
Peter Thiel on the Global Economy, Technology, Artificial Intelligence [video] - internaut
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_3r49XXRw4
======
aaharb
This video is oddly pessimistic, but to me, Thiel is overlooking where the
greatest advances are yet to come.

The advances in computers are advances in processing power and connectivity.
Every industry uses both of these elements to succeed. Now that computers are
reaching a sort of peak development, there is going to be a dispensing of the
capabilities that computers offer into other industries.

Its hard for me to put it into words, but I think that computers are simply a
stepping stone for real achievements to come.

The car has basically reached peak performance years ago, but we aren't
disappointed in the fact that there was a lot of focus improving the car and a
giant vehicle industry for many many years. Instead we moved on to building
things that can use a car, such as the highway system. Or the mail delivery
system, or the thousands of industries that completely rely on highways or
mail.

In the same way with computers, we are now going to see industries and
technologies appear that rely on having computers that have reached this
advanced level of processing power we have today. Once this mighty computer is
passed on to the common man, innovation begins to move in different paths
again. Like a tree.

I dont know, this may have delved into a bit of a rant but that video made me
extremely optimistic :)

~~~
internaut
Thiel would agree with your main statements.

He's said before that he's not particularly worried about advancements in
computers continuing to unfold and the potential for the Net to become ever
more like a planet wide nervous system with many more use cases coming into
existence.

His complaint is that if progress does not occur in fields outside of
computation there will be stagnation. No amount of computational intelligence
can mine asteroids or convert the Sahara to arable land without doing
something with the material world.

You can have rapid improvements in specific technologies in the midst of a
general decline or a stagnation. For example; surely there a great deal of
improvement in weapons systems during the middle ages. The stirrup, the
crossbow, the gun, the cannon. Most of the advantages of those technologies
didn't really help the average person's situation.

This is not a hypothetical. While there was enormous increases in
computational power in the past three - four decades median wages have not
budged. People were able to consume more primarily due to debt.

We ought to question whether computers will be enough to raise living
standards in the developed world in the short to medium term (his main
contention I think).

------
Animats
OK, the big theme here is "innovation has slowed down, but this is being
masked by all the activity around computers". So let's take a look at that.

Way too many smart people are tied up doing rather banal things with
computers, or in finance. That's capitalism in action.

What isn't being worked on? Thiel is bothered by lack of progress in medicine.
Medicine is now working on really hard problems, most of which are
consequences of aging. Short of redesigning the human genome to eliminate
aging, which may happen, those problems will remain hard.

There hasn't been much visible progress in aircraft in a while. Boeing is
still building the 737, which first flew in 1967. Aircraft are lighter,
quieter, more fuel efficient and safer than they were back then. But not
cheaper.

The biggest societal problem is that we have less and less of a role for a big
part of the population. The average IQ is only 100, remember.

~~~
w1ntermute
> The average IQ is only 100

You do realize that's a tautology, right? There's no reason productivity
couldn't be increased, and one potential method would be to boost human
intelligence.

~~~
hammock
I believe the point is we (HN readers) are mostly exposed to smarter than
average folks in our daily lives. Our idea of an "average" person probably is
smarter than the true average person. And we would do well to remember that,
for example, 42% of Americans believe ghosts are real.

~~~
metaphorm
you may be tooting your own horn there. its a trap to believe you and/or your
community is "above average" in intelligence. the community on hacker news is
more enculturated than most for a few things.

1\. working with computers

2\. selling technology

3\. thinking about business in the medium term

4\. calling ourselves very smart with little backing evidence for that claim

and besides that stuff I am not particularly impressed by the level of
intelligence displayed here (including my own)

~~~
Houshalter
It's not a trap, HN definitely has a higher IQ than the general population.
FWIW I have some data on IQs from a similar online community, showing the
cumulative distribution of IQ compared to the general population:
[http://www.leijuvakaupunki.fi/images/box/lw_ssc_iq_cdf.png](http://www.leijuvakaupunki.fi/images/box/lw_ssc_iq_cdf.png)

HN is highly correlated with technical professions and especially programmers.
Those things happen to be highly correlated with and selective of IQ.

~~~
metaphorm
post I responded to said "smarter than average" which is not the same thing as
IQ and conflating the two of those is also a trap.

~~~
Houshalter
IQ is the best measure of intelligence we have, and correlates strongly with
real world outcomes like income and academic success.

~~~
metaphorm
I don't think we're even talking about the same thing anymore. Nor do I think
we could possibly have a productive conversation on this topic.

------
return0
He reiterates many of the things he 's been saying for a while and written in
his book. It's worth reiterating them, probably because things have not
changed.

He makes a distinction of computers as the "one field that has progres", but,
is it really true that IT is not stuck in a rut as well? What are the new
paradigms developed recently? Computer vision, machine learning were
established in the 80s , despite only becoming commonplace nowadays. There is
little progress in theory since then. Engineers obsess over the rediscovery of
functional languages, a relic of the 50s.

