
Peter Thiel Is Wrong About the Future - T-A
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-10-08/peter-thiel-is-wrong-about-the-future
======
sytelus
The most depressing thing is that our generation can achieve so much more. We
have more scientists, more engineers and much larger economies than babyboomer
generation. But most of these money ends up corruption in underdeveloped
countries and in wars and busted healthcare system in developed countries. For
example US spent 1 trillion dollars [1] just for stupid Iraq war _alone_. With
same amount of money we could have vaccinated kids of entire world, could have
had multiple missions to Mars, permanent bases on moon, accelerated research
on all kind of diseases, funded more research on fusion and alternate power
sources, and could have built sanitation facilities for all in multiple under
developed countries for free - and even then we would have some money left
over. Just 1 trillion dollars is more than enough to make huge progress on all
of these front but we spend it out on wars and busted healthcare system.

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

~~~
robomartin
The problem is easy to identify: Our various forms of government are simply
obsolete. In the case of the US you have very small groups of people
interested in nothing more than the survival of their respective political
clans. Despite what they say, they consistently fail to represent us and
always, always, always make decisions based on their own self interest (or
that of their party).

Remember: Governments and politicians cause and fight wars. It's politicians,
not the people, who make a mess out of society and the world. I can't think of
many wars that were not the product of politicians run amuck.

I am not proposing anarchy. That helps nobody. Yet I do think we need to
collectively figure out how to correct the political landscape in order to
ensure that politicians understand they work for us and always towards the
common good (whatever that means).

~~~
slgeorge
> I can't think of many wars that were not the product of politicians run
> amuck.

I don't think you know of many wars then.

Let's see:

\- World War II (Europe) Not caused by a politician, caused by a dictator (a
different thing). Arguably caused by economic and social forces applied to
Germany after WW1.

\- World War II (Asia) Not caused by a politician. Arguably caused by either
nationalism which was an outgrowth of their forced modernisation; or caused by
encirclement and the risk of losing their new empire.

\- World War I (Europe) Not caused by a politician. Simplistically caused by
nationalism, perhaps caused by economic issues.

I'm sure there must be some examples of wars caused by politicians - but it's
doing a disservice to the complexity of issues to point at a single person,
and giving them too much power.

~~~
robomartin
You missed my point in a grotesque way: GOVERNMENTS start wars, not people. I
used the term politician because I was making a commentary about our
government. Governments are the sole decision makers in all of the major wars
for centuries. People, regardless of culture, do not want war. People do not
wage wars. People just want to live a decent life and be left alone. I don't
know many who wake up every day thiking about going to war against someone
thousands of miles away.

Neither World War would have happened if a set of governments had not decided
to either trigger them (after various events) or participate in them.

------
tokenadult
I remember reading the book _You Will Go to the Moon_ in childhood, just as
Virginia Postrel, the author of the essay here, did. She is right that most
people in our era were not as excited about the space program as she and I
were: "The reason mid-20th-century Americans were optimistic about the future
wasn’t that science-fiction writers told cool stories about space travel.
Science-fiction glamour in fact worked on only a small slice of the public.
(Nobody else in my kindergarten was grabbing for _You Will Go to the Moon._ )
People believed the future would be better than the present because they
believed the present was better than the past. They constantly heard stories
-- not speculative, futuristic stories but news stories, fashion stories,
real-estate stories, medical stories -- that reinforced this belief. They
remembered epidemics and rejoiced in vaccines and wonder drugs. They looked
back on crowded urban walk-ups and appreciated neat suburban homes. They
recalled ironing on sweaty summer days and celebrated air conditioning and
wash-and-wear fabrics. They marveled at tiny transistor radios and dreamed of
going on airplane trips."

The older I get, the more I like incremental progress that leads to inventions
(like this Internet doohickey that lets you and me have an interesting
conversation across barriers of time and place) that hardly anyone thought of
in the 1960s, and which have developed from a mixture of government research
projects and private investment. I don't really care if not a lot of big-deal
things happen in the next thirty years, as long as plenty of little-deal
things happen like a continuation of the ongoing increases in healthy life
expectancy at all ages.[1]

"Optimistic science fiction does not create a belief in technological
progress. It reflects it. Stephenson and Thiel are making a big mistake when
they propose a vision of the good future that dismisses the everyday pleasures
of ordinary people -- that, in short, leaves out consumers. This perspective
is particularly odd coming from a fiction writer and a businessman whose
professional work demonstrates a keen sense of what people will buy. People
are justifiably wary of grandiose plans that impose major costs on those who
won’t directly reap their benefits."

Hear. Hear. Let's keep working away at making our own lives better, and our
children's lives better, and as everyone does that, the whole world's lives
will be better.

[1]
[http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...](http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box/scientificamerican0912-54_BX1.html)

~~~
lmg643
My main concern with Peter Thiel praising monopolies is that the nuance of the
message will get lost - "earning monopoly through radical innovation" \- but
the core message remains - monopoly = profit. People will start to pat
themselves on the back for acquiring all their competitors, skewing
regulations in their favor, and a variety of other sleazy business tactics. I
suspect most large business CEOs already understand that monopoly = profits,
so Thiel is just making it respectable to talk about by casting it in the
light of innovation.

~~~
thathonkey
So the argument is that monopolies are ok so long as they are won fair and
square? Umm... ok.

