
If Peter Thiel And Garry Kasparov Are Right, Then We're In Trouble - ca98am79
http://thestockmarketwatch.com/news/news.aspx?articleid=611106
======
jswinghammer
I think if you just discount all modern innovations then it's easy to say
nothing has changed of note. My TV looks better than ever. Should I just
discount that as progress because it's still a picture displayed in my living
room? If you suggest the iPhone 5 which allows me to get anywhere without
planning with turn by turn directions, communicate with family on the road,
make dinner reservations, and answer a work related question via email is not
advancing anything just because the science behind it was settled in the
1970s? The amount of wealth and coordination in society to make that happen at
such a low price is difficult to get your head around. It wasn't innovation
policy that lead to these things though it was the result of the market
providing services to people who want thme and individuals working very hard
to make it happen.

Regulation (another word for taxes) and taxes are much higher than in prior
periods. It should surprise no one that these have negative effects on growth.
Combine that with taking on a lot of debt that cannot be repaid and you have a
recipe for low growth. I'm afraid that any innovation policy that isn't just
will just end up as gifts to those who are well connected.

Part of the problem is that some of the things we have now are totally amazing
and we just don't care to notice.

~~~
hooande
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 with enough relevant functionality
to make it to a 5th version.

It sounds like you're equating the leap from "radio to tv" with the leap from
"tv to 1080p". There's almost no doubt that the pace of innovation is slowing.
Businesses will be more than happy to make billions of dollars by taking us to
iphone9 and 2160p, because that's much easier than introducing an entirely new
way to interact with the world.

I'm not sure if the free markets are the best solution to this particular
problem. Thiel and Kasparov kind of have a point. The internet emerged from
government funded DARPA research. Our communication infrastructure was built
by a government granted monopoly. The moon landing, one of our species
greatest achievements, was the result of a national innovation policy pissing
contest with the soviets. Maybe everything would _really_ be amazing today if
we'd focused more on innovation over the last several decades.

~~~
jerf
"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 TCP, as important as they may be, are still vanishingly small
components in the huge collection of things we call the iPhone 5, with all of
its huge stack of software, the huge stack of hardware and work to miniaturize
it, the hardware necessary to feed it wireless signals, the huge software
stack _that_ requires, and on and on it goes. The reason the iPhone 5 didn't
exist 30 years ago is quite simply that the society of 1982 simply couldn't
afford it, and it took decades to put together everything that was necessary
so it was affordable. Dozens of iterations on dozens of technologies,
consistently improved over decades by a crew of tens of thousands of people.
Nobody could even conceive of what it would take to centrally manage this
massive set of resources.

If you could graph the amount of work put in to make things like the iPhone,
if you could even define such a thing halfway sensibly, you'd have a hard time
finding the sliver that represents the government work done on TCP/IP. It's an
insult to the hundreds of thousands of other people who have done so much for
you to pretend that that tiny little sliver was so much more important than
everything they did.

The government has a huge role in providing the stable environment necessary
to safely do that work and the fair playing ground to compete on, but the
government's _direct involvement_ in the creation of the iPhone is negligible.
And if we account for patent shenanigans, possibly negative. (One massive
stupid patent lawsuit can pay for an awful lot of research, after all.)

~~~
ebiester
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 work that was done in the area in the 50s, 60s,
and 70s. (See: Steve Blank's stories as but one evidence.) Much of the work on
smaller electronics was originally military funded - no one else had the R&D
funding to do so.

Without the government, it is likely the development of something like ARPANET
would have been delayed a decade, perhaps more. I'm not saying the internet
wouldn't exist, but it would have been delayed and certainly would have looked
a lot more like AOL and Compuserve than the integrated system we have now.

I'd say that there is a lot of government involvement that we're talking
about.

