I'm all for billionaires using their money to fund research, but that NRO article was so bad that I question his judgement.
1) I don't know what tech slowdown he's talking about. The cost of genome sequencing is falling at faster-than-Moore's law rates; that's probably the most significant growth area right now.
2) Thiel is a Singulatarian [3]; I thought the point of that was that exponential growth is inevitable. It's that coupled with this article that leads me to dub him bipolar. If you believe in the Singularity I presume you believe it will happen with or without any particular pool of money.
3) This paragraph. Maybe sounding like Grampa Simpson is required to get into NRO. And who in their right mind considers Robert Moses and Brasilia good models for anything?
> "towards the end Robert Moses, the great builder of New York City in the 1950s and 1960s, or Oscar Niemeyer, the great architect of Brasilia, belong to a past when people still had concrete ideas about the future. Voters today prefer Victorian houses. Science fiction has collapsed as a literary genre. Men reached the moon in July 1969, and Woodstock began three weeks later. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this was when the hippies took over the country, and when the true cultural war over Progress was lost."
Damn hippies! And here I heard that they helped invent personal computing [1] and saved physics [2].
1) I don't know what tech slowdown he's talking about. The cost of genome sequencing is falling at faster-than-Moore's law rates; that's probably the most significant growth area right now.
2) Thiel is a Singulatarian [3]; I thought the point of that was that exponential growth is inevitable. It's that coupled with this article that leads me to dub him bipolar. If you believe in the Singularity I presume you believe it will happen with or without any particular pool of money.
3) This paragraph. Maybe sounding like Grampa Simpson is required to get into NRO. And who in their right mind considers Robert Moses and Brasilia good models for anything?
> "towards the end Robert Moses, the great builder of New York City in the 1950s and 1960s, or Oscar Niemeyer, the great architect of Brasilia, belong to a past when people still had concrete ideas about the future. Voters today prefer Victorian houses. Science fiction has collapsed as a literary genre. Men reached the moon in July 1969, and Woodstock began three weeks later. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this was when the hippies took over the country, and when the true cultural war over Progress was lost."
Damn hippies! And here I heard that they helped invent personal computing [1] and saved physics [2].
[1] http://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-Pers... [2] http://www.hippiessavedphysics.com/ [3] http://singularityu.org/?p=1749