
The End of the Computer Age - aazaa
https://www.manhattan-institute.org/events/2019-wriston-lecture-end-computer-age-thiel
======
neonate
Transcript: [https://www.manhattan-institute.org/events/2019-wriston-
lect...](https://www.manhattan-institute.org/events/2019-wriston-lecture-end-
computer-age-thiel#transcript)

------
fadisaleh
"...the iPhones that distract us from our environment also distract us from
how strangely old and unchanging our environment is, how you're riding a
subway that's 100 years old. And I think sort of a healthier sort of progress
would happen on many different fronts."

This quote stood out to me. It seems like we silently concluded that the
physical world has evolved enough, developed enough, even though there's a ton
of inefficiencies to fix.

I often lament that the built environment of the average American city looks
stuck in the 80s, and this quote made me think of that.

~~~
_bxg1
I think the market is what silently concluded that the physical world has
evolved enough; software isn't more important, just more profitable. And
because the United States is allergic to public spending, that's all that
matters.

~~~
mcphage
> And because the United States is allergic to public spending, that's all
> that matters.

I don't think it's the _spending_ that the US is allergic to, it's the
_collecting_ the money to spend.

~~~
bitwize
Ever been to Connecticut? I-84 is still constantly in rough condition, even as
property and income taxes climb.

~~~
lasagnaphil
As a Korean who visited LA this summer, I was shocked to see how unmaintained
the roads were, especially the highways. (There were cracks and debris all
over the place)

~~~
bartread
I remember thinking the same back in 2005, which was the first time I'd driven
in the US. Cracks and potholes all over the place. At the time I'd assumed it
was because California was basically bankrupt (maybe it still is), but
slightly shocking that it's still the case.

I suddenly felt like I understood why American cars have such soft suspension.
The roads were notably worse than in the UK, and by a wide margin: no way I'd
want to drive a car with a sportier setup there.

What's depressing is that since 2010 there's been a progressive degradation in
the state of _our_ roads. In Cambridgeshire the roads are now in a terrible
state: cracks, fissures, potholes, road markings barely visible.

You can blame public spending cuts for this, and no doubt there's truth in
that statement, but there are plenty of road infrastructure projects
happening. For example: the (admittedly decades overdue) A14 upgrade, recently
completed Ely southern bypass, various smart motorway projects (M1 and M4
spring immediately to mind, as well as recently completed work on M3).

This is all well and good, but I would far rather see some of this money
diverted to the basics of a safe road network: i.e., ensuring the roads we
already have are in good condition. I would particularly like to see funds
being used for smart motorways, for which serious safety concerns have
emerged, diverted in this way.

~~~
Paianni
'Smart motorway' is an umbrella term for various traffic control schemes used
on motorways since the 90s. The version deemed unsuitable is dynamic hard
shoulder running (called 'managed motorway' at inception), first used on the
M42 from 2006 on.

All new projects in England since 2013 have used All Lane Running (an
alternative to widening, where the HS is permanently converted into a traffic
lane). This format is not being killed off.

The A14 Huntingdon Bypass was supposed to open as a smart motorway (A14(M))
but the legislation hasn't passed soon enough, so it will open as an all-
purpose road with motorway-style restrictions and smart tech.

------
buboard
This talk mostly reiterates his basic talking points so it feels a lot like
rambling. And the title is not justified by the argument.

There is, however, a case to be made that the computer tech age has reached an
end. Tech companies turning to investing in banking and real estate is not a
good sign.

~~~
icebraining
Tech companies are still doing tech. It's more that the "tech" label is being
applied to other companies incorrectly.

~~~
buboard
apple is investing in payments, credit cards and real estate. so does facebook
(and google)

~~~
ehnto
But they haven't stopped doing technology. If anything, they are bringing
technology to banking.

I am not saying I am feeling great about those particular companies entering
the finance industry, but it's not like it's a signal that technology is
becoming unimportant. If anything it's just the continued expansion of
technology.