~~~
jerf
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.

~~~
mc32
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.

------
tezza
I think they're both right: because there is more than one problem facing us.

The press like to focus on one issue at a time. Europe last week, US elections
yesterday, fiscal cliff today and China tomorrow.

The reality is that there are many major problems.

Off the top of my head:

\--

* People these days have everything they need. There are very few must-have items to spur sales

* The inventions so far cover a lot of what we need to live long in absolute safety and comfort. This is what Kasparov is noticing.

* Western Economies are 66% or more based on consumer spending ; any belt tightening has major impact

* People are still in too much debt, they're spending less

* Companies still have borrowed too much in the past: expecting boom years to continue 2050+

* Banks insolvent without support

* All governments bar Norway,Oz,Cananda? are in deficit

* Pensions are barely worth the contributions you put in over your lifetime. There has been no 5-8% increase as forecast

* Some countries have demographic problems where a lot of people will leave the income earning age

* It looks difficult for Democracies to reduce government spending. 'Pain-now', both real or perceived, is always deferred

[Edit for formatting, spelling]

~~~
engtech
off-topic: you should edit your comment to get rid of the three spaces before
your bullet point.

The three spaces indicates pre-formatted text, so it won't line wrap.

It creates scrollbars on your comment, so less people will be able to read
your points.

~~~
tezza
I do it deliberately, as I have very poor vision and find it impossible to
read block text these days.

Please excuse my preference for commenting this way.

~~~
jessedhillon
It seems that you have some good points, but please fix the formatting. I
can't read it at all on my mobile. You can copy and paste from another editor
if you need a more comfortable way to view it.

------
bsenftner
From the article: "There are certainly those who believe that the wellsprings
of science are running dry..."

What a load of horse shit! We're just getting started here, the "Internet
Revolution" just discovered non-computer devices! And biology is just getting
tapped...

And those thinking along the lines "most people already have everything they
need": well, duh, it's always that way. It's the unreasonable, the
uncomfortable, and the restless who create and self actualize. The majority of
human nature looks around themselves, takes care of their "necessities" and
lives and dies with what is given to them. We, as those hard ass freaks that
can't be satisfied, will always push against our limitations, our "gifts", to
self actualize, to grow beyond our capabilities, and create something unheard
of, unexpected, wonderful and disruptive.

Now, sure Mr. Thiel is a wealthy entrepreneur, but his wealth and fame derives
from creating PayPal - a translation of existing credit card transactions to
an online environment. I have no doubet it took great effort, but PayPal is
hardly innovative, and hence his dark view of real innovation. Plus he's now a
VC, so he sees all kinds of half baked startups failing...

As far as Mr Kasparov, I don't consider him an authority on anything. May as
well be a super model, considering Kasparov's involvement in invention, new
technology and start ups. He's merely famous for chess and writing essays. Not
exactly developing science or new ideas at all...

~~~
njoubert
I can't agree more. As the article points out, we're seeing huge advances in
plenty of scientific fields. We're talking about storing terabytes on a cube
on DNA no larger than a drop of water, we're synthesizing drugs that travel to
tumors, activating only on arrival, we're gearing up to put people on mars...
Really? No progress? No innovation?

Why are we even listening to a chess champion espousing crap about scientific
progress? And Pieter Thiel might have entrepreneurship credentials, but he's
no scientist.

------
rndmize
We live in, presumably, a consumer-spending driven economy. The problem I see
is that in the efforts of businesses to become more efficient and to
outsource, they're creating a tragedy of the commons effect - if no one is
willing to stay in the US and pay US workers highly, US consumers won't have
anything to spend.

I think this is fairly evident due to the continuing list of articles about
jobs that make the front page here - the "skills gap" that's not a skills gap,
but a problem with hiring practices; the one a few weeks ago about the
manufacturer that wants to pay skilled math and science students $10 an hour
and wonders why they go work in service jobs; the service jobs that are now
carefully managed to the minute by software so no one is idle on the job and
are 90% part-time to extract the best work from their employees at the lowest
cost.

Startups aren't a fix for this, they make the problems worse - how many Saas
startups have a business proposition of making something more efficient
(Salesforce, Workday as the biggest and most obvious) which results in a need
for less people to do that work? How many people does a place like Facebook
employ compared to Google, or Google to Microsoft, or MS to GE or Chevron?

~~~
takluyver
This might make economists cringe, but here's how I see it:

In the past, increasing efficiency was beneficial, because the people no
longer needed for one thing could go and do something else, increasing the
total amount of things being made and services provided. Most obviously, as
agriculture was mechanised, people went to work in the factories (of course,
early factories were nasty places to work, but that's another story).

Today, we're still increasing efficiency, but - as I see it - we're running
out of things we need people to do, so freeing people up increases un- or
underemployment. At best, people are employed to do ever more 'luxury' things
that can easily be dropped when money runs tight.

I think we've reached a point where the sum of human happiness is increased
not by churning out ever more stuff, and finding ever more services to
provide, but by increasing our leisure time. When I was young, I imagined that
robots would one day do most of the work, leaving humans to relax and pursue
their hobbies. But economics locks us out of that, because having a lot of
leisure time (i.e. unemployment) is something to be avoided. I wish I knew how
to fix it.

Looked at another way: we can produce the stuff we need without needing all
the people to work. But the people who do work resent non-workers enjoying the
fruits of their labour, so we almost have to keep people busy for the sake of
fairness.

------
ChuckMcM
I am always amazed by these sorts of articles, in part because it is always
nominally 'successful' people who have these sorts of doubts and in part
because Toffler's "Future Shock" can express itself in ways that look like the
medical condition.

The changes they aren't ready for are the biological ones. You see the whole
'10 years of trials from monkeys to humans' thing which limits the application
of biological agents is going to change once we understand how the machine, we
call a human, really works. We are getting closer. Once we're there you won't
have to 'test to see the effect' you will 'design for this particular effect.'
That will make things very different.

We're starting to see the leading edge of the carbon age. I pointed out once
that if you name the human "ages" by the primary material of their tools, we
had stone, bronze, iron, steel, and now silicon. Next up, carbon.

We're about to expand into space. Unlike Apollo which was like a program
written to do one thing, SpaceX and others are building space flight
capabilities that will mix and match to create space access as a function of
money, not expertise.

I've always enjoyed stories where authors imagined the transition from 'now'
to 'star trek' like universes. We are in a transition, of that there is no
doubt. the next level will be interesting, of that I have no doubt.

------
mathattack
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 technology is the masses who can't keep up do
get left behind. This is more a problem for the customers of YC than HN's
readers.

~~~
jstelly
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?...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0525952713/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=marginalrevol-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399349&creativeASIN=0525952713)

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.

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

------
clavalle
I have one word for Thiel and Kasparov: Biology.

There are many known-unknowns in the sphere of biology, and by extension,
medicine right now. We may be approaching the top of the s-curve for
computational and industrial technology, but we are at the bottom left of the
biology curve, and now we have the tools to start exploring that space
systematically.

~~~
campnic
The entire time I'm reading the article and the comments, I'm just mentally
jaw-dropped by these comments. We are no where near the top of the 's-curve'
for computational or industrial technology.

The entire argument is a straw man by Kasparov. Name a single science which
has not been dramatically changed in the last 20 years by the application of
computation. Its just boggling to me how Kasparov's argument holds any sway.

------
skylan_q
"In a forthcoming book, they argue that the collapse of advanced-country
growth is not merely a result of the financial crisis; at its root, they
argue, these countries’ weakness reflects secular stagnation in technology and
innovation."

I'd argue it's a result of artificially low interest rates which effectively
increased societal time preference. In short, we spent the last 40 years or so
eating our future. We've run out of future to borrow from.

I'm glad to see Thiel is kind of in agreement. :)

------
robertpateii
I feel like most of the comments are reading the title and not the article.

The author is actually suggesting that Thiel and Kasparov are probably wrong,
and the current economic situation could be explained by simpler means
(results of a financial meltdown as opposed to running out of things to
invent).

I'm inclined to put more faith in the economist pushing the simple and
previously observed cause than the big names pushing a doomsday scenario.

------
debacle
The main problem of the 21st century is and will continue to be energy.

