was beautiful and inspiring,
but secretly somewhere deep inside I wonder if the reaction wasn't
metaphysical horror...

Stare at it for a while... you'll see it.

~~~
possibilistic
Blaming skepticism is an interesting point and makes me wonder. What about the
publishing culture? Does it map more closely to incrementalism, or is it just
that the surface area of the problem space has grown too vast for the human
mind to generally see the bigger picture?

Should empiricism be changed to allow fuzziness and uncertainty within the
process? Scientific truth seems like a problem space similar to those amenable
to metaheuristics. We don't know the form of the optimal / most true model.
I'm not positing this for physics. Mainly systems biology and big data fields.

~~~
fidotron
I certainly do think the publishing culture has become broken.

There is no doubt in my mind that if Einstein appeared in this environment
he'd have been labelled a crackpot and it would have taken fifty years or more
before anyone even began to take him seriously.

The fact we now have a global network of entities competing for funding from
relatively narrow sources means that those that deviate rapidly get weeded
out. There is at least the perception that prior to about 1990 different
institutions could be quite divergent with their views on particular ideas,
violently disagree, but both still pursue research in their unique directions.
The world seems far more homogeneous today.

------
AnimalMuppet
We're close to getting cars that can drive themselves. We have cars that can
detect when the brakes are locking and fix it, so that you never go into a
skid. We have railroad locomotives that can tell when an axle is just starting
to slip, and cut the power to that one axle, so that the wheels never slip
even at full power on slick rails. We have jet aircraft engines that can
report when a part is getting close to failure, so that it can be replaced at
a soon-but-convenient time before it actually fails in flight.

Desktop computers. Laptops. Cell phones. CT scanners. The internet. The Large
Hadron Collider. The Hubble Space Telescope. Progress has slowed since the
1970s? Really?

Progress in physical things has not so much slowed since the 1970s; it has
gone into improving efficiency, convenience, and reliability. For example: In
the 1970s, you were supposed to tune a car engine (plugs, points, timing)
regularly. On my 2005, I had to do it after 100,000 miles. It used to be a
great achievement to keep a car running for 100,000 miles; now it's just time
for the first tuneup. For another: My 2005 is _far_ more stable and easy to
drive than what I had in the 1970s. This means I crash less often. That's
progress.

~~~
angersock
And yet over 3B ( _billion_ ) people are below the poverty line...

EDIT:

Luckily, weapons systems are _much_ more effective than they were in the
1970s, so I guess we will be able to fend off the poor.

EDIT2:

Look, downvote all you want...the elephant in the room is that the rewards and
advances in technology are not and can not be distributed evenly. Even in a
first-world nation such as the US, so many of the products listed in my parent
post are out-of-reach of anyone without significant financial means. CT scans,
for example--what does imaging matter _if you can 't afford it_?

You think that the starving huddled masses are just going to sit outside the
walls and go "Man, sure wish I could live there?". That's _never_ how history
has worked out, you nitwits.

~~~
jotm
People are quick to downvote when it's inconvenient to their vision of the
world.

What he says is true, and innovation seems to affect fewer and fewer people -
the rest can only dream of it.

Good drugs are being banned, electric cars are being laughed at by people who
can't fathom that an electric motor can put out the same performance as a V6,
smartphones can be used as full digital assistants yet they're used for phone
calls/Skype and alarms, SpaceX - what's that, etc.

Not to mention that "over 3B (billion) people are below the poverty line..."
as angersock said.

Those who are lucky enough to be touched by innovation surround themselves in
a bubble and dismiss everyone else.

~~~
PythonicAlpha

      Those who are lucky enough to be touched by innovation 
      surround themselves in a bubble and dismiss everyone else.
    

Totally correct!

Despite of (political correct) statistics made by the world bank, the
inequality is rising in the world. Only look at the US. Once the US had a
broad middle class. Today, the middle class is shrinking more and more and is
replaced by quarters for the poor and others for the rich. The only reason,
that it is not seen by most people is, that they stick in their own peer-group
-- and do not look to much into the lives of others. Also, there is no country
in the world that has that many people in prisons ...

------
therzathegza
I think the article unfairly bashes rail transport by singling out coal. If
you read Warren Buffett's writings, his investment in rail was mostly due to
being able to move something 500 miles on one gallon of diesel fuel.
Regardless of what is being carried, there are very few things that efficient.
Coal sucks, but but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater there.

As for the science section, claiming that productivity per scientist is <1% of
what it was in 1920s is absolutely laughable. Look at some of the really large
projects humanity pulled off like sequencing the human genome for good
examples.

Interesting article, but seems to be a pretty pessimistic outlook.