~~~
cpeterso
AFAIU, Thiel doesn't say monopolies are good. He says the _pursuit_ of
monopolies drives progress:

“Monopolies drive progress. The promise of years or even decades of monopoly
profits provides a powerful incentive to innovate.”
[http://www.technologyreview.com/review/531491/the-
contrarian...](http://www.technologyreview.com/review/531491/the-contrarians-
guide-to-changing-the-world/)

~~~
ThomPete
That is putting the wagon in front of the horse IMHO. A monopoly doesn't drive
progress imho it takes advantage of an opportunity no one else did compared to
where the world is at any given time.

~~~
seanflyon
> takes advantage of an opportunity no one else did

Sounds like a reasonable definition of progress.

~~~
ThomPete
That doesn't mean that the monopoly drives it and there are plenty of examples
of monopolies hindering it.

------
canjobear
I really appreciate many points in this article, especially showing that
people in the 60s thought that they were in just as much of a decline as we do
now.

But there's also a weird anti-environmentalism threaded through the article.
Toward the end, the author lists things that we now think are bad, as an
example of how we've become pessimistic. Including: "New subdivisions
represented a threat to the landscape rather than the promise of the good
life. [...] Insecticides harmed eagles’ eggs." Those are and were legitimate
concerns!

Just because we are correctly critical of some aspects of technological
process doesn't mean we have become a bunch of petty pessimists who are just
trying to make everyone feel bad.

~~~
autokad
-Just because we are correctly critical of some aspects of technological process doesn't mean we have become a bunch of petty pessimists who are just trying to make everyone feel bad.

maybe you stop at those things, i doubt thats the case but lets assume you do.
you think these ideas are a tree with the wind of truth and reason blowing
through your leaves. however its a tree in a forest of never ending
complaining, negativity, and loathing on every step of progress. things like
zoos are torturing animals into slavery, panning for gold is made illegal
because it might disturb the fish - and they cant take it, companies like
monsanato dont produce science and research into better crops to stop famine,
they are an evil empire destroying the ecology and sapping humanity for all
its worth. space program? forget it, why spend on wasteful things like that
when we can spend more money on health and education.

the spit and the acid that people around me say towards those who choose to
live in rural or suburban areas astounds me.

although i do find it amusing, they live in their concrete cities that
destroyed all the ecology around them, but somehow believe they have special
knowledge to tell people (who did not destroy the ecology around them) how
they should live with regards to environmentalism.

~~~
JetSpiegel
If Monsanto are a paragon of virtue and want better crops, what's up with the
sterile seeds and lawsuits over people selling legitimately obtained seeds?

~~~
Vraxx
This is a valid complaint about Monsanto and it is one that I have myself, but
it is also not the complaint that was being referenced. GMOs (not necessarily
Monsanto) have great potential, yet just the words "non-GMO" printed on a
package are enough to convince people of one brand over another. The fact that
GMOs are a political issue in the US is more proof that there is resistance to
progress, at least in this particular respect.

~~~
rabbyte
Resistance or reluctance? In keeping with the article, it would be less about
the GMO vs non-GMO debate and more about uncertainty in how we agree on
whether something ought to be or if it will cause more problems than it
solves. The fear of progress in this case may be rooted in sound reasoning as
a reaction to past advances that have wreaked havoc in other areas. The
impulse is to treat it as an ideological difference when it actually should be
looked at as a breaking down of trust and an inability to discern foolishness
from genius.

------
bsder
The problem is that the US has too many people who were actually _better_ off
in the past.

This is where the pessimism comes from. While a very small number of high-tech
areas have gone fast-forward into the future and are way better off, the vast
majority of the country has been left behind.

Fix that, and people will be optimistic again.

~~~
rqebmm
The "problem" here is the globalization of the economy. I like to think of it
as an icecube in a pitcher. If you pour water in, it starts to melt the
icecube, so the tip will go down a bit, before it's carried up by the water
level. The US/EU is the tip of that iceberg. As economies around the world
copy the Western world, they're rapidly expanding and improving the quality of
life for millions around the globe, while the ones that were in the lead after
WWII have seemingly stagnated.

