Their disagreement can be viewed through the lens of how they view Twitter. Thiel sees it as "we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters" (a Founders Fund motto). He thinks it's an unimpressive, incremental advancement. Andreessen, however, views it as "instant global public messaging for free". In other words, fundamentally transformative.
The entire video is well worth a watch, but that's it in a nutshell.
It's not nearly that simple. The question is not just are we innovating here and there, but are we gaining productivity (and therefore building wealth)?
Marc mentions GNP growth but that's a horrible number to gauge on. Peter brings up mean household income and working hours, which are much better indicators -- and they indicate we're going nowhere.
You say Twitter is "fundamentally transformative". But I don't see the wealth Twitter has created. And if Twitter was gone tomorrow, would anyone really notice?
I bet that if you looked at household income and working hours and worker conditions at the beginning of the industrial revolution you wouldn't see great improvement. You've seen that only after the workers movement gotten worker rights.
That's to say that those metrics are wrong to measure technological advancement per se. But of course what's important is standards of living.
First even Thiel agrees there isn't lack of innovation in computing.
Alan Kay asks about big ideas, not about innovation. I'm pretty sure that if you look at research papers you'll find amazing ideas that within a 5/10/30 years time will be important(but we can't tell, not until we worked hard to make them work).
Just of the top of my head, there are many potential amazing ideas: look at literature based discovery, alan kay's project that tries to build full os + apps in less than 20KLOC, "naked objects" and meredith patterson's work on parsing and security[1].
I guess we're disagreeing with what is meant by innovation. For me it means big ideas. Better tires on cars is innovation but it's not satisfying to me. I think Thiel also means big ideas -- hence the 140 character quote.
I like your enthusiasm and your list is fantastic. I haven't seen Meredith Patterson's stuff. It looks interesting. But we were also "on the cusp" of curing cancer in the 70's.
This is personal, I guess. I've spent an inordinate time on deep research and I've done it on my own. It's frustrating to watch while things like the Kickstarter for T-shirts get drowned in financing while I count pennies.
I'll try to be more optimistic but there's nothing wrong with saying, "Let's stop chasing money and start chasing something more. Something bigger. Something better."
The truth is they are both right. Technology is accelerating but it is also changing directionally. It is no longer accelerating along a physical axis but instead along a virtual one. What Peter Thiel doesn't see is that the virtual curve will be even more transformative than the physical one. Physical technology has had hundreds of thousands of years to evolve but virtual technology will obsolete it in just a few decades. How? The answer starts out looking a little like Angry Birds but probably ends up more like the Holodeck.
The issue of measurement IS important. The problem with all of Peter Thiel's metrics is that they are inherently indicators of external activity. The triumph of the virtual curve reveals itself in the only metric that really matters: time.
All forms of technology have the same purpose: to optimize the utility obtained during a finite lifespan. Some forms of technology increase the utility per unit time, others simply increase the units of time we have left. Therefore, more and more time spent in virtual space is an indication that virtual technology is out competing the substitutes provided by physical technology. As we go higher up the virtual curve and technology becomes more advanced at fulfilling our emotional and psychological needs by moving bits instead of atoms, eventually physical progress will slow to baseline: literally life support (maybe with gamified life extension projects taking place in virtual land).
Alas, the last technology invented by man will not be the singularity, it will be near perfect virtual reality; closer to Angry Birds than Skynet.
Therefore, more and more time spent in virtual space is an indication that virtual technology is out competing the substitutes provided by physical technology.
I am slamming my head against my desk this is just that dumb.
Managing to subvert people's attention spans and dopamine systems to keep them clicking on the orange-red envelope and clicking to the next page does not mean you've actually done anything good for them. It just means you're consuming their attention until they actually leave the site and walk away with that empty feeling of having outright wasted several whole hours of their day.
Alas, the last technology invented by man will not be the singularity, it will be near perfect virtual reality; closer to Angry Birds than Skynet.
Why? A perfect video game is still just a video game.
Please explain why you think reality is inherently better than a virtual reality. edit: By the way, I get the sense that you think this is a grim future. I do too, but I think this is irrational.
Please explain why you think reality is inherently better than a virtual reality.
Mostly because of an entire youth's raising and training designed to not only enable me to cope with things that don't go away when I stop believing in them, but a whole lot of built-up pride and enjoyment at being able to force reality into my desired shape despite itself.
edit: By the way, I get the sense that you think this is a grim future. I do too, but I think this is irrational.