~~~
buboard
time will tell. i think it 's worrying that they are entering these zero-sum
markets

btw this technology already exists in bitcoin and other coins

------
blueyes
Thiel's talk starts around 10m40s, after the throat-clearing intro.

This is not his most articulate talk, fwiw. Thiel's smart and sometimes very
clear, but not here. This feels off the cuff, where he's falling back on pot
shots and sound bites.

~~~
josephg
Its very long, but I enjoyed Thiel on _The Portal_ (Eric Weinstein's podcast)
a few months back:

[https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1-peter-
thiel/id146999...](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1-peter-
thiel/id1469999563?i=1000444670908)

I don't know how this compares to talks he's given, but there were a lot of
small ideas in there which I thought were really interesting - like the idea
that we're in a period of relative technological stagnation compared to a
couple decades ago. And how obvious this observation seems to both Thiel and
Weinstein.

~~~
Animats
_We 're in a period of relative technological stagnation compared to a couple
decades ago._

Kind of. There's no new "must have" consumer electronics product. 3D TV was a
flop, robot vacuums were a dud, VR goggles make 5% to 15% of the population
nauseous, and everybody has a smartphone. The "lose money on every sale and
make it up on volume" model (Uber, etc.) is coming apart. Self-driving cars
don't work yet. Moore's Law has hit a wall. Wafer fab cost is so high that the
next node may be unaffordable.

There's lots of stuff to do, though. Solar panels and batteries work pretty
well, and there's a few trillion dollars of those to be deployed. But it's not
a Make Money Fast business. Electric cars and charging stations work, and
those need to be deployed. The battery manufacturers need to get their
automation act together and start pumping those things out at high speed at
very low cost.

There's also lots of room for progress in bioengineering. Editing DNA is just
beginning.

~~~
tashoecraft
It's weird that everything is compared to one of the most successful products
ever created. Something that went from an incredibly niche product to nearly
every adult, and a lot children owning, in a very short timeline.

Every Apple product launch has commentary of "This isn't as successful as the
iPhone", like yeah, no shit, the iPhone isn't going to be replicated every 10
years. We aren't always on the cusp of being able to combine components
generated from advances in multiple industries to propel one industry to
market dominance.

I like to imagine a future where we are able to continue the advances of
Moore's law by getting more efficient with our software and the ever
increasing abilities multi core processing. I have no idea if that's how it's
going to continue, but in the absence of continued progress in one area,
progress will probably be demanded in another.

------
wrs
This mostly just reads like stream of consciousness gibberish to me. Is there
an actual coherent argument in here somewhere?

~~~
classified
This is the top 1% celebrating themselves. If they had any coherent arguments,
we would have been convinced long since. As it is, they're just laughing their
asses off while taking candy from a baby (i.e. getting even more rich and
powerful).

~~~
incognition
Is it me or has his thinking got more sloppy?

A couple examples, his indictment of the Obamas is that they sent their kids
to Harvard but his indictment of America is that we don't focus on the things
we do well... such as universities?

The assault on science now without any prescriptive solutions. Is he arguing
for more populous interpretation of science? Has he had any first hand
experience and investigation into the mechanisms of double blind peer review?
(In my experience, still prone to gaming but often rigorous and the best
method we've got).

Re: The indictment of the SV elite. I don't move in the same circles as he
does but it's obvious that he's still smarting from the SV elite's rejection
of him.

His hypocrisy from being owner of Palantir and yet seeming indictment of AI
software for governments? Another layer of hypocrisy of espousing libertarian
values when he's come to embody the system as much as anyone (in the
administration, numerous govt military contracts with Palantir). And yet he's
even more shifty than that, embracing NZ citizenship for possible tax evasion
avenues.

His indictment of Twitter yet entrepreneurs have made material progress in
traditional sectors (his old buddy Elon making headway with Tesla).

Our indictment of him should be that he's turned his back on values he's
formerly espoused, content to rankle in a 'get off my front lawn style' on his
large pile of capital while often committing the same hypocrisies of which he
feigns disgust.

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TheRealPomax
"And so, if we were to rightsize the scaling for our intellectual life, you
should describe Harvard, not as one of the thousands of great universities,
you should describe it as a Studio 54 nightclub" is really all you need to
take away from this. Not for what it says, but for the desperate attempt of
those words to make any real sense.

Although don't miss out on gems like: "But in practice, the main AI
applications that people seem to talk about are using large data to sort of
monitor people, know more about people than they know about themselves. And in
the limit case, maybe it can solve a lot of the sort of Austrian Economics
type problems where you can know enough about people that you know more about
them than they know about themselves, and you can sort of enable communism to
work, maybe not so much as an economic theory, but at least as a political
theory. So it is definitely a Leninist thing. And then, it is literally
communist because China loves AI; it hates crypto. And so that, I think, tells
you something."

AI is literally communist. Thanks Peter.