~~~
tokai
Actually there have never been so many publications per scientist as there is
now. Nearly every metric that is measurable, have been growing exponentially
for the last century (no. of scientists, publications, research institutions
etc.). There are some indications that we are nearing the top of the s-curve
however.

Which begs the question: why is all that research not resulting in equal
exponential innovation in our society?

~~~
kazagistar
Cause all the important research is already done.

Seriously. Why do we assume the difficulty of making meaningful progress to be
linear? It seems reasonable that each new discovery becomes harder then the
previous one, at a rate equal to or faster then the rate at which we speed up
science.

------
tdees40
There's a reasonable argument that the entire industrial revolution was just
the result of cheap carbon, and we've been running on that ever since. The
Haber Process allowed us to get out of agriculture (and thus have time to make
all of these breakthroughs) and then electrification (courtesy coal/gas) got
us out of having to do manual labor. So we had lots of free time! And we used
that to develop transistors and MRI machines and spaceships and everything
else. But the returns to that free time seem to be diminishing rapidly, and we
still rely on power growth to get GDP growth.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
A lot of the stuff we do that uses transistors doesn't show up as GDP.

------
zanny
> because there’s no one in the system who has any idea what to do with the
> money

Hey look, validation of my outlook on basic income.

Links the go-to source:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM)

For some reason, we seem to have forgotten that the best investment is in
people. You want your innovation, all the potential is trapped living on
scraps a day in soul crushing poverty or near-poverty, while you move around
your trillions with nothing to spend it on - because you are literally running
out of things to get you more money, because nobody else has any left to give.

------
joeclark77
Mark Steyn has also commented brilliantly on the fizzling out of technological
innovation: [http://www.steynonline.com/6425/holding-
pattern](http://www.steynonline.com/6425/holding-pattern)

Quote: "The first half of the 20th century overhauled the pattern of our
lives: The light bulb abolished night; the internal combustion engine tamed
distance. They fundamentally reconceived the rhythms of life. That's why our
young man propelled from 1890 to 1950 would be flummoxed at every turn. A
young fellow catapulted from 1950 to today would, on the surface, feel
instantly at home – and then notice a few cool electronic toys. And, after
that, he might wonder about the defining down of 'accomplishment': Wow, you've
invented a more compact and portable delivery system for Justin Bieber!"

------
alricb
Things do advance, but they're a lot less spectacular, sometimes because we're
running into hard physical limitations. Supersonic flight, for instance: it's
just super difficult to make it economically feasible. But subsonic aircraft
are much better than they were back in the 1970s. Cars are leaps and bounds
above what they were in the 80s: more reliable, safer, faster.

Scientists are also running against physical limitations: to do Big science,
you need expensive equipment, like the LHC, but also electron beam
microscopes, sophisticated automatic lab equipment, etc. so you need a lot of
people to make this stuff works.

The problems we do get are more social than scientific: most new buildings
aren't much better than the ones from the 70s, but that's because people
aren't applying the science that exists. Transportation and energy are
similar: it's not sufficient that the technology can be used, the social and
economic structure has to be there to support it.

For instance, you could dream about a citywide automated contained
transportation system in Montreal. You'd have a big east-west conveyor, with
links to the mainland at each end of the island, plus a big north-south
corridor to get across the island and cross the St. Lawrence. Then you'd only
need small electric trucks to move the containers to and from stations along
the conveyors.

But that's never going to happen because you couldn't put the structure in
place.

~~~
sumitviii
I think you didn't read the article carefully. We don't need more people doing
the same stuff. We need people willing to waste all their cash to BUILD
something from new discoveries.

Earlier new technologies used to be priced sky-high. Now cost benefit analysis
is the only thing that matters.

