8 ms·

The End of the Computer Age

92 points by aazaa 7y ago

neonate 7y ago
Transcript: https://www.manhattan-institute.org/events/2019-wriston-lecture-end-computer-age-thiel#transcript https://www.manhattan-institute.org/events/2019-wriston-lect...
TheRealPomax 7y ago
"And so, if we were to rightsize the scaling for our intellectual life, you should describe Harvard, not as one of the thousands of great universities, you should describe it as a Studio 54 nightclub" is really all you need to take away from this. Not for what it says, but for the desperate attempt of those words to make any real sense. Although don't miss out on gems like: "But in practice, the main AI applications that people seem to talk about are using large data to sort of monitor people, know more about people than they know about themselves. And in the limit case, maybe it can solve a lot of the sort of Austrian Economics type problems where you can know enough about people that you know more about them than they know about themselves, and you can sort of enable communism to work, maybe not so much as an economic theory, but at least as a political theory. So it is definitely a Leninist thing. And then, it is literally communist because China loves AI; it hates crypto. And so that, I think, tells you something." AI is literally communist. Thanks Peter.
- jmull 7y ago
  Thanks, I was wondering if I should read it or not and this gives me some good tidbits to help decide.
- chrisco255 7y ago
  Maybe not so elegantly put, but there's no question that China has embraced AI as a tool for spying on its own people. For whatever reason, spying seems to be a consistent Orwellian feature of communism. It was a central feature of the Soviet Union and China just seems to be taking the franchise to new heights with its approach to AI. I don't know what to say about the Harvard quote, but with the recent admissions scandal implicating that rich people are buying their way into premium universities and into higher SAT scores, there's some nugget of truth to criticizing the current situation. I wonder if universities aren't suffering Goodheart's Law: "Once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a useful measure." That is to say, once we measured that a university degree lead to higher incomes, better life outcomes, etc. and then we started pressuring everyone to get a four year degree...did it cease to be a good measure for quality employees, creative thinking, problem solving skills, etc? I think there's something to that. When everyone is obsessed with getting the degree, and they're not worried about the practical application of their knowledge, they are doing the world a disservice. And we're all suffering for it, through higher debt and inflated expectations.
  - Omnitaus 7y ago
    I'm not sure America is as different from China as you seem to imply here. You don't manage to incarcerate more individuals than "an authoritarian communist dictatorship" four times your size without massively scaling the state's ability to monitor citizens. 20% of the world's prisoners are in America. Is spying a consistent Orwellian feature of American capitalism?
- davidivadavid 7y ago
  I'm not sure what's unclear about what he's saying. a) Harvard is a pure signaling mechanism that doesn't provide education as much as exclusionary credentials. b) AI/Big data is a way to solve the economic calculation problem that was once seen as one of the main theoretical hurdles against communism. That a country like China favors AI and punishes crypto tells you something (that it's a communist dictatorship). It's pretty straightforward.
  - bamboozled 7y ago
    I also liked the fact that he points out he'd like to see innovation not just "in some iPhone app" but more broadly in different fields. I think this is a good point, there isn't enough going on in other areas, like he said people ride the 100 year old subway distracted by their iPhones not realizing the world around them is unchanging mostly. It's true in some ways, who will build or even demand the better faster subways of the future if 99% of the people don't even realize they're on the subway.
    - davidivadavid 7y ago
      Yup. To be fair, that's a point he's been making for ~10 years about the world of atoms and world of bits dichotomy. I think it's also, in part, subtly caused by our narrow understanding of the word "technology" to be "software made in Silicon Valley" as opposed to a broader "tool that serves a human purpose." If we broadened that understanding, we could see engineers applying their skills to problems that would be just as lucrative, but could be more legitimately called "innovative" than working on the umpteenth marginal "tech" app.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    Well, but China doesn't use AI to centrally plan the details of its economy. Corporations, prices, and competition are undisputed features of the economy there. Whether you want to call it communist or not, the computational problem is still as intractable as ever. There's a difference between monitoring and regulating society with computers and solving the classical economic calculation problem. And Harvard is a way for elites to network, but that's not merely arbitrary signalling - it depends on how those elites are selected.
- roenxi 7y ago
  Quoting him and restating