We have the science to do amazing things, but we can't afford the power
requirements. We wont be able to advance as a civilization without something
radically different in the way of generating power.

~~~
at-fates-hands
Amen brother.

This is essentially what it all comes back to right? The thing which drives me
insane is so many presidents and administrations have been unable to grasp
this. I still think back to Jimmy Carter's speech in 1978 warning about the
need for affordable, sustainable energy.

What have we done in the past 30+ years to address this imminent crossroads?
Next to nothing.

~~~
debacle
Not because we don't want to. There are about ten different ways we could do
it, and none of them look incredibly promising.

------
RyanMcGreal
I continue to be surprised at how little attention economists are paying to
the role of tight oil supplies in dragging the economy. The 2008 crash was
triggered by an oil price that spiked to nearly $150 a barrel in response to
strong growth in demand against a flat supply. Since then, every time the
economy tries to pick up, the oil price drifts back up to $100/barrel and GDP
stagnates.

------
neebz
Whenever my father uses Skype, he still can't grasp the fact that we can make
long distance video(!) calls for free. He keeps reminding me that when he had
to walk 3 km by foot to a Public Call Office and book a call for a max. 3
minutes to talk to my grand mother. That was only 35 years ago.

------
jamespitts
Alarmist, but I cannot object to manifestos that aim to improve the rate of
innovation!

Perhaps the real problem: 1. The human mind or a team w/ communications
between members can only handle so much information. 2. The toolboxes
available to innovators working different stripes of the tech spectrum become
riddled with complexity over time.

The solution: 1. As tools are aggregated and abstracted, this reduces
information needing to be understood, allowing indies/teams to get a handle
and get creative with their work. 2. As thinking/psychology approaches improve
and as communication systems improve, the ability for the same people to
process the relevant information also improves.

The internet has done a very good job with increasing information processing
(by humans!), and other fields are being influenced by this success.

------
loudin
I think the article is correct to say that technological innovation has slowed
down and will likely continue to slow down over the next period of time.
However, I disagree with the diagnosis that this slowdown is due to bad public
policy.

Rather, the Internet is such a vast step forward that we are still struggling
to build infrastructure. We will be tied up building this infrastructure until
we expand the portion of our workforce capable of building technology for the
Internet.

Since this is an infrastructure problem, let's compare building pieces of the
Internet to building roadways for another great technology - the car. The
differences between building roadway and Internet infrastructure are the
following:

1) The building blocks of the Internet are not steel, but software and
hardware.

If you look at things this way, the iPhone is not its own innovation, but
Internet infrastructure. It's a mobile connection to the Internet that serves
up other connections through apps. Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Yelp - they're
all infrastructure. And we've only touched the tip of the iceberg.

2) Unlike building roads, the Internet requires highly skilled workers and
doesn't have a 'completion date'.

We still have a lot of opportunities to build out businesses on the Internet,
and a large percentage of people who are capable of building these businesses
out are doing just that. They're not innovating, but executing.

Until our workforce becomes more educated, the rate of overall change will be
stagnant.

------
PaulHoule
The global megatrend is still the developing world developing. There are so
many people who don't have clean water, don't get good food, don't have
electricity or automobiles so that things can "get better" for the median
person on Earth for a long time.

If we apply human ingenuity to it, it's challenging but believable to can
support this in terms of food and energy for the next 50 years at least, and
beyond that time frame it's likely that the world population stabilizes.

You might find many signs of decline such as the crude humor on TV sitcoms,
the disappearance of defined benefit pensions, or Facebook and Zynga as
"tittytainment" for the masses. You could say we'll never have another
Einstein or Feynman, that we'll never have a satisfying paradigm for
deterministic chaos with more than three degrees of freedom, etc. You might
also point out very real problems we'll face dealing with global warming,
terrorism, cybercrime, unemployment.

However there are so many exciting things I see going on today. The space
program is more exciting today than it was in the 1960s. When I go to the west
coast I see cool new restaurants that start in Hollywood, set up another
location in L.A., then San Diego and the next thing you know it's a national
chain with 50 locations. I think of all the cool little handmade things you
can buy on Etsy.

I think there's still going to be a rapprochement between the FIRE (Financial,
Insurance and Real Estate) industry and the real of the economy, but I think
lots of people are doing big and little things that make life better and more
interesting.

