
Thiel: Technology Stalled in the 1970's - david927
http://www.technologyreview.com/qa/530901/technology-stalled-in-1970/
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ChuckMcM
What drivel, consider Theil's comment, _" We could be finding cures to cancer
or Alzheimer’s."_

This is somebody who watches Star Trek and figures that if they can use
dilithium crystals to control anti-matter plasma conduits, well gee how hard
can it be? We should get right on that.

I'll cut him some slack because he wasn't actually alive in the 70's but
seriously, cure cancer? Is he not aware of the billions of dollars of
investment in that problem? Did he not even realize that the cell biology
research that came out of figuring out AIDs wasn't even freakin' _POSSIBLE_ in
the 70's? You couldn't do analysis on DNA in the 70's because the machines
that did that, would take until the present day to give you an answer. Think
about that.

Famous quote from Marvin Minsky along the lines of you want to solve a problem
that will take a million hours of compute time, you can either spend a ton of
cash and buy a super computer, and start it on its way and wait 114 years, or
you can invest the money you have in a savings account, wait 20 years and then
buy a computer at Fry's that will solve it in an hour.

We couldn't even build the tools to build the tools yet in the 70's that we
regularly use to put cool features into an iPhone today.

So basically I'm offended on behalf of every engineer who lived and worked in
the 70's at his comments.

And then lets take the flipside, given that we do have all of these amazing
tools at our disposal, do you think people are _not_ trying to cure cancer, in
all its forms? So Peter has some genius idea that the Memorial Sloan Kettering
Cancer Center's staff of doctors _isn 't_ considering?

Technology did not "stall" in the 70's. It has been accelerating at an
exponential rate for decades. I can't believe he really thinks that.

~~~
mindcrime
I kinda feel like you're getting too bogged down in the detail here. I don't
think anybody would agree that Thiel is literally 100% correct in saying
"technology stalled in the 1970's, but if look look at the statement as a bit
of hyperbole with a kernel of truth to it, he has a point. And whether you
agree with him in general, or not, I think his rhetoric serves a valuable role
in terms of encouraging people to reach further, and work on big, hard,
fundamental problems.

Anyway, I don't see what he said as being a statement like "I, Peter Thiel,
could trivially cure cancer" or anything like that.. I see it as a call to
arms to people who are working on, say, ad serving networks, to work on curing
cancer instead (where "curing cancer" is a variable that could be replace with
any "big, hard, fundamental problem").

~~~
ChuckMcM
Except I think Peter misses the point. He's asserts technology is moving "to
slowly" or "to inefficiently" and doesn't seem to have any appreciation for
the prerequisites for forward motion. And he dismisses out of hand anything
people have done while that foundation is being build. As if having them sit
idly by would have been a better use of their time?

Imagine you're building a castle, and you've got a quarry full of people
cutting the stones to build it, and then you chastise the carpenters who are
working on decorative woodwork because there is not enough castle yet to work
on.

Sure, Google has spent a ton of money building an ad network and figuring out
how to get people to click on ads. They have also spent a ton of money on
building phone OSes, and build tools, and efficient data centers, and self
driving cars.

Not everyone can work on curing cancer or creating durable political
institutions that survive local corruption. So what do they spend their time
on? Building tools, or using those tools to build interesting things which
feeds back into better tools.

I didn't see any appreciation of the foundational work that has to happen in
order for progress to be made in that interview.

------
david927
Alan Kay famously asked if there was any new invention in computing since 1980
(and the answer was essentially 'no'):

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-
in...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-inventions-
in-computing-since-1980)

Our whole industry got sucked into making a fortune and now suffers
(ironically) from "The Innovator's Dilemma".

We have more money than Croesus now, but at the expense of any real progress.

------
dventimi
As an alternative to the subjective impressions of Peter Thiel or of people
here, perhaps we could adopt a more objective approach, relying on empirical
evidence. I propose looking at productivity growth:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity)

~~~
david927
First, I think he is talking about larger projects, with larger leaps of
faith. Small, incremental gains in productivity and chip speed are fine, but
we can do more; we have the potential do amazing things and we're not even
trying.

Second, productivity growth would normally be good if the gains from that
growth were distributed. Instead, all of those gains have been placed directly
with the wealthiest %1. So instead your graph, sadly, simply reflects how the
quality of life has degenerated over the generations. That's not the kind of
progress that 99% of the world was hoping for.

~~~
dventimi
First, what Thiel is trying to do (which neither of us will know for sure) is
irrelevant to the question of what other approaches we might adopt for
answering variations on the question, "How has the pace of technological
development changed, if at all, over time?"

Second, how those those gains are distributed is likewise irrelevant to that
particular question. Not that they're irrelevant to other questions, or that
they're unimportant, or uninteresting, or that this is the only question we
can ask. The careful reader will notice that neither Thiel nor I really
commented on the otherwise important and interesting question of how gains are
distributed. That's just something you threw in.

Third, it's not "my graph." I linked to a Wikipedia article written by other
people and which contains no fewer than four graphs at the time of this
writing, and none of them were created by me.