Really we're just waiting for everyone else to catch up.

~~~
bsder
> Really we're just waiting for everyone else to catch up.

I don't buy this without some evidence.

China is automating. Quickly. Yet, they still have very significant endemic
impoverished population clumps--especially in rural regions.

However, with automation, the whole "move everybody to the cities" is breaking
down.

~~~
seanflyon
> Yet, they still have very significant endemic impoverished population clumps

China has problems, but nothing compared to the China of 20 years ago. China
is the poster-child of globalization improving the living conditions of the
poor.

------
ThomPete
I am personally torn which basically tells me that Thiel is neither right nor
wrong but just carves out a useful perspective.

I read his book and I found several points extremely inspiring while other
things I find lack introspection.

What important thing is no-one currently building still comes down to some
sort of luck but at the same time I find it an inspiring way to think about
problems.

However we can't all solve the things no one is building and we certainly
won't all be successful if we tried so personally

I am happy that someone actually wants to create a restaurant even if it's
shitty despite the fact that it doesn't return great profits and isn't
anything close to the value of a Google.

Just like I am happy that someone build a little app for my phone or make an
ebook even though it isn't going to do 10X.

The reality is that there isn't and never will be perfect competition just as
there will never be perfect monopoly not even a state legislated one cause
time changes the underlying premise for these things.

I do agree that we are too many people stepping on each others toes. Too many
suppliers of the fundamentally same things. But given time that will change.

------
Animats
Thiel has some good points about the lack of progress. Rocketry is only
slightly better than it was 45 years ago. We've hit the limit of chemical
fuels, and weight reduction can only go so far. In comparison, 45 years took
us from the Wright Flyer to the first jet aircraft.

Fission power isn't much further along than it was 45 years ago, either. Nor
is fusion power. Nor is power transmission. At the high-power end of things,
there hasn't been all that much progress. Most of the action is at the low-
power end.

Biology is nowhere near hitting a wall. Commercially, though, bio isn't
generating huge new businesses. Nanotechnology has devolved from micromachines
to surface treatments for materials such as Rust-Oleum NeverWet.

The robot revolution may happen, but robot manipulation in unstructured
situations still sucks. Watch these two videos:

Robot assembling water pump using visual guidance and force feedback, 1974:
[https://archive.org/details/sailfilm_pump](https://archive.org/details/sailfilm_pump)

Robot picking up flashlight and putting key in lock using visual guicance and
force feedback, 2014:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPD5tUlKGMM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPD5tUlKGMM)

Not much difference there.

~~~
adrianN
Fusion power is quite a bit further along than 45 years ago. We're in the
process of building ITER, with ignition expected in 2020. The main problem for
fusion power is the utter lack of funding it receives:

[http://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg)

~~~
tsotha
We're still thirty years away. Just like we were back then.

~~~
anonbanker
2020 is thirty years away?

~~~
tsotha
Uh huh. Exactly what will they have accomplished by 2020? Ignition? Who cares?
Based on their own timeline the earliest possible date for a commercial fusion
reactor is 2050.

~~~
anonbanker
I'll just leave this [1] here. Seems we'll have more than just ignition in
2020. :)

1\. [http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/ON-British-boy-builds-
fusi...](http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/ON-British-boy-builds-fusion-
reactor-080314st.html)

~~~
tsotha
That article could have been from 1955, you know.

~~~
anonbanker
It had an equal likelihood of being from 2020, as well.

------
stillsut
If you want Grand Engineering, why not get behind the Soviets? Their progress
to space outclasses any other non-US country. So why is Russia a second world
country, with world-class math, science, and comp-sci talent?

Further: the 'softer' half of any Tech-accelerator - consumer apps or anything
ad-based - would be a non-starter for venture capital if it were based in
Russia. But Russians do have the ambition and skill to execute these concepts.
The reason for this disparity is worth considering if we want to make Thiel's
techno-vision our first principles for economic growth.

I'd propose: it was not the big projects in rocket science but the crass day-
to-day business of ordinary people to meet ordinary peoples' needs that led
the US to develop into the wealthiest country.

The idea that having a bunch of users that never pay you money is a symptom of
an affluent society like ours, and although it seems kind of disgusting when
you thing about it, is probably more essential to our economy than whatever
DARPA and NASA are cooking up right now.