Angry Birds? That is grim. In fact, any Matrix-y future based on a video game is grim. Video games are designed to provide some entertainment for real people who are taking a break. Or, sometimes, you get World of Warcraft and the game is just designed to keep you paying and playing.
To replace most of life, you need to move away in the solution space, to something that's either far more realistic (the Matrix), or something far less realistic, enough to be a fun way to spend all your time.
It's like car-culture: it caters to precise fulfillment of individual preferences, probably in a market structure, at the cost of shared communal life and space people actually enjoy.
Actually, for the latter to work I think you'd have to raise a whole new generation of people to whom life without significant external challenges or struggles would be as natural as YOLO and SWAG and neo-feudalism are to Generation Z. Wow, I think I've found what I'm going to lecture children about when I'm elderly. You kids these days and your completely self-designed lifestyles!
I was there, probably one of the best sessions at the event. I especially liked the part about building a very strong roof if flying cars come to fruition.
Quote from Peter Thiel starting around 39:10 in the video:
"Mean wages have been stagnant (not median). It’s not an income an inequality issue. Mean wages went up 350% in the US after inflation from 1933 and 1973. [They] went up 22% from 1973 to 2013. Median wages were flat, so it’s become more unequal. Even if you had redistributed everything, it’s gone up only 22%."
I feel this is an overly US-centric view of humanities progress. Globalisation produces winners and losers in the short term, and even though manufacturing jobs are being destroyed in the US, millions of people are being lifted out of poverty in China and other low cost developing nations.
If you are using the argument that stagnant wages in one part of the world means human civilisation is not progressing technologically, does that argument stand up if you look at global living standards?
There was an interesting argument (unfortunately I can't recall where I heard it) that put forward the idea that World War II was like a massive subsidy from the US Air Force to the US manufacturing sector. The US Air Force destroyed many of the industrial cities of America's global manufacturing competitors (mainly Germany and Japan) and other major European nations were destroyed also and were bailed out with the Marshall Plan.
All this meant that for decades, the US manufacturing sector had it artificially good because of greatly reduced global competition, as factories and other manufacturing infrastructure had to be totally rebuilt in the other big industrial nations, which took decades. This was great news for US car companies (and other manufacturers) in the decades after the war, who could churn out (relatively) unreliable and fuel inefficient vehicles, which were bought in huge numbers as they were the best available. In the 1970s, the combination of the oil shocks and encroaching competition from Japanese car makers, who innovated with reliable, fuel efficient and affordable vehicles, meant that the good times were over.
Tl;dr using US wages from 1933-1973, and 1973-today is the wrong metric to measure human civilisations technological progress, for a variety of reasons.
Definitely worth a watch. Interestingly, they agreed on quite a bit. The one thing I was struck by, was the extent to which they agreed that government regulation was an inhibitor of innovation. Actually, I expected that from Thiel, since he's well known as a libertarian, but I wasn't sure that pmarca would share that viewpoint. But they both came down pretty hard on government in that regard.
I think both agreed that energy is of critical importance as well, and that the nature of the energy markets have had a big impact on shaping progress in other areas.
Also, I think Peter Thiel made a fairly interesting point about the connection between our imagination (as a culture) and Hollywood's portrayal of technology. It is a little odd that some of the most well-known and popular movies with a large technological element are the ones where the machines are coming to kill us. I'm sitting here right now trying to think up some good counter-examples, and am coming up fairly blank so far...
Something else that Peter Thiel mentioned at least twice was the phrase "risk averse". I think that's a pretty important point... as a society, have we become so risk averse that we aren't willing to gamble on the big breakthroughs anymore? Are we content to just sit back and wait and hope for a steady stream of incremental, sustaining innovations? I think he might be onto something with that.
Edit: Something that neither Thiel nor Andressen mentioned, that I think is relevant to this discussion, is the recent re-emergence of the hobbyist / DIY / amateur scientist / solo hacker/builder movement. Hackerspaces, cheap embedded / embeddable computers, Arduino, Beagleboard, rPi, 3D printing, cheap DIY CNC milling machines, etc, are enabling thousands or millions of people to take a stab at building things they never could have tried to build before. And go visit the recent HN thread on "Hardware startups" and the CDixon post... looking at what an entrepreneur can do now, in terms of having a physical product built at scale with a much smaller capital investment than in the past... that's got to encourage some new companies to form, and some people to start working on ideas and dreams they've been stewing no, no? And hardware devices aside, cheap computers, cheap Internet access, Open Source software, etc., are making it so much easier for people to explore their software and virtual ideas as well.