------
russell
The thesis that innovation has stopped because the major foundations of
today's technology were laid in the 70's is utter nonsense. Most breakthrough
innovations take 15 to 20 years to go from the initial discovery to widespread
adoption. Examples penicillin, ARPANET, GPS, television, unix, and on an on.
So it is no surprise that the Internet and GPS took off in the 1990's. If you
want to know what is going to drive the 2020's and the 2030's look at what's
in the labs now. Of course 99% of it wont amount to much, but the core
innovations are there somewhere.

The author has a point about the problems inherent in unregulated financial
manipulation and monopolies in general. But unless there are huge restrictions
on small business development and a suppression of the universities,
innovation will continue.

------
sologoub
This article misses some huge innovations that have taken place in
manufacturing and other heavy industrial areas.

Take just one example in 3D printing. When this technology matures, the result
will be no less profound than the invention of spare parts (hard to believe,
but the idea of standardized parts that could be replaced when worn out is
relatively new - few hundred years). Imagine a house that builds (or prints)
itself?

Today that technology is already getting a lot of adoption in aerospace, where
the waste produced by machining is so expensive, it makes the costs of new
technologies look like a bargain.

Another good example is our ability to process data. The old saying goes:
"Knowledge is power". Well, today we can process petabytes of data and extract
knowledge out of it as routinely as flying from SF to NY...

------
streptomycin
Not that I'm an acolyte of Kurzweil, but he does make a pretty convincing case
that humans have a tendency to locally linearize things that really aren't
linear, and then extrapolate linearly out into the future. This seems as if
this may be one more example of that.

------
hmexx
I wonder if a slow-down or plateau-ing of technological advancement would make
us focus more on cultural/philosophical advancements that improve: average
happiness per-person per-"day lived".

That would be an interesting paradigm shift...

...assuming there are such advancements to be made.

------
rapind
I consider our now constant and affordable access to enormous amounts of
information (fast and mobile internet) as a massive innovation. It's built on
top of lots of other incremental innovations and inventions, but that doesn't
lessen it's impact on our fundamental behaviour.

It all boils down to your classification between invention, innovation, and
improvement. According to my own subjective classification, there's been a lot
of innovation since the 70s. More than I can keep up with anyways.

I think AR is going to be pretty significant too, and a huge enabler of new
tech as it matures.

This is just the way to sell a book these days though right? Make extreme
claims you don't actually agree with in order to stir up interest.