~~~
nhaehnle
Russia is a second world country because the terms "first world" and "second
world" originated during the Cold War, with first world countries being
aligned with the US and second world countries being aligned with Russia/the
Soviet Union _by definition_. See
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_World](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_World)

The common use of these terms has since shifted in meaning. To be honest, I
haven't really heard people use the term "second world" in a long time.

~~~
tsotha
Even back then people hardly ever said it. You used to hear "first world" and
"third world" a lot, but most people said "the Soviets" in lieu of "second
world".

Never really thought to wonder why at the time.

------
eruditely
Why is Virginia Postrel writing an article to posture with no substance?
Author of "The Substance of Style", she writes an article representing the
over-inflation of stupidly half-aggressive titles filled with not much at all,
and to top it all off she threw in commercials at the end.

Yes, half an article to refute not a real point Thiel has made so that "Peter
Thiel Is Wrong About the Future". Does Virginia Postrel think that
'countering' points that have not been made with

"People are justifiably wary of grandiose plans that impose major costs on
those who won’t directly reap their benefits. " should validate such a title?

MetaMed & MIRI do not have a chance to improve people's lives? Contracts that
are not completely recursive to violence based on the blockchain(Ethereum)
cannot change peoples lives?

Palantir to improve law-enforcement while having personal liberties hard-coded
in do not count? In an age where surveillance has become industrial? When
before the greatest protection was being locked in file cabinets?

but do not forget that all of Thiel's relatively nuanced views are countered
by....

"Directed by Steven Soderbergh, the series depicts decidedly flawed characters
living in an exciting but brutal period and improving surgery through clever,
risky and -- by today’s standards -- often-high-handed medical procedures."
OhMyGod.

Ah yes. Now I can see the point that was being made. Not really. When you are
going to write articles with sleight posturing, it would be good to have
direct quotes about statements that were actually made and then getting to it.

~~~
gone35
This. Worryingly enough, I confess I've read the article back-to-back several
times but I still don't see the author's _actual_ argument. Maybe there is
one, but I'm just too dumb.

------
goodgoblin
Did anyone else see the headline at the bottom of the page claiming that
'Amazon Workers are Today's Coal Miners'?

I haven't read the article, but given the amount of death and human suffering
coal miners overcame, I can only assume it is consciously sensationalist.

It is almost as if certain villainous categories are built into our collective
minds and we are looking for actors to play the parts.

~~~
oculus42
There are some very disturbing stories about extreme conditions in the
warehouse.

There's a good NYT article about it
([http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/inside-amazons-
very...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/inside-amazons-very-hot-
warehouse/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0))

This is the piece I heard about:

So many ambulances responded to medical assistance calls at the warehouse
during a heat wave in May, the paper said, that the retailer paid Cetronia
Ambulance Corps to have paramedics and ambulances stationed outside the
warehouse during several days of excess heat over the summer. About 15 people
were taken to hospitals, while 20 or 30 more were treated right there, the
ambulance chief told The Call.

~~~
Animats
That's from 2011. Amazon bought Kiva Systems to install robots in their
warehouses. No more walking around in Amazon's newer warehouses; the pickers
stand in one place as shelving units of products are brought to them by
hundreds of mobile robots.

Picking from bins is still manual, but Bezos has Rethink Robotics, which he
owns personally, working on that.

~~~
couchand
_Hey guys, no need to worry about those workers ' health. They won't have a
job soon, anyway._

~~~
tsotha
It wasn't a coincidence you heard about the hamburger making machines when
people were trying to organize fast food workers a few months back.

------
rqebmm
This is a very good crystallization of my thoughts when I first heard Thiel's
argument. At the end of the day, it's always been about incremental steps, we
just look back and see the leaps and bounds that they enabled.

~~~
acgourley
The manhattan project wasn't incremental. Nor was the apollo program nor the
hoover dam. It does seem like we (America) have moved into a mode of thinking
where instead of asking, "what do we want to build?" we ask, "based on the
advances at the edge of iterative academic or technical progress, what is now
possible to build?"

In short, Thiel's argument that America has mostly transitioned from
optimistic determinists to optimistic indeterminists seems like more than a
matter of perspective bias.

~~~
StandardFuture
Manhattan project, over half a million people working in cooperation to meet
one end goal. The Apollo program, over half a million people working in
cooperation to meet one end goal. How many people do Google, Apple, Microsoft,
Oracle employ? _Combined_?

A single individual with a computer can be more productive than 100
individuals from any of those past projects. We walk around with more computer
power in our pockets than the entire computer power that got mankind to walk
on the moon.

But that is not the point.

The point is that a mooonshot is only a moonshot relative to _its_ time.

In other words, we would need to imagine what a project, that could be
accomplished with half-a-million (or more) people _working in cooperation
toward a single end goal_ , would look like today.

I can guarantee you that would look something along the lines of a partial
terraforming of Mars.

Hacker news complains about the lack of innovation and invention, and yet
continues to support a tech-world with a "solo founder" mentality, one man
sitting alone in a room coding an app ... You'll never get a moonshot
civilization pushing that attitude.

~~~
gbhn
You might enjoy the book "Why the West Rules -- For Now"
([http://www.amazon.com/Why-West-Rules-Now-
Patterns/dp/0312611...](http://www.amazon.com/Why-West-Rules-Now-
Patterns/dp/0312611692))

One of the main premises is that the impact of societies on other societies
("ruling" in the vernacular of the book, as this impact has often been
military and brutal in the time scale the book covers) has a lot to do with
the kind of social organization they are able to use. There's amplifiers to
this of course -- you can either mobilize a huge number of people to build a
pyramid, or mobilize a huge number of people to invent cranes and bulldozers
and let a few people build the pyramid. But the bottom line, according to
Morris, is that this kind of social goal-oriented organization is a key metric
of a society's impact.