------
tbolse
Some additional thoughts: Maybe Thiel is right with his thesis. But I think we
don't see the impacts of the latest "technology" like Facebook and Twitter or
any social network that might come as a successor clearly yet. I had the same
opinions, because it doesn't really feal like rocket science or flying cars. A
German professor called Peter Kruse, changed my mind. He has a really
interesting perspective on todays interconectedness using a system theroetical
view:

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.

------
skybrian
Thiel is focused on lagging indicators and this results in excessive
pessimism.

For example, the average price of energy is a lagging indicator. If you're
focused on this then you'll completely miss all improvements in the cost of
clean energy until the day when it's better than the average price of all
energy. In fact, in the early days it's just making the average price more
expensive.

If you want to know where we're going rather than looking in the rear-view
mirror, you need separate metrics for watching new tech while it's still new
and more expensive.

------
JimboOmega
I love the tension between the "OMG Robots will do everything, even write
code!" and "Technological progress has essentially ground to a standstill"
camps.

It's refreshing to see something from the standstill camp; thanks to self
driving cars the former has been enjoying its day in the sun.

Especially so since it fits with a nice cultural narrative about the haves and
the have-nots; the theory being that all the robots will take all the jobs and
leave only a small elite to live in hyper-luxury (see: Elysium).

It's nice to see the counterpoint. There was a time (ca. 2008) where oil price
rises were predicted to continue to $500/bbl or more by, er, well now. There
was this crisis of resources, of which the technology to extract them had
peaked... (speaking of, how can we ignore fracking?).

Anyway the bubble burst and the narrative changed. Google's self-driving car
gained a lot of hype and suddenly people were worried about automation again
(think of all the drivers!).

~~~
jameswilsterman
I don't think these camps are mutually exclusive. For example, I believe that
Thiel is right about the past 40 years, but we are starting to get back on
track again (thanks in part to Larry Page) and the next 40 years will be much
more broadly innovative.

------
trekky1700
Because we wanted flying cars and all we got was online payments.

~~~
michael_nielsen
The funny thing is, if I had to pick just one of those two, I'd definitely go
for online payments.

~~~
nostrademons
So did everybody else. That's why we got online payments.

I wonder if much of the angst about how the future hasn't turned out the way
we wanted is really "We got everything we wanted and it turns out what we
wanted is _this_?" Markets are really good at fulfilling peoples' desires, but
the problem is they fulfill people's _actual_ wants, not what they wish they
wanted. So it's like turning a spotlight on our desires and realizing that
hey, we're all nothing more than human.

~~~
jacquesm
No, we got the online payments because they scale.

Flying cars have been possible since the 50's or so but they're simply not
practical and the concept does not scale well (and not counting Mollers scam,
it's a scam _and_ not practical).

[http://www.terrafugia.com/aircraft/transition](http://www.terrafugia.com/aircraft/transition)

[http://www.smithsonianmag.com/videos/category/innovation/the...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/videos/category/innovation/the-
incredible-flying-car-of-the-1950s/?no-ist)

------
nostromo
I think we're at the top of an S curve. And it's reflected in the stock
market:

[http://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-price/](http://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-price/)

After 6 years of 0% interest rate, we've clawed our way back to the dot-com
bubble, and no higher. Our foot is completely down on the gas pedal, and we're
hardly getting anywhere.

