
Peter Thiel Says Computers Haven’t Made Our Lives Significantly Better - finisterre
http://www.technologyreview.com/qa/530901/technology-stalled-in-1970/
======
joshuaellinger
You know what is damn funny about this....

In 1980, Reagan got elected and cut a ton of forward-thinking basic research.
I won't go through it in detail but there was a giant shift from publicly-
funded big ideas to privately-funded little ideas. All the big companies also
got short-term focused and outsourced their labs to startups.

Now we have this big-government-is-bad guy, who probably looks at Reagan and
his gang as Saints, lamenting the lack of progress.

This is what happens when you put all your best minds into either (a) building
weapons or (b) advertising/marketing or (c) the legal profession.

Let me know when he says that we need to raise his taxes to do stuff that
collectively benefits society. Until then, he's just like a drunk complaining
about a hangover.

~~~
hawkice
Actually, there's reason to believe the shift started much earlier -- in The
Organization Man, William Whyte describes how in the '50s we shifted away from
fundamental research and into applied research, away from individual grants
and towards group work. This focus on both consensus (which encourages
incrementalism) and application is likely what reduced research timelines, and
had nothing to do with Reagan.

~~~
api
> away from individual grants and towards group work.

I see this in the startup world in the form of a strong bias against sole-
founder companies and toward large teams with huge numbers of advisors and
even "party rounds" with three dozen VC firms involved. It looks like a
football pileup, but hey they can't _all_ be wrong can they?

~~~
hawkice
That strikes at the heart of it, perhaps. The techniques were adopted to
reduce variance, but we honestly do not know how they effect the work. Maybe
we have fewer failures and fewer out-of-the-park accomplishments, but I would
be surprised if that was the only effect.

Notably, I see a world where we are less and less likely to acknowledge truths
that violate e.g. tribal ideology, because of in-group pressures. The
diversity of opinion and viewpoint that lets you harvest good ideas is
typically the same mechanism that's used to put the breaks on them. You grab
100 random Americans and you'll avoid spending millions looking for Noah's Ark
in the Black Sea, but you'll also avoid spending money to combat climate
change. The problem isn't how difficult the technical challenge is, but how
far it is outside the universally-shared worldview.

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mudil
I really respect Mr. Thiel for what he has done in the past, but I
increasingly find that people who publish a new book (like Mr. Thiel) come up
with categorical, often outrageous, statements just to drum up the support for
the book.

~~~
hawkice
And here we are talking about it, so mission accomplished, I guess.

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foobarqux
> For example, you probably could not restart nuclear power in the U.S.
> without the role of government. But because our government does not believe
> in complex coordination and planning, it will not restart the nuclear
> industry. It’s quite possible it will just not get restarted.

Funny that you can call yourself an emphatic capitalist and advocate for
central planning.

~~~
jboggan
Capitalism is not synonymous with competition, in fact Thiel has made a point
of expressing his monopolistic philosophy [0].

0 - [http://online.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-
fo...](http://online.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-
losers-1410535536)

~~~
foobarqux
Central planning is the antithesis of capitalism, nothing to do with
competition.

~~~
maxxxxx
I think you are confusing capitalism with free and competitive markets.
Capitalists probably prefer central planning and regulation as long as it
benefits them.

------
rayiner
I tend to agree. Cellular wireless is really the only fundamental advance in
that time. The rest is engineering and refinement, and new applications for
existing things. Which is important too, of course.

I would posit that part of the problem is the overall decline in our belief in
institutions (covered elsewhere). You need big institutions to organize people
to do big things, and when trust in them erodes, our ability to coordinate to
do big things is reduced.

~~~
tptacek
Portable civilian satellite location services would be another.

Consumer-feasible portable LCD displays might be another.

~~~
e_modad
I'm actually curious, why LCD displays? Was it thought to be incredibly
difficult to achieve before?

------
volaski
Yeah and human beings have stalled evolving ever since we started looking like
a human. I mean, we look the same as thousands of years ago, right? What have
we done? At this point we should all have evolved so much that our brain
should be the size of a basketball and should be able to communicate via
telepathy. What have we done? We've all failed.

------
sanoli
I've thought about this on and off, and one day I arrived at this: The only
technological progress that truly matters to me are medical ones. If people
could live and not get sick, and not die until they're 90, then I would be
fine living with 1970's era tech, or whatever year's era tech. Then all we'd
need would be to have less violent, more egalitarian societies, à la
Scandinavia. Flying cars, faster+cheaper computers, better internet be
dammned. (or they could go on being improved, but I wouldn't care if not)

P.S. I never get the flying car thing, since we have helicopters.