~~~
andyjohnson0
The author gave an talk to the Long Now Foundation a few years ago. Audio
stream/download is at [1]. I found it interesting, and he was an engaging
speaker.

[1] [http://longnow.org/seminars/02011/apr/13/why-west-rules-
now/](http://longnow.org/seminars/02011/apr/13/why-west-rules-now/)

------
trhway
Thiel builds one future, Musk - another. I root for Musk, yet realistically
expect to end my days in Thiel's, while some minor portion of our species will
go on to live the Musk's.

------
fsloth
I think Peter Thiel's Zero to one does not specifically lament that the hoi
polloi do not dream of space elevators. To me the core concern was a general
risk averseness among investors, who prefer to diversify their portfolio among
established investment products rather than figure out things from first
principles and start up on new and better things. I read it as a critique of
establishments where economists run things just by the accounting books
instead of engineers who start from first principles and want to get things
actually done.

------
seabug
You all might find my book and online course about the future relevant:
[http://www.possiblefutureworlds.com](http://www.possiblefutureworlds.com). I
referenced Peter Thiel's book and actually met him at his book launch in New
York at Columbia. He's impressive and thoughtful, to say the least. I've also
exchanged some emails with people involved with Project Hieroglyph.

I think that the Bloomberg article gets both books wrong, simplifying each
authors' notions of the future. They both attempt to stimulate us into
thinking about possible futures that no one else is thinking about, either
because we are biased against the fanciful, we are too consumed with making
money rather than creating value, or that we no longer dare to dream big. It
is not that incremental improvements in technologies add no value in Thiel's
case or that space elevators themselves should be the goal of humanity in
Stephenson's case. However, a large number of copycat competitors will not
steer us into a fundamentally different and better path, and not daring to be
audacious will prevent us from achieving something extraordinary. In short,
people today are letting the good be the enemy of the great.

Of course there are two valid visions of the future that we could hope for.
One that takes what we value presently and improves upon those values. Or one
that creates new values and expectations that hopefully fulfill our old
values. Both are attempts to expand the frontiers of humanity. So it makes
little sense to me to say that one is wrong or the other is right. The future
will be whichever we want it to be.

------
danieltillett
I read Thiel’s book and he claims that the rise of human level computing
intelligence is a problem for the 22nd century. Does anyone know why he thinks
that it is so far off?

~~~
foobarqux
Because everyone else does?

~~~
danieltillett
Really? I thought the people like Moravec and Kurzweil were predicting 2030 to
2040? I have not seen any analysis from anyone that would push it off past
2100.

~~~
tlear
You might as well say that we gona create a Warp drive by 2100. Jump necessary
for AI advancement makes settlement on Mars an easy problem. We are so far
from that we really have no idea how far it is. Human level AI when it happens
and it probably will will most likely be at a stage where current tech would
seem something out of Ancient Greeks time if not Stone age.

~~~
bhashkarsharma
Wow! That far? I feel sad. Kurzweil had me hopeful that I'd be able to use it
in next 30 years.

~~~
darkmighty
From Terence Tao:

"The funny thing about AI is that it’s a moving target. In the seventies,
someone might ask “what are the goals of AI?” And you might say, “Oh, we want
a computer who can beat a chess master, or who can understand actual language
speech, or who can search a whole database very quickly.” We do all that now,
like face recognition. All these things that we thought were AI, we can do
them. But once you do them, you don’t think of them as AI. It has this
connotation of some mysterious magical component to it, but when you actually
solve one of these problems, you don’t solve it using magic, you solve it
using clever mathematics. It’s no longer magical. It becomes science, and then
you don’t think of it as AI anymore. It’s amazing how you can speak into your
phone and ask for the nearest Thai restaurant, and it will find it. This would
have been called AI, but we don’t think about it like that anymore. So I
think, almost by definition, we will never have AI because we’ll never achieve
the goals of AI or cease to be caught up with it."

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rinL25rC8LnMTzZcGjg1axT-...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rinL25rC8LnMTzZcGjg1axT-0r-oiCnoKKH1DLQlmVA/preview?sle=true)

~~~
danieltillett
This is known in religion as "god of the gaps”. We will know when we have true
AI as the it will tell us and not take no for an answer :)

------
ilaksh
The environmental movement was an important course correction. But now we have
gone too far to one side to the point where society doesn't recognize the
value of progress or humanity itself. We need to incorporate those
environmentally conscious attitudes into a more subtle, balanced, and fair
assessment of our place in the universe and our ability to grow.