What will the next S curve be? Space? AI? I'm not sure, but as things stand, I
can't help but chuckle remorsefully when I think back to the exuberance I felt
when I read my first Kurzweil book.

~~~
tbolse
Interesting idea to use the framework of S curves on this observation. But I
think that the typical S curve model will not work on big innovations that are
not disruptive towards or at least strongly related to each other in terms of
use cases. What you mean is rather the concept of "Kondratiev Waves" [1]

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave)

------
jeffreyrogers
Thiel is more or less reiterating the points that the economist Tyler Cowen
has been making for several years. I just read _Zero to One_ and found it
good, but not great. Cowen's book, _Average is Over_ [1], covers much of the
same ideas and is better reasoned. (Cowen's earlier book, _The Great
Stagnation_ , is also quite good).

[1]:
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00C1N5WOI?btkr=1](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00C1N5WOI?btkr=1)

------
dharma1
Maybe the low hanging fruit have been picked but I think there will be a
steady stream of innovation in the near future - more efficient and cheaper
renewables, better battery tech, better cures to disease etc. I think the next
big shift will happen when the remaining 4-5 billion people are empowered with
high quality education and computing devices and the potential of the whole of
humanity can be put to use.

It's a numbers game, more brains working on innovation=more innovation. This
global levelling of the playing field and equal access to technology and means
of innovation is playing out slowly, maybe too slowly for it to feel like an
"acceleration" to us who live through it. Give it another 10-20 years. Right
now it's like we're running at 20% capacity when you look at the total number
of people on the planet, at how much of that potential is not utilised.

China will take the lead, already has started to in some cases (in the case of
AI, Andrew Ng's jump to Baidu was interesting) -
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/08/28/interview-i...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/08/28/interview-
inside-google-brain-founder-andrew-ngs-plans-to-transform-baidu/)

------
jostmey
Yeah, we went to the moon and then what happened? Genetic engineering has been
around since the 70's but society has largely rejected its applications. And
consider the Energy sector - when was the last nuclear power plant constructed
in the United States?

~~~
api
GMOs are a more complex subject, but as for nuclear power I tend to think that
the lack of progress has caused its failure to be adopted rather than the
other way around.

Look at the nuke plants we're building. They are still overgrown 1950s
submarine reactors that only make use if about 3% of the useful energy in
fissile fuel. The rest is "waste," and reprocessing that waste is expensive
and cumbersome. They're also still vulnerable to a whole host of nasty failure
modes. The probability of those failure modes has been reduced through
incremental improvement, but there has been no revolutionary progress.

An analogy: It's as if we invented the piston steam engine and that's it. No
turbines, no internal combustion engines, no combined cycle plants, and
certainly no fuel cells or thermovolaics or photovolaics or anything like
that. That's the situation with nuclear power. We're still building big
versions of the Chicago Pile.

~~~
zanny
There are better designs out there, the constantly touted Thorium reactors
being one, but just lower grade Uranium burning plants are another common and
unused modern design.

------
FD3SA
The takeaway from Thiel's fairly accurate assessment of broad technological
progress is the following:

You get what you incentivize.

Winner-take-all free market capitalism is not synonymous with advanced,
century-long research and development projects at the national scale. Our
current socioeconomic system rewards convincing others to depart with their
money in the quickest way possible. Ponzi-schemes, marketing, financial
trickery, etc. are the preferred methods.

Why do we see so many get rich quick startups (to the dismay of Sam Altman and
YC) instead of fusion startups?

Because that's the most rational way to succeed in today's economy. You'd have
to be an idiot to waste your time trying to build a working fusion reactor in
your basement when you could just code up a photo sharing app and get acquired
for billions. That's why we all idolize Elon Musk; he's only ever tackled
difficult industries. How much easier would it have been for him to have made
a Facebook, Instagram, etc. clone and become an investor just like the rest of
his cohort of successful entrepreneurs?

Look gang, we have to stop lying to ourselves. YC and VCs are great for
startups that require a few laptops and a bunch of determined programmers.
They really are not suited to decade long research projects which have
produced such things as: Multi-stage rockets, genetic sequencing, computers,
the Internet, fission reactors, etc.

I love the startup culture, hacker culture and the sheer spirit of creativity
and determination it espouses. But serious science and technology research is
very expensive, very long term, and financially extremely risky. That's why in
the last century, it has almost exclusively been financed by governments under
threat of war (WWI, WWII, Cold War).

Thiel prescribes deregulation and Libertarian governments as a solution to the
failure of Big R&D. I think he is wrong, precisely because of the last hundred
years. Big R&D is expensive and risky, and requires a very long commitment
timeline for results. Corporations cannot and will not bear the financial risk
of long term research. Neither will individuals or investors.

Thus, I propose the only solution that has any precedence: Big R&D as a
government mandate. Much like education, healthcare, and social benefits, Big
R&D must become a central pillar of a modern society. I envision a Cold War
era science race between nations, research labs, and individuals, but in the
spirit of science, not war.

Research would be a continuous national challenge, much like the Apollo
project under Kennedy, but encompassing all of the sciences and continuing
past a single administration. There would be work at every level for citizens
in the nation's research industry to slowly offset the losses incurred by
automation. When all basic needs are met by a very efficient, very high tech
and mostly automated free market system, research would become our generator
of economic activity. It would provide a consistent safety net for citizens
exiting the free market, and prepare them for an eventual return if the
opportunity arises (e.g. a new technological breakthrough is ready for the
market).

Think of research labs like Bell Labs or Xerox PARC, but government funded,
intertwined with a cutting edge educational platform (e.g. edX), and in every
municipality.

In conclusion, I think the free market has done all it can for research.
Capitalism is great at providing needs and wants very efficiently in the short
term and making incremental technological progress, but is terrible for making
big leaps by solving very hard problems that have substantial capital
requirements.

For that, we have to look back to our previous successes in Big R&D.