~~~
will_work4tears
I agree entirely, medical progress is really the only thing that really
interests me, aside maybe material science and engineering breakthroughs (e.g
wastewater treatment, etc).

I never got the flying car thing because we can have flying cars. The
technology is there, the barriers are more.. social or political, if that
makes sense. I sure as hell don't want people flying anywhere near my house in
a 2 ton vehicle 20+ feet above the ground at even residential speeds. A nice
yard, some trees and maybe a fence keep a runway car out of my living room,
not so with a flying one.

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judk
Peter Thiel is a businessman, not a historian of technology.

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frogpelt
I think the realization of what global connectivity can produce is still in
its infancy.

IoT is huge. We are on the verge of controlling our entire homes with the
wallet-sized computers in our pockets. I say on the verge because it hasn't
reached mass adoption levels.

Information/knowledge/education sharing is growing by leaps and bounds. When
the education bubble completely bursts, and you don't know have be rich, know
someone, or have a 4.0 to get a high-quality education, that will be
considered a huge development in hindsight. (EDIT: I realize this is also
currently going on but for the next decade or two the ivory towers still have
the influence.)

People are quick to dismiss technological advances once they get used to them.
It's easy to say, 'we haven't cured _X_ terrible disease' and 'humans aren't
living past 100, we're underachieving.'

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nick2008
What if we are just in a consolidation of technology phase? It would make
sense that after so many breakthroughs until the 70's you need some time to
consolidate that technology and knowledge before moving forward.

~~~
maxxxxx
I think that's it. There haven't been that many fundamental breakthroughs in
science in the last few decades.

------
api
Another recent thread on this same topic:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8337460](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8337460)

Have to say I can't agree with him more on this specific point. Other than IT
and a few other things, technology has stalled since 1970.

Every counterexample I've heard is actually an application of IT to enhance
some other thing (e.g. self-driving cars). The car itself hasn't changed in
any fundamental way since 1950 (unless it's electric).

~~~
slapshot
> The car itself hasn't changed in any fundamental way since 1950

The form factor of cars haven't changed much since 1950. Everything else has.
Seatbelts. Airbags. Hybrids. Automatic transmissions allow more people to
drive, and are now faster/better than manual. We moved from carburetors to
fuel injection to direct injection, dramatically increasing the ability to
control combustion in each cylinder. We went from massive V8 and V12 engines
(the entire 1950s Cadillac line produced about 300 horsepower from a 6 liter
V8 -- a modern import sedan can produce almost the same on a 2 liter V4 e.g.,
the Hyundai 2.0 liter engine). Superchargers allowed greater performance,
turbochargers unlocked greater efficiency. Radial tires were barely a thing in
1950, and advancements in tires have made cars dramatically safer. Catalytic
converters and electronic emission controls returned LA's atmosphere to
health. Etc.

If there was any doubt, check out this chart:
[http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_otfwl2zc6Qc/TIp8lXB5h2I/AAAAAAAAOW...](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_otfwl2zc6Qc/TIp8lXB5h2I/AAAAAAAAOW8/fmXi_SCP-
jw/s1600/highway2.jpg)

Highway fatalities per mile traveled are about 80% lower than in 1950. The
vast majority of that gain is from technology -- drivers sure haven't gotten
any better over that period.

~~~
api
That's improvement, yes, but it's incremental. I'm talking about the internal
combustion engine -- the core design.

This reminds me a lot of the micro/macro-evolution debate in biology. There
are people who think macroevolution is just a lot of microevolution, and there
are people who think macroevolution is sometimes something completely
different -- that discontinuous leaps occur. I am of the latter camp there
too. The Cambrian explosion was a sudden non-linear leap to give one example.

Going from horse to car is not the same as going from Model T to Honda Civic.