------
ForHackernews
> “There’s an automatic perception ... that everything’s dangerous,”
> Stephenson mused at a recent event in Los Angeles, citing the Stonehenge
> example, “and that there’s some cosmic balance at work--that if there’s an
> advance somewhere it must have a terrible cost.

Am I the only one who thinks this is a good thing? We _should_ be worrying
about trade-offs. There are myriad examples from the past (DDT, Thalidomide,
Chernobyl) of humans racing ahead to use new technologies without taking
sufficient time to consider the consequences.

~~~
scriptman
I think you are just proving the author's point.

The author is saying that people living today are overly concerned about the
environmental effects of experimenting with new technologies when compared
with people in the recent past.

You, being a person living today, have just expressed that you are overly
concerned about the environmental effects of experimenting with new
technologies. That's not a criticism, we are all a product of the time we live
in.

That's not to say that people in the past had no concern about the
environment, it's just that they weighted the costs and benefits differently
to modern people when comparing anticipated benefits for humanity against
potential environmental effects.

The author correlates this different weighting with increased technological
progress in the past. I think that is very hard to measure as it really
depends on what you value.

I agree that you can list examples of people racing ahead to use new
technologies and there being negative consequences. But what about all the
times that humans raced ahead with new technologies and there were positive
consequences? If we didn't race ahead would we be better off or worse off
overall? When you delay implementing a technology due to concern about the
potential side effects you make people worse off in the interim than what they
would have been if you went ahead. We can never really know what all the
consequences of our actions will be until we act.

~~~
slgeorge
>have just expressed that you are overly concerned

The "overly" in that sentence is a value judgement. It may or may not be
'overly' to have a number of concerns over certain advances.

The difference between the 60's and current day is that they had fewer
examples of the disastrous negative consequences that can accompany new
inventions.

"We cannot know the consequences of our actions until we act" is not entirely
true - we can infer and put in reasonable risk management processes.

~~~
scriptman
>The "overly" in that sentence is a value judgement. It may or may not be
'overly' to have a number of concerns over certain advances.

I agree, it is a value judgement. I agree it is possible that people today may
or may not be overly concerned. But outside of maths, we only have value
judgements to know what is a good decision and what is a bad decision. It all
depends on what we want. What the author is pointing out is that you can't
have your cake and eat it too - if we are so concerned about the environment
to the point that it limits technological progress, then we'll have less
technological progress than we would otherwise have had. I'm not sure you can
argue with that. Maybe that's a good thing from some people's point of view,
but for other people (including probably many people living several decades
ago) the current level of concern that we have for the environment today would
be unduly high compared with their perceived benefits from technological
progress. But maybe we have our level of concern exactly right? Who knows?

>The difference between the 60's and current day is that they had fewer
examples of the disastrous negative consequences that can accompany new
inventions.

In absolute terms this is correct. Of course the present has more examples of
something happening than the past. But you are forgetting that we have more
examples of positive consequences in that have accompanied new inventions too.
Why should the negative consequences be weighted more heavily than the
positive consequences?

In relative terms, I have to disagree with you though. People living in the
60's had either lived through 1 or 2 world wars or had relatives and friends
that recently lived through 2 world wars. Both of these wars exploited
technological advances that meant more people could suffer the brutality of
war than at any previous time in history.

>"We cannot know the consequences of our actions until we act" is not entirely
true - we can infer and put in reasonable risk management processes.

You changed what I wrote, which isn't very polite. I said we cannot know "all"
the consequences. I think when the word "all" is included it's hard to argue
with. You are right though that we can try to manage risks, but the point I
was making in the context of the article is that there is a risk when not
acting too, which is difficult to measure but isn't 0.

I think this discussion has made me think more about what the author was
trying to say - that people living today focus on the negatives of
technological advances. I actually wonder if the language of "risk" has made
that worse. I talk about risks myself all the time in my day job... something
to think about :)

------
tempodox
How can a society that places by far the biggest emphasis on getting as rich
as possible as fast as possible, no matter how, achieve anything else than
barbarism? In the 60s we were still bent on showing that we're better than
that. Not any more, now it's just everyone for themselves. We grab what we can
and call anyone who opposes our way of life a Terrorist®.

------
seanflyon
tl;dr: We don't need moon shots to inspire us, we need to believe in progress,
believe that the present is better than the past.

~~~
oscargrouch
This is Comte's Positivim, we need to turn that page, cause the phylosophical
roots of this come from two centuries ago(not that the age matters but in the
sense we are "stuck" here); While it was essencial to science and progress in
the XX century; We need to see we also did a lot of harm in our frenetic
pursue for progress; So we need to see thats not always for the better, also
bad things can come with it and we need to be more clever, giving we have more
educational resources than past humans, and figure out how to avoid advance
without the destructive side effects

------
dissentertainer
Being right is overrated. We still learn a ton when brilliant people get
things wrong.