------
brianstorms
What has Peter Thiel built that is so earth-changing? (And don't say Paypal.)
He sure likes to talk a lot, but I'm waiting for him to come up with the next
game-changing, once-a-millennium innovation. It isn't hedge funds or other
financial trickery.

~~~
alextingle
Isn't that his point?

------
nrcha
It's like saying that there will be no more exciting music and it all pretty
much ended with Mozart and Beethoven. And one thing that is very consistent
for human kind (with few very bright exceptions, of course), is the poor
ability to predict future innovations and technologies. If you look at 100
year old drawings of year 2000, you will see flying steam engines, coal
powered robotic maids and biplanes used for public transportation. So.. let's
just wait and see what happens. A cure for cancer may be just as exciting
breakthrough as electricity was in its time, and it may as well be just around
the corner :)

------
ble
The phrase 'diminishing marginal returns' is missing from this article. The
essence of diminishing marginal returns is something like, "low-hanging fruit
gets picked first"; problems that have a good ratio of effort in to reward out
are preferentially attacked and so, over time, the average problem is harder
to solve or has lower yields.

One could argue that 'stagnation' is occurring not because absolute innovation
(however you make up a way to measure it) is down but because the average
real-economy impact of a unit innovation (in made up measure) is getting
smaller.

------
antidoh
You can innovate all you want, but if people don't want or need it they aren't
going to buy it.

Moving from a farming/subsistence economy where most people had something to
do with food production to survive, to our present post-farming/industrial
whatever-this-age-is was a huge leap, and there was a lot of peripheral
infrastructure to build up.

Now we're there, and yes there's more room for innovation, but there's no
existential leap forward in front of us.

We have enough. We're not fundamentally changing the way of the world (not in
developed countries). That doesn't generate a lot of peripheral work.

------
meric
The underlying science of computers and science might have been discovered in
the 1970's, but back then, use the internet and computers were in no way in
mainstream society.

How do they know that innovations 30 years from now won't be based on the
science we discover today, in "nanotechnology, neuroscience, and energy, among
other cutting-edge fields"?

------
3d3mon
Rather than saying what is descriptively and historically accurate, I believe
Thiel and Kasparov are merely issuing a challenge, if stated in a somewhat
hyperbolic way, to today's innovators/entrepreneurs. If read in this light,
they are cheerleaders not historians.

------
ratsbane
They're falling to an intrinsic bias - the technological advances we see are
the ones that have already been made. Future advances haven't been made yet;
effectively comparing sum(past_technological_advances) with
sum(future_technological_advances)

------
iuguy
You can argue that the pace of innovative growth is slowing because of
whatever reason, but I would like to post a few things worth thinking about,
given that I was thinking about this the other day.

Firstly lets look at things such as manned flight, radio transmissions and
other innovations in the late 19th century that are now critical today. These
eureka moments in science and engineering were traditionally brought about by
a few people and their relative complexity is low. Look at the innovations
we're seeing in physics today and you're talking about teams of people across
multiple generations attempting to solve problems our ancestors couldn't even
imagine. Electricity producing fusion reactors like ITER (and later DEMO)? Not
a chance. They were too busy trying to get manned flight to work. Breaking the
speed of sound in air? No way. Putting men on the moon? Not a chance.

Here's the thing, we (as a planet) _could_ put men on the moon. Granted we're
not as ready as the USA in 1969, but given the need it could be achieved.
Putting a man on mars? Well that's a lot further away much further than the
moon is with a whole new raft of unsolved problems.

I can immediately think of two areas where growth is as great and immediate in
the field now as it was in physics in the early 20th century - nanotechnology
and biotechnology. If you look at how much of Physics we understand, and our
understanding of what we can and can't manipulate versus biology you can see
that there's plenty of space for innovation.

I would also make a case for disruptive versus iterative innovation. The
automobile has come a long way in 100 years but is essentially the same thing,
a horseless carriage that takes the driver and passengers from point A to
point B. We have however had massive amounts of iterative innovation in speed,
fuel management, safety and so on. The same with air travel with demands and
needs changing and planes changing to accomodate. Sure, it may look like a
plane but the insides of an A380 are very different to a DC-3.

If the 20th century was the century of physics, I'd say the 21st is the
century of nanochemistry and biomechanics. I suspect (although have no real
proof) that we don't see the changes on the same scale because our quality of
life, education and so on has been brought up by such a level already that
improvements have less of a social impact in the west. There's no need for a
cure for smallpox anymore. Disabilities from Polio have been down in the west
for decades. Diseases like SARS and H5N1 that could've wiped us out in the
early 20th century like the Spanish Flu have so far been contained.

------
pbreit
Kasparov kills his argument by pooh-poohing the iPhone. I'm sorry, but holding
the internet in your hand is simply amazing. Maybe it was inevitable, but it
is at least the culmination of many very impressive innovations.

------
nameless_noob
<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

------
narrator
I think real innovation is most likely to come from China. For example, they
plan to build a 220 story tall sky scraper in 90 days:
([http://gizmodo.com/5962070/china-will-build-the-tallest-
buil...](http://gizmodo.com/5962070/china-will-build-the-tallest-building-in-
the-world-in-just-90-days)). They've also been building a massive high speed
rail network over vast distances throughout China.

I think with these feats they want to establish themselves as a super power
that can take on the U.S, as well as to improve their infrastructure. I think
it's a good thing, as peaceful competition between nations has always lead to
benefits for the world in general.

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jlouis
What if they are wrong as in completely wrong? Then I dare say we are also in
trouble. The only road not littered with trouble is if the current state and
pace can be kept.

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mempko
Or we burned through all the easy to get materials....