~~~
FiatLuxDave
As someone who was working at a fusion startup when Musk was doing PayPal,
your post hit a bit close to home for this particular idiot. Had I known back
then that I would have been better off doing an internet startup and then
later do a fusion startup with the petty cash fund, I would obviously have
chosen that route. But like most founders, I thought I could actually succeed,
or why else try?

The real issue with incentivizing long-term investment is one of distributing
risk and reward over both participants and time. The great advantage of the
web startup space is the quick time to expand the market - even if working
fusion were here today, it would not have the growth curve typical of
successful web companies. Add this to the long and risky development time for
things like fusion (or AI, or space launchers, etc.), and what you say seems
obvious.

So, why did I choose to follow the risky route rather than the more assured
Big R&D route? Well, competition is the main answer. Big R&D projects often
start with the idea that developing something is expensive, and since you
can't afford to build more than one, this idea morphs into the One True Design
(e.g. ITER/Tokomak in fusion). Then big R&D turns its back on other, possibly
cheaper development paths. Taking the VC route may put the risk on to the
participants, but at least it is open to new, cheap ideas which may be able to
bypass the big R&D route.

~~~
FD3SA
For the record I'm a die-hard scientist at heart and hold individuals who
attempt to tackle the greatest scientific and technological challenges (e.g.
fusion) in the absolute highest esteem. I understand that at the moment, the
VC funded route is undoubtedly the only logical path. However, that doesn't
change the fact that it is extremely sub-optimal in the long run. In a
different era, you would have your own lab after a quick run through academia
and ample funding to pursue your research. You would not be restricted to
working on an ITER style mega project.

I would be willing to accept the end of those times if the alternative (VC
funded startups) was superior. Alas, when it comes to large problems, I fear
it may be a massive step back.

The oncoming wave of labor automation should spark a new debate about how we
want to reorganize our societies to adapt to such drastic changes. I'm hoping
that at this point, we can begin to emphasize the importance of research as a
fundamental human endeavor.

------
chillingeffect
Has technological progress slowed since the 1970s? I think there's evidence
technology is moving along quite quickly:

We've gone from expensive, slow, geographically-constrained telegrams and
short-range, anarchic CB radio to gigahertz communication, carrying gigabits
of data _in the pockets of 1.5 Gigapeople_.

We have the ISS, in space, 257 miles above us, 24/7, docking several times
weekly with _spacecraft from several continents_. We have GPS. We have a
world-wide data network and speech-controlled word-processing and publishing
so billions of people can write and deliver a book, paper, speech, etc. with
pictures and diagrams complete with _automatic language translation_. The days
of hand-staining long-exposure slide film for use in a projector are over.

We eradicated smallpox. We invented MRI, robotic surgery, Tamoxifen,
Raloxifene. We have successfully transplanted hearts and lungs, livers,
intestines, hands, arms, legs and even faces, bladders, ovaries and penises.

We've gone from one farmer supplying 57.7 people to 155 people.

Yes you can point to vast stretches of mediocre scientists and companies who
are also-rans. That's just a condition of humanity. Not everyone can sequence
the entire human genome. If someone wants much more miraculous results out of
the natural world than what we have today, you're seeking mystical
discoveries, not technological ones.

~~~
noir_lord
I was reading today of the first person to have a 3D printed skull implanted
that was an exact physical replica of the one she originally had before
disease deformed it.