------
gbog
In summary, ecology is eating our heads, raising fears and superstitions, and
needs to be superseded with a viable meta ecology compatible with science and
progress.

------
aaron695
Was the link in the OP article a joke article? It doesn't seem to have a punch
line....

Blood Industry Shrinks as Transfusions Decline -
[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/23/business/blood-industry-
hu...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/23/business/blood-industry-hurt-by-
surplus.html?_r=1)

~~~
ianferrel
No, the point is that we focus too much on the downside.

We should be _happy_ that there's lower demand for blood transfusions due to
improved medical techniques, but we're just lamenting the lost jobs in the
industry.

Just like we should be happy that self-driving cars are going to mean more
leisure time, safer streets, and lower transportation costs, but we spent a
lot of time worrying about people who currently drive cars for a living.
Obviously, we should care about those people, but we shouldn't let a minor
loss overshadow a major gain.

~~~
eropple
How much of that is the precondition for that progress (which, mind you, I'm
100% behind) being economic harm to other people?

My guess is that with a stronger social net you'd see fewer doom-and-gloom
articles about this sort of progress.

~~~
ianferrel
I think that's probably true.

I also think that there will be more political will for a stronger safety net
as technology displaces more jobs. And there'll be more wealth to support it.

It'll be rough for a while, but things will turn out ok.

------
adventured
She's right, Thiel & Co. are entirely wrong. And not just subtly, but
extremely wrong.

Here are some problems I have with Peter Thiel and other people that claim
we're not making progress or pulling off 'moon shots':

The Large Hadron Collider

The International Space Station

Tesla and the advances coming to the auto market

The human genome

Mapping the human brain

Understanding stem cells, and the incredibly fast rate at which we're learning
to grow new organs. Organ growing will be vastly more important than the
Manhattan Project or the Hoover Dam, it's not even going to be a close
comparison. In fact, it's a sick joke that anybody would be so confused as to
think there's a comparison to be made.

Virtual reality, which is going to be an extraordinary accomplishment and lead
to entirely new visualized space that will be so large, it's nearly impossible
to comprehend for people today; it'll enable exploration and experiences for
the visual and auditory on a scale that would be otherwise impossible for a
person in the real physical space. It has begun, and will accelerate very
quickly from here. Thiel & Co. either pretend this isn't coming, or are
ignorant of just how immense it's going to be. VR is as much an accomplishment
of the physical space, as it is the digital - the infrastructure that had/has
to be put in place to make it possible at the scale it's about to be, tallies
in the trillions of dollars cost wise. People are sitting around wondering
what we're going to use all of our storage capabilities for - in less than 30
years VR space will consume more storage than the entire Internet combined
today.

Digital currencies will generate (are generating) a once-per-century rebuild
of the global economy when it comes to how we use / regard / store / secure
money and wealth. This is a big deal, even if it's going to take decades to be
fully realized. This breakthrough is only made possible by breakthroughs in
the atomic space, nano scale manufacturing that is extraordinary all by
itself.

Robotics, and the extremely fast pace at which it's gathering steam. This
alone proves the progress worriers entirely wrong, it's going to be that big
of a deal over the next two decades. The breakthroughs in this field have been
astounding, even if they always seem incremental; measured in 10 year spans,
it's remarkable frankly.

Solar power has gone from being so weak as to be a joke even just 20 years
ago, to being powerful and cheap enough to be practical for many purposes. And
it's only going to get cheaper and more powerful by the year forward.
Efficiently harnessing the sun for energy, then building a huge global
industry around it and deploying it, is an extraordinary accomplishment, every
bit on par with The Manhattan Project; I'd argue it's a greater accomplishment
in fact.

The smart phone is more important than the Hoover Dam. The technology, the
people, the science, and the industry that it required as a whole is a moon
shot. Extreme improvements in communication and knowledge acquisition - what
the smart phone represents - are at least as important as energy or going to
the moon; I'd argue more important.

People arguing about the low value of Twitter / WhatsApp / Instagram /
Facebook, may have a problem in social thinking or social understanding. I
think they make the mistake of failing to understand just how important
communication and expression is for human beings, and it likely derives from
an engineering brain bias.

------
byEngineer
I dont't want to be politically judged by HN audience. But, I will tell you
this: don't you see that start-ups and innovation happen around things that
are the least regulated by the Government. Things with the least amount of
required bureaucracy and compliance to the state regulations?

Peter Schiff - opened hedge fund from his bedroom. He got lucky, worked had,
whatever, his investment company is doing pretty good nowadays. But he will
tell you one thing - if he wanted to open a brokerage firm from his bedroom
today, it would be impossible due to all the regulation imposed on the
financial markets. Putting aside that this way the regulation protects
established big financial institutions from new competition, this also kills
innovation.

What isn't regulated by the Government? Internet start-ups. I can work in my
bedroom on a new search engine (currently). Or on mobile app. But try to open
brokerage firm.

There is a reason for which still more innovation happens in the USA than in
much more heavily regulated EU. Spoke to fashion designer from Paris in New
York the other day. He lives in New York. Why? Because to open a fashion shop
in Paris requires fee to the government to the tune of 15,000 Euros. Nobody in
New York ask him to pay 20,000 usd to the city for the privilege of opening
business.

The moment they will start regulating web - the party will be over! What about
10,000 usd fee to open a commercial website? Would you be surprised there is
innovation in the web ?