~~~
krschultz
It's not incremental, you just don't understand the depth of the difference.
You're effectively saying there is no difference between a telegraph and the
internet. They both send data over an electrical wire, so it must be
'incremental progress'. If that's your definition of incremental, then you
will probably never see something that you consider innovative in your
lifetime.

~~~
api
Windows 3.1 to Windows 8 is incremental. This, however, was not:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-
zdhzMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY)

It's hard to pin down, but I'd define a fundamental advance as one that either
(a) multiplies the number of addressable problems, or (b) constitutes a sudden
and sizable nonlinear jump in capability over a very short period of time.

It does often result from the combination of existing things, but it's always
a discontinuity. A fundamental innovation is when 1 + 1 + 1 = 1000, not 3.
It's a big monumental win that unlocks whole sections of the "technology tree"
that were not reachable at all before.

An example of (a) would be the final integration of all the components
necessary for a CPU onto a single die. An example of (b) would be what the
development of the alternating current transformer did for energy transmission
over long distances.

The most dramatic examples are both. Examples of these would be the first
radio transmission or the first rotary electrical generator. These were
utterly unprecedented innovations that changed human life radically. They
weren't linear at all.

You're right. I haven't seen many of these in my lifetime. I can think of some
low-magnitude borderline cases but nothing Earth-shattering that has touched
me directly. But if I'd lived from, say, 1900 to 1970, I'd have seen _many_ in
rapid succession.

You seem to be arguing that such things do not exist-- that the fitness-
weighted combinatorial state space for technology is completely smooth and
incrementally traversable. I think you should study a bit of combinatorics as
it applies to areas like evolutionary information theory. Discontinuities in
slope, fitness valleys between significantly different local maxima, and
isolated peaks unreachable by incremental hill-climbing are common features of
real-world fitness landscapes.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Windows 3.1 to Windows 8 is incremental.

Arguably Windows 3.1 to anything in the DOS-based line ending with Windows Me
is incremental, and Windows NT 3.1 to anything ending in the line of which
Windows 8.1 is the most recent (until Windows 9 is released) iteration is
incremental, but the shift from the DOS-based line to the NT based line when
XP extended the NT line into the consumer space was not incremental.

------
bicknergseng
I feel like Peter Thiel is taking the Foundation series a little too
literally.

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melloclello
Peter Thiel invested in Urbit, it is important to note.

[http://urbit.org](http://urbit.org)

[https://github.com/urbit](https://github.com/urbit)

------
squozzer
If Thiel had spoken about something more broadly defined such as "progress",
then his arguments might have held water.

------
diminoten
Isn't the kind of stuff he's talking about _really_ hard?

We may have wanted flying cars, but 140 characters is _way_ easier, and that's
why we have it, not because we're focusing on the wrong things.

------
skynetv2
coming from a person who made a ton on money on the same things he says are
not making our lives better.

------
uokyas
that's because he isn't a developer

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benihana
What's with the surge of Peter Thiel related soundbites lately?

I have no idea where he gets the idea that technology stopped in 1970. A
simple example: look at how much more efficient internal combustion engines
are now than they were in 1970. You can actually drive distances that are in
the double digits of miles on a single gallon of gas today. That's a simple,
quick example.

Saying "we were promised jetpacks and flying cars and that future wasn't
delivered," is short sighted and so ridiculously uncreative. Instead we got a
global communication system. The world is way smaller now than it would have
been with flying cars. I can keep in touch with people across the globe for
almost no cost. That is real innovation - few people could even imagine the
internet - fewer predicted it and I don't think anyone foresaw the impact it's
had on humanity. While Peter Thiel was watching movies with flying cars and
jetpacks (which I might argue are uncreative continuations of existing
technology) people were solving actual problems in new and incredible ways.

~~~
gatehouse
Engine efficiency looks good until you put it next to a chart of oil prices.
The amount of ingenuity and dollars being poured into technological research
and development is immense and staggering -- and yet keeping in touch might be
easier, but if you actually want to touch them -- sure, the flight it will be
25% cheaper than 20 years ago, but you'll be flying cattle class with a
complimentary ass grab by the TSA.

~~~
hawkice
Say what you will about the other elements, but surely we are not saying there
is a technological reason for the TSA grabbing your ass?

~~~
gatehouse
Overreaction to blowback from American interference in Middle Eastern politics
in order to secure oil supply due to lack of viable new energy sources due to
...

Ok -- not really though. The thing about efficiency though is it only goes up
to 100%.

I actually think that progress in automation and robotics will be what
provides an increase in the standard of living over the next 100 years but it
is looking like it will be a slow slog compared to the last 100.