That lady would have died 20 years ago, now she is expected to live.

Progress has stopped....bollocks we may not do showy grandscale stuff anymore
but the sheer _rate_ of improvement across so many fields is there if you
look.

------
julie1
My parents could go on vacation, enjoy life and come back from work with a
clear break.

I am to be a coder, whose dreams are constantly polluted by solving work
problem, uncertain of my future, hardly going on vacations, and I should see a
progress in the fact my parents could be important and it was normal they had
a life and be "reasonably" reachable, and I am not important and have a sort
of intrusive technology not leaving room for a life out of work.

I would gladly trade it for my parent's generation condition of life, all
included.

Our societies priorities are really not well adjusted at my opinion. But I
need to feed my loved one and myself, so I shut my mouth, and work in this mad
system, like everyone...but it piss me off to be still young enough to love
life with her, and can only tell her we can hope we will be able to do it
later ... eventually.

I care not about iphone, because I am more likely than you to become poor. I
want cheap food, cheap energy, and healthy time to enjoy life with the ones I
care for.

My only wealth are my friends (and family) and my friends especially are being
crushed by the exaggerated amount of work we push in industry like banking,
advertisement, distraction industry and the media. What do we do to save the
world? We code awesome softwares to have the feeling we help humanity.

Yeah. We improve humanity for the better good. Pushing a rock hard because you
are scared, does not make it go in the right direction if you never put an eye
on the road.

------
dicroce
Wow, that article is a total bummer. But it seems to me he's cherry picking
all of the things that haven't worked out so well, or progressed as fast as
we'd like and pronouncing us a failure.... What about all the things that we
didn't predict, that we DO have? We are remarkably close to self driving
cars... that is awesome... Some recent breakthroughs in AI I suspect will be
rippling through our civilization for quite a while to come...

~~~
api
Everything you cite is in or closely related to the IT sector, which is the
exception. Every other sector has gone cold or even backwards since ~1970.

~~~
nostrademons
That's only because you're unaware of innovations that have happened in other
sectors and their consequences.

In oil, there've been huge breakthroughs in fracking, horizontal drilling, and
oil shale and tar sands mining. As a result, U.S. oil imports have fallen by a
third since 2008 [1], and domestic crude oil production is up nearly 50%.
We've pulled out of Iraq and Afghanistan because the Middle East is no longer
strategically important to us, saving thousands of lives in those wars. Oil is
expensive now, but the price is relatively stable, meaning that we can plan
ahead for the future (like buying a fuel-efficient car instead of an SUV)
instead of being at the whims of global politics.

In finance, it's now possible to get funding for an idea without being a
grizzled 30-year veteran of an industry. If you have a creative project or
even something plain-old crazy, you can go on Kickstarter and crowd-fund it
with pre-orders. Microfinance is commonplace enough that it's driving down
returns, and it's lifted millions of people out of poverty in the developing
world. You can accept credit card payments with just an iPad.

In education, you can take courses online with world-leading professors at
elite universities, all without leaving your living room or paying tuition.

In travel, you can take virtual tours of places you might want to visit on
your computer, map out on itinerary, read reviews, and book flights, hotel
rooms, and activities within minutes, again all without leaving your living
room. I'm just old enough to remember travel agents. Remember when you had to
drive to meet one, have only a vague idea of what country you wanted to see,
take the options they give you because you don't know what else is available,
and pay through the nose for all of it? The first Google-assisted trip I took,
back in 2004, was a revelation, and that was before Maps or StreetView or
smartphones or Kayak or Yelp or the universal ability to book things online.

Most of the time when I hear folks say "Things have gotten worse than they
used to be", they don't mean "things have gotten worse", they mean "Argh,
things have changed and I don't know how anything works anymore and what's my
place in the world and how will I support myself and everybody else seems to
be doing better than me!" Much of which is an illusion, because everybody else
is _equally_ insecure about their prospects and place in the world. But the
opportunities are out there, and objectively speaking, we are so much, much
better off than we were when I was a kid in the 80s.