~~~
duckmysick
> Nobody in New York ask him to pay 20,000 usd to the city for the privilege
> of opening business.

Nobody ask for that in Europe either, unless you're interested in heavily
regulated industries like energy or banking (and they ask for more than
$20,000). But we're talking about small businesses, right?

I don't know if fashion industry is heavily regulated in Paris, but a
15,000-euro fee to the government sounds like a big stretch. They used to
require 7,500 euro of starting capital for SARL (a private limited liability
company), but it was still your money, not the government's. But it's
irrelevant, because the minimum amount changed and it's 1 euro now.

There's still an issue of paying various legal and professional fees before
you can start your company. It depends on your needs and type of the company,
but according to Doing Business report by the World Bank [1] this cost
(represented as a percentage of the country's income per capita; not ideal but
good enough) is lower in France and dozen of other European countries than in
the United States.

1 - [http://www.doingbusiness.org/data/exploretopics/starting-
a-b...](http://www.doingbusiness.org/data/exploretopics/starting-a-business)

~~~
eande
Incorporating e.g Delaware in US is below $1k. In Germany starting a GmbH in
Germany requires a $25k Euro capital
[http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stammkapital](http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stammkapital)
There is still a lot more regulation in Europe when it comes to operating a
business. It is also one of the reasons why I see so many European start-ups
here in San Francisco trying to establish early on.

~~~
duckmysick
> In Germany starting a GmbH in Germany requires a $25k Euro capital

Since 2008 you can start a derivative called Unternehmergesellschaft which
waives the minimum capital. You need to keep 25% of yearly earnings, but it
can be rebranded later as GmbH if you raise 25,000 euro capital in said
savings. It says right there in the article you've linked:

> Um die deutsche GmbH im internationalen Wettbewerb zu stärken und
> Neugründungen von Unternehmen zu erleichtern,ist seit dem 1. November 2008
> die Gründung von Unternehmergesellschaften (UG) möglich, deren
> Mindeststammkapital nur mehr 1 € betragen muss. Die UG muss – solange das
> Stammkapital unter 25.000 € liegt – 25 % des Jahresüberschusses (Gewinn) in
> eine Rücklage einstellen.

Here's an alternative in English for others who might be interested but might
not understand German:
[http://www.germanlawjournal.com/pdfs/Vol09No09/PDF_Vol_09_No...](http://www.germanlawjournal.com/pdfs/Vol09No09/PDF_Vol_09_No_09_1093-1108_Articles_Schmidt.pdf)

And while it might technically cost less than a thousand dollars to
incorporate in Delaware, in practice I'd need much more than that - especially
if we consider costs of obtaining visa and housing, traveling and living
expenses. It's difficult to get money for all of that, especially if you start
from nothing. On the other hand I can travel to another country within the EU
with favorable regulations (low taxes, low cost of starting a business)
without the need for a visa.

------
scottlocklin
TLDR: "Theil is wrong, because TV and iphones."

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElcYjCzj8oA#t=7m34s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElcYjCzj8oA#t=7m34s)

------
whitehat2k9
Peter Thiel isn't exactly known for his good judgment. Just look at one of his
Thiel fellows: [http://blog.kevinzhang.me/posts/tracking-down-the-person-
who...](http://blog.kevinzhang.me/posts/tracking-down-the-person-who-tried-to-
impersonate-me.html)

~~~
michaelkeenan
What is a good procedure for determining whether someone has good judgment? Is
it never making an investment in a person or company that turns out wrong?
Then those who never invest at all have the best judgment. But that can't be
right.

I think good judgment is shown by those whose investments (of money, time,
trust, reputation, or anything) turn out to be better than those in their
class. By this measure, Thiel has shown good judgment - his investments of
money, time and trust have turned out unusually positively overall. It's
been...colorful, at times, but unusually positive overall.

To show someone has poor judgment, one would need to point to a pattern of
poor decisions, preferably some hard metric (like investment returns). A
single instance of misplaced trust seems inadequate. Does Thiel trusting Elon
Musk cancel out his (probably delegated) trust in that Thiel Fellow? I think
it does and much more.