~~~
davidivadavid
I'm not sure what's unclear about what he's saying.

a) Harvard is a pure signaling mechanism that doesn't provide education as
much as exclusionary credentials.

b) AI/Big data is a way to solve the economic calculation problem that was
once seen as one of the main theoretical hurdles against communism. That a
country like China favors AI and punishes crypto tells you something (that
it's a communist dictatorship).

It's pretty straightforward.

~~~
perl4ever
Well, but China _doesn 't_ use AI to centrally plan the details of its
economy. Corporations, prices, and competition are undisputed features of the
economy there. Whether you want to call it communist or not, the computational
problem is still as intractable as ever. There's a difference between
monitoring and regulating society with computers and solving the classical
economic calculation problem.

And Harvard is a way for elites to network, but that's not merely arbitrary
signalling - it depends on how those elites are selected.

~~~
davidivadavid
Sure. Thiel is proposing a model. All models are wrong, some are useful, and
so on. His models happen to be interesting to people who like to think in more
contrarian ways. That doesn't make them right, and we can debate their merit,
of course. But it hardly makes them impossible to understand.

That China hasn't solved the economic calculation problem yet is plain to see,
and I don't think that's quite what Thiel is saying. He's talking about the
principles and the mindset behind the support for AI, as well as its
ramifications in terms of the type of society it can produce asymptotically.

No one said Harvard's signalling was arbitrary. It's a very clear signal.
Thiel's point is that that signal has nothing to do with "higher education".

~~~
perl4ever
"well as its ramifications in terms of the type of society it can produce
asymptotically."

My assertion is that it can't though. That's because the complexity of even a
fairly small entity makes the number of the particles in the universe look
infinitesimal.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busy_Beaver_game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busy_Beaver_game)

"In 2016, Adam Yedidia and Scott Aaronson obtained the first (explicit) upper
bound on the minimum n for which Σ(n) is unprovable in ZFC. To do so they
constructed a 7910-state[2] Turing machine whose behavior cannot be proven
based on the usual axioms of set theory (Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory with the
axiom of choice), under reasonable consistency hypotheses (stationary Ramsey
property).[3][4] This was later reduced to 1919 states, with the dependency on
the stationary Ramsey property eliminated."

To me, granted I have only a vague idea of the meaning of the above, that's
saying that "solving the economic calculation problem" (society having more
than 1919 moving parts) is not just beyond physical limits of the amount of
matter in the universe that could be used for computation. It's not just
beyond the physical laws that we think we know, like a FTL spaceship would be.
It's beyond the most fundamental math we have. To me, that's like a _third
order_ of infinite impossibility.

And as far as Harvard goes, how can the interaction between students and
faculty have nothing to do with higher education? What else is higher
education? In _every_ school, people learn from each other, and they interact
more than with people at other schools.

------
captaincrowbar
It’s amazing how much the output of Serious People pontificating about AI is
coming to resemble that of the AIs themselves.