[1]
[http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_ep00_im0_...](http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_ep00_im0_mbbl_a.htm)

[2]
[http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_crd_crpdn_adc_mbbl_a.htm](http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_crd_crpdn_adc_mbbl_a.htm)

~~~
frandroid
> We've pulled out of Iraq and Afghanistan because the Middle East is no
> longer strategically important to us

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...

------
gorkemyurt
Abundance; great book that's insanely optimistic about the future. Sure it
cherrypicks the "what went well" part of our history, but a lot more has went
well compared to a couple of failing industries..
[http://www.amazon.com/Abundance-Future-Better-Than-
Think/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Abundance-Future-Better-Than-
Think/dp/1451614217)

------
RobPfeifer
The real reason - it gives him a differentiated brand which drives certain
types of entrepreneurs to Founder's Fund. Since he started down this branding
exercise with that New Yorker piece in 2011, I'm sure he gets much more
inbound interest at Founder's Fund. Plus, his hedge fund was being wound down,
making him refocus on his VC brand. Everything with a grain of salt people!

------
dbpokorny
The essay "What happened to the future?" is, I think, notable for what it does
not contain, which is any mention of mathematics.

The Digital Math Library project has been going on for years in the background
(mostly in Europe). They have been doing conferences for years, and, at 30,000
feet, it looks like fascinating work: [http://cicm-
conference.org/2014/cicm.php?event=nop&menu=gene...](http://cicm-
conference.org/2014/cicm.php?event=nop&menu=general)

The computerization of mathematical reasoning, and in particular directing AI
toward the study of the "pre-rigorous reasoning" aspect of mathematical work
is, in my opinion, a great "plan of attack" toward general AI. Mathematics is
about problem solving, and if computers can learn to do problem-solving well
in the mathematical domain, in a general way, it seems to me that there is
hope that computers will be able to solve problems in other domains as well.

------
tim333
>“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”

The flying car thing is actually getting closer with the likes of the
Terrafugia, and the advances with self driving cars give me hope that they may
progress with self piloting aircraft. At the moment piloting planes is a bit
tricky for everyday use. I did a private pilot's licence and it's hard work as
is flying a small aircraft in terms of radioing the various air traffic
controllers and similar tasks.

([http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/automobiles/terrafugia-
tra...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/automobiles/terrafugia-
transition.html))

------
jqm
Well, we couldn't bomb people with drones remotely from half way around the
world 3 decades ago....

But seriously, I blame the growth of the bureaucracy. Bureaucracy not only
takes resources needed for innovation, it flat out stifles it. This happens at
many levels... the government, the employers... lots of people going to work
and not only not productively working, but actively keeping others from doing
so while loudly proclaiming their right to a share of the pie.

------
mark_l_watson
I have not closely followed Theil's entrepreneurship or previously read his
writing, but I did buy his "Zero to One" book on Audible earlier today.

The premise of the book, on the higher value of inventing totally new things
rather than copying, sounded good to me.

------
foobarqux
Eric Schmidt challenged Thiel's main points in a debate two years ago.

[http://fora.tv/program_landing_frameview?id=16152&type=clip&...](http://fora.tv/program_landing_frameview?id=16152&type=clip&autoplay=0)

~~~
maurycy
And badly lost. He's not even a sparring partner for Thiel.

------
zarkov99
Because most of what passes for innovation in the last decade is vapid garbage
with negligible impact on society's well being.

------
InclinedPlane
If most of my wealth came from a dubiously valuable social media site, I might
be just as pessimistic about technology.

------
graycat
The title of this thread asks a question, and here is my guess at an answer:

Progress 1900-1941. Mostly based on practical 'tinkering' with a little
science and engineering at just the college level. With a few exceptions,
didn't need _research_ contributions. Some Exceptions: Antibiotics,
anesthetics, chemistry and chemical engineering. Also Bell Labs had started
working on transistors based in part part on understanding of quantum
mechanics. WWII interrupted the work, but soon after the war Bell Labs had the
transistor.

Progress 1941-1960. Heavily driven by big spending, lots of drive, for US
national security, especially WWII and the Cold War. E.g., US DoD spending
helped create Silicon Valley.

Progress 1960-1974. Throttled by US efforts in Viet Nam, the oil shock, and
inflation from Viet Nam spending.

Progress 1974-present. Moore's law, the Internet, some pharmaceuticals, some
in materials.