But, then we'd be back to Peter's point that "we got 140 chars". So, is it lack of imagination, or something else, that's keeping us from getting radical, disruptive breakthroughs? Or are they out there, on the cusp, just... about... to... happen.
The Iron Man movies might be one example, glorifying a tech genius who was able to turn his tech skills around from evil to good. This may be more of a throwback from the comic super hero's origins though, rather than being an indicator of our modern imaginations.
One way to I've been thinking about technology is how easily the outcome of a war between our current year and a prior year in the same country would turn out. For instance, could the U.S. of 2013 easily defeat the U.S. of 1993. I know for a fact that the U.S of 1960 would make short work of the U.S. of 1940. I think the U.S. of 1973 would give the U.S. of 1993 much more of a problem, however.
Synopsis: Peter making the argument that innovation is decelerating and the returns from tech innovations are minor compared to tech innovations in the past. Marc arguing that while some innovations may appear trivial but it is too early to judge for sure (based on history other innovations which we now consider ground breaking were at their times often written off as a fad) & that innovations aren't actually slowing down.
Fun bits about flying cars & how early automobiles required taking a mechanic with you wherever you go. Also interesting comment about Cisco, IBM & maybe MS being part of the technology rust belt. Neither are very fond of NYT.
Agreed, and when they started to talk about lack of the incumbent institutions that are pressuring regulation in developing countries it made me think about how the concept of the electrical grid is obsolete and highly cost inefficient in places with lack of infrastructure and are being solved by tech in a way that would be over regulated(or not allowed) in the united states; Probably because when we as culture think of electricity, we have an existing infrastructure (and the government sponsored monopolies on such) to think of unlike in developing countries.
I loathe the fact that Thiel's arguments do not get enough purchase even within the technology circles.
Argument 1
The fact - and it is very much a fact - that, off late, technology hasn't progressed very much at all.
Argument 2
And that our scowl-faced culture, that disparages everything technological -- in favor of products of some glorious bygone era where everything that would be ever needed for human purposes has already been conceived, crafted and fabricated -- reinforces this notion in every aspect of our lives.
This is the part I hate most about our culture - the utterly stupid, moribund romanticism associated with every stupid thing ever invented -- however ill-suited it is to serve a purpose in this age -- is somehow worthy of our admiration solely because it is antediluvian.
Not that it is efficient or infinitely better than any candidate that has since come along to replace it (and there are a few examples of such nature. Very few indeed. Eg: the drinking straw or the common t-shirt).
But purely because it served our forefathers well and therefore it is somehow worthy of continued use.
Hollywood unabashedly continues to perpetuate these sickening notions to no end.
Right. I just had an article cross my stream about completely thought-controlled hand prosthetics that can actually grasp things and give feedback on pressure. Clearly not a tech advancement.
Genetic testing for $99. Clearly just incremental, because hey, last year it was $199. Never mind the fact that it wasn't even imaginable 20 years ago.
Private space shipment at a price/weight that's rapidly decreasing way below what we ever had.
Rapid acceleration of solar technology.
And the list goes on and on. Of course they're all incremental - that's how science and technology work. Einstein's theory of relativity didn't come out of nowhere, but built on predecessors. The transistor built on long research in solid state physics, Shockley didn't just pull it out of his pocket.
And if we go to the trope of "but they were paradigm shifts" - so is "big data". So is probabilistic AI. So is molecular engineering.
Funny because Thiel would remark along the lines of despite those very valid technical advancements (that he himself is invested in), most people in the United States (or developed world) are not even in the context of understanding what value most of the things you listed will be to them.
What is the economic value of a thought controlled hand prosthetics to an illusioned college student who just finished watching Minority Report and iRobot who is "able-bodied"(for lack of a better term) and who will probably never use it (maybe they will use it in some form of masturbatory tool) though claim to sympathize with those who do yet knowing nothing of them personally and their experiences?
What is the economic value of private space shipment for someone who will probably never receive any financial gain of space travel proportional to the few who do, when working at [insert-mega-corp] CEO makes 1k times the avg employee (that their laying of in increasing numbers) they hope to work at after graduating with 100k in debt for 30k/y designing logos for a brand with sales down y/y for 5 years?