Commercial success should not be taken as an indicator of real progress.

~~~
virmundi
I agree that there doesn't seem to be much advancement over the 80s (I'm
trying to learn emacs for Clojure right now). I don't agree that commercial
success is not an indicator of real progress.

For example, LISPs did not run well on 80s computers. The Japanese, amongst
others, had to create special computers to control their trains. Rules based
programming performed poorly too. May other such paradigms and tools fall into
this category.

For the most part the old, neat tools of now have the hardware necessary for
them to be useful. The JVM provides great performance for Clojure. Over the
last 30 years, multi-threaded concepts coalesced too. Now they're built into
mainstream languages. Provided people stop trying to solve already solved
problems like task management, we could possibly be on the verge of
productivity improvements.

------
someguydave
THIEL: "one other way of interpreting the AI boom is that on the surface, it
is about extreme optimism about the potentialities of computer technology, and
the beneath the surface, it is simultaneously, perhaps, a great deal of
pessimism around the possibilities in other technologies that will be
developed by humans, and deep pessimism about the possibility of what humans
can do."

This is what I think about whenever I hear folks scaremongering about the
"singularity". In my opinion these beliefs reflect a kind of spiritual
emptiness; a yearning for answers that only God can fulfill.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
What I find funny is people who think that metaphysics is _real_ , even at the
mild level of mathematical Platonism, but think that it can only ever be
figured out from our armchairs, that there's no way I could build a machine to
do it for me.

On the other hand, I find it pretty _easily_ believable that we can receive
compounding returns from advances in ML/AI. After all, pretty much as soon as
we invent new techniques in computational statistics, the go-to fields needing
to apply them are the other computational sciences: physics, chemistry,
biology, medicine.

------
kriro
Very interesting talk. I'd love for him to write a history of capitalism type
book. "The History of Innovation and Globalization". Start it off with the
x-axis=globalization and y-axis=innovation model and go from say 18th century
to now. I always enjoy history of economics books. I like the mainstream books
but really enjoyed the perspective and research that went into "An Austrian
Perspective on the History of Economic Thought". I am not aware of any good
history type books from a more pragmatic business oriented point of view.
Thiel has some interesting insights and perspectives.

Unfortunately that book probably wouldn't be a good use of his time but come
on Peter, I know you want to write it :)

~~~
mseebach
Zero to One actually has some good material in this vein.

~~~
mark_l_watson
The book does, and is well worth the reading time. I have Zero to One as an
audio book and I am on my second way through it.

The concept that zero to one is much more valuable than one to ten helped me
understand my own career better. I have always been a risk taker and even
though some of my work projects over the last 30 years have failed, my bosses
never seemed unhappy with me. I would usually really nail a few new ideas a
year. This book helped me to understand why I seemed to get perks (like ocean
view window offices at two consequative companies) that none of the other
programmers got, even though they seemed to be much steadier workers than I
was.

------
andrewfromx
"From 1982 to 2007, that 25 year period, NYC was the world center for
globalization, moving money around to do things we already know how to do. Now
from 2008 to Present the center is Silicon Valley. Moving money around to do
things we don't yet know how to do."

------
peternilson
For those who would prefer just the audio it's also offered as a podcast on
iTunes.

------
mrep
Is there a transcript anywhere? I much prefer reading over watching/listening

~~~
tristanj
Youtube has an auto-generated transcript feature. In the video description,
click More->Transcript.

Edit: actually don't use the YouTube transcripts, there's a human-curated
transcript here [http://conversationswithbillkristol.org/transcript/peter-
thi...](http://conversationswithbillkristol.org/transcript/peter-thiel-ii-
transcript/)

~~~
Animats
That transcript system doesn't recognize sentence breaks.

Theil speaks in run-on sentences, so it's not entirely the transcription
system's fault.

~~~
jessriedel
It also doesn't try to distinguish the speakers, which is weird. (It could
just be "speaker #1", "speaker #2", etc.) I'd have thought it would be a lot
easier to distinguish voices than to understand the English words they are
saying.

------
codingmyway
Peter mentions Robert Gordon and his theory that all the good innovation is
done but the one I'm looking forward to is the coming revolution in brain
research.

Wait until procrastination, anxiety, depression and fatigue can be turned off
by a device behind your ear that controls your amygdala and instantly puts you
in the zone.

See see how much productivity goes up when everyone has the energy and
motivation of the Richard Bransons of the world.

------
some_guy1234
Well, I am working on hard science. Neuroevolutionary development algorithms
for reinforcement learning. Online unsupervised learning.

I can't get funding.

He talks big but he doesn't invest in the research. He still wants some
business plan dropped in front of him. It doesn't work that way until the hard
science is done first.

~~~
kwisatzh
He's a contrarian for the sake of being a contrarian. He never grew up beyond
16. It's not worth bothering about what he says or means.

------
dredmorbius
Innovation discussion at 20m38s

Transcript:

[http://conversationswithbillkristol.org/transcript/peter-
thi...](http://conversationswithbillkristol.org/transcript/peter-thiel-ii-
transcript/#innovation)

------
codingmyway
His bit about wisdom of crowds won't please The DAO fans.

------
tiler
One interpretation of this interview: _If Machiavelli had had a prince for a
disciple, the first thing he would have recommended him to do would have been
to write a book against Machiavellism. --Voltaire_

Another interpretation of this interview: P.T. for POTUS.

------
dang
Url changed from [http://conversationswithbillkristol.org/video/peter-thiel-
ii...](http://conversationswithbillkristol.org/video/peter-thiel-ii/), which
points to this.

~~~
kruipen
I don't think this is a good URL change. It is not like
[http://conversationswithbillkristol.org](http://conversationswithbillkristol.org)
is a blog spam for "Conversations with Bill Kristol". And the original site
has video divided into chapters which is useful.

~~~
dang
It was a borderline call, but I'm guessing a URL with Bill Kristol in it would
have had an evil-catnip effect. So, risk mitigation.

~~~
dredmorbius
It definitely gave me pause when I hit the YT link.

Fair call.