Otherwise progress was throttled. And here I will have to attempt to describe
a cause, my idea, apparently not mentioned so far.

There's plenty of good pure and applied research on the shelves of the
research libraries. There are plenty of well trained people in the results of
the pure and applied research and how to do more such research, in science,
engineering, technology, etc.

But for this material on the shelves of the libraries and these trained
workers to contribute to the US economy and standard of living as Thiel
discusses, we need a lot of other people to go along, approve, fund, act as
CEOs, Members of Boards of Directors, etc. Then, these other people upchuck at
what the well trained people know, feel threatened, inadequate, intimidated.
They fear that going along with the corresponding projects would be imprudent
for them as managers and/or financially irresponsible.

Or, through 1940, work was mostly in a management hierarchy where the
supervisor knew more and the subordinates were there to add muscle and/or
person-hours to the work of the supervisor. Now that situation has changed:
Mostly the people who really understand the technical material and how to
apply it are just the _worker bees,_ and the rest of the organizational
hierarchy is trembling because they do not understand, in the old model,
enough about the technical material really to _manage_ the work.

There are some big exceptions: The US DoD is able to get leading edge research
into systems into the field. E.g., GPS, the SR-71, indeed, the H bomb. And so
can the pharmaceutical industry. And what has been done in the _lithography_
for microelectronics is astounding.

But, my view of information technology in Silicon Valley, it can't: That is,
send them a project plan with a technical paper, and Sand Hill Road will just
toss it into the trash; really. NSF, NIH, DARPA, ONR, etc. are fully able to
review and evaluate technical material for projects, but nearly no one on Sand
Hill Road can. Indeed, nearly no venture partners have the qualifications to
serve as problem sponsors for DoD, DoE, NSF, NIH, etc., tenure track faculty
in STEM fields in research universities, direct research, get research grants,
review research papers, publish in good journals, serve on the editorial
boards of good journals, etc.

Elsewhere in the US economy, middle managers do not want to bet their careers
on technical projects they do not understand from their highly technical
subordinates.

Basically the need is to get people with good technical backgrounds in
positions where they have the authority to request, evaluate (or have
evaluated), approve, fund, and oversee projects that exploit the pure/applied
STEM work on the library shelves.

So, for the high level technical material we need to exploit, we need _middle
management_ well enough educated with such material to be able effectively to
manage the exploitation. At least the middle managers must be able to direct
competent evaluations of high end technical material.

------
michaelochurch
Technology has shitty leadership, and society as a whole has even worse
leadership.

Thiel is right. Global economic growth was 5-6% per year in the 1960s. Now
it's around 4%. The main culprit: disinvestment in R&D. Those "cushy jobs" for
engineers whom the MBA dickheads claimed "weren't earning their keep" were
_actually_ the R&D pushing the country (and the world) forward.

Transportation is another thing we suck at, as a country. We're frozen in the
1960s, but with worst traffic. Trains are expensive and slow, planes are only
cheap if you play the constantly changing, convoluted system, and cars are
probably up against the limits of human reflexes and the roads.

Finally, the middle class has had its collective face ripped off by the
Satanic Trinity (housing, healthcare, tuition costs). Things that used to be
comparable to utility bills are now life-wrecking constraints and, because no
one has any fucking savings anymore, entrepreneurship is at an all-time low
(whatever nonsense the VCs fund isn't entrepreneurship; in that world,
investors are just bosses by another name).

Thiel is right. We've had a lack of vision and leadership for a long time and
it has really slowed the world down.

~~~
enraged_camel
>>Finally, the middle class has had its collective face ripped off by the
Satanic Trinity (housing, healthcare, tuition costs). Things that used to be
comparable to utility bills are now life-wrecking constraints and, because no
one has any fucking savings anymore, entrepreneurship is at an all-time low.

This is why unconditional basic income is an absolute necessity, in my
opinion. It's the only way to save the middle class.

If every individual received $1,000 per month from the government, they could
start working part-time and have much more time and energy left for creative
pursuits, including entrepreneurial endeavors.

As things stand though, most brilliant minds work for (and are wage-slaves of)
corporations and all their work does is enrich the people at the top.