What is the economic value of solar technology to most americans whose idea of electricity is flipping a switch that have no idea about the publicly subsidized/poorly maintained aged infrastructure, and think solar panels are fancy tech that is not needed?
And the list goes on.
Paradigm shifts or not in tech have been effectively moot when the perception (and the benefit in peoples immediately lives) seem to be out of sight (economists might see this as spending more money but getting less and less returns as time progresses). When they are in sight, you bet it will come in the form of drone packed action thriller with big data crunching molecularly engineered AI genetically testing people using 23andMe api to exterminate those with disease risks higher than the overall population coming down from ISS with Space X's grasshopper drone edition, with the video game to follow then preceding the cartoon equivalent for childhood consumption.
I bet the teen in Fez, Morroco who didn't have electricity for most of their life and has to hang around tourist bars to watch his favorite team play to go back home to his "house" made of corrugated aluminum roofing(in some places) with walls at least a thousand years old [http://i.imgur.com/1zzmoLa.jpg] outfitted with satellite tv installed by the state and only on few hours of the day (the mother would be watching her favorite american show of course) due to power contraints, will probably appreciate that cheep chinese solar panel installed by EWB more than either of us (which Thiel alludes to in this talk) after never having stable electricity [my personal experience after living there for some time].
I sure know the youth in Spain and Greece sure do appreciate this tech and are using it for their economic benefit as you can tell from their quality of life.
In the last day or so, I heard some researcher say on NPR that some of his postdocs now are accomplishing things that a decade ago would've taken a hundred scientists to do, and all thanks to recent rapid advances in technology. While I understand Thiel's arguments, how should we actually weigh these competing claims? Is it as simple as the notion that lots of people are trying to use technology to safely make big bucks with very minute changes in products whereas other folks might be making big advances in science without getting much press? Talk to me, I want to know!
I think the low-cachet quotient society bestows on technology is the huge carcass no one wants to talk about.
It is the real answer why we cannot get enough women early on in the STEM pipeline.
It is the real answer why technology workers have not-very satisfying careers in the West.
Society treats them as lepers here. Whereas in the rest of the world they are highly esteemed members of the society.
We will still be talking about the low headcount of women in technology as long as its quite apparent that the likes of a sneaker maker like Isabel Marant or an editor like Anna Wintour are more esteemed in society than any living woman in any field that is remotely scientific or mathematical.
All the tech workers I know in the U.S. have very satisfying careers, but it depends on your metric and who you're talking to. Many of my Southeast Asian and Indian tech friends work hard to get to the U.S., and I don't see the reverse happening much.
> The fact - and it is very much a fact - that, off late, technology hasn't progressed very much at all.
It's by no means a fact, just anecdotal 'evidence'.
> culture, that disparages everything technological
Quite the contrary. Technological progress is the fetish of modern civilization. Society still believes that eventually all human problems, even illness and death, will be cured by new technology.
BTW, there is absolutely no moral obligation to be progressive and to embrace new technology. We should not hand over our freedom to a technocratic regime.
I definitely think the incumbent leaders (the other 2/3 of the forbes list) and their monopolies granted by governments which allows them to sponsor much of the culture (at least in the developed world) can be attributed to this.
And which makes me smile when Thiel touches on how developing countries, who are glad to get their solar panels and rain water catch systems that give them access to things they had no access to for most of these past 40 years in the same way developed countries have, might come out ahead in this next go.
Thiel had hammered home these points before, yet no one seems to take notice.
Links to video footage of past debates and conversations:
A Conversation with Peter Thiel and Niall Ferguson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw-rxtwhzcY
Innovation or stagnation - Oxford Union Debate
http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/view/210
Fireside Chat With Peter Thiel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6taTMa4nls
And despite it all Thiel hasn't given up and continues to bring this conversation[at least trying and doing with his ideas/companies/investments] to the forefront of the minds of his fellow human beings…
"Today, nobody cares… But tomorrow, they will…" cc: Spain,Greece. bcc: America…
You seem to be confusing a trend towards bespoke consumer products with a rejection of a technological society, when they are not at all the same thing. One is an upper-middle-class reaction against mass consumerism and has nothing really to do with "technology". The other is the philosophy of the Unabomber, which last I checked had yet to gain much traction in America.
The entire video is well worth a watch, but that's it in a nutshell.
[edit: fixed typo]