~~~
ehnto
Perhaps it will be revealed that he had an AI write this talk.

------
kjhughes
Other than old arguments about innovation deficiencies (wanting flying cars
but getting 140 characters), there was little/nothing about "The End of the
Computer Age."

The talk was more about _scaling_ (Finance, Tech, Cargo, and People) with some
insights regarding which the US has a chance to compete effectively against
China (only Finance and Tech) and some (related?) advice to the left and the
right in the US:

Left: Move beyond identity politics.

Right: Rethink the doctrine of American exceptionalism.

Thought provoking commentary, but mistitled as "The End of the Computer Age".

------
goranb
That introduction is a guillotinable offense.

~~~
classified
And this time the Scarlet Pimpernel wouldn't lift a finger to save them.

------
Animats
It reads like a long rant on Reddit. I'm a lot less impressed with Thiel now.

His fascination with "scale" is interesting. Some of the problems we have
today come from the conquest of scale. It used to be that big companies
couldn't get out of their own way. This limited how big a company could get
before smaller competitors were more efficient. With computers and networks,
businesses can now be scaled to national, if not planetary, scale. And we get
a very small, and shrinking, number of big players. One Google. One Amazon.
One Facebook. One Alibaba. One Tencent. Three big US telcos. Three big US
banks.

~~~
chrisco255
Scale in tech has been solved, because it's trivial to reproduce a software
program. It's not like manufacturing. We've got a dozen or so large automobile
manufacturers that are all thriving. There's five big tech companies: Google,
Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. And three big telcos is an improvement
over the early 20th century that Thiel is idealizing when AT&T was the only
game in town. But Thiel himself is a supporter of monopolies and wrote a whole
book on the virtues of them in "Zero To One".

One thing I feel as though we lack is more visionary entrepreneurs in some of
these other fields (or if we don't, they're not very visible). In the early
20th century, you had breakthrough after breakthrough. You had Edison, Tesla,
Einstein, Ford, Disney, Eastman (Kodak), Sarnoff (radio), Fisher (washing
machine), the Wright Bros, and on and on...so many breakthrough entrepreneurs,
scientists and technologists in such a small window of time.

If we tried to point to people alive today who have the same impact as the
ones mentioned above, we'd probably name Musk. In the early 20th century, we
had hundreds of Elon Musks.

~~~
incognition
I don't agree with your summary of the greats, you're lumping in scientists
with entrepreneurs.

If you want revolutionary entrepreneurs in our era, this list is a fairly good
summary:
[http://startupsusa.org/fortune500/](http://startupsusa.org/fortune500/) 2017
Fortune 500 "Companies Founded by Immigrants or the Children of Immigrants, by
Company, Founder" . Jobs, Brin, Yang, Huang, Bezos and more

------
arunpuri
I am not 100% sure but I think this fits here
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDpZ7w9uNuc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDpZ7w9uNuc)
(Newsroom opening scene). I am not American but I believe this can apply so
much in a lot of places.

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tus88
I thought this was going to be about Stadia.

------
rasengan0
Centuries old subways? I'm typing this on a QWERTY keyboard layout. Innovate
people!

~~~
mertnesvat
Hold tight because soon there will be Brain Computer connections with enough
bandwidth to allow us type, read, write at the same time.

------
ggm
Wait.. I thought I read a "how to recognize snake oil in AI/ML" posting just
yesterday...

------
groby_b
Wait - he helped elect a cryptofascist that plunders the public coffers for
personal gain, and then he's got the chutzpah to complain about the state of
public infrastructure?

At the _Manhattan Institute_? The place that loudly complains that tax payer
financed efforts are really just exploitation?

~~~
classified
> ...tax payer financed efforts are really just exploitation

Right, and the super rich cannot wait to relieve us tax payers from our plight
and pay all those bills for us. Otherwise, what would be the point in never
paying any taxes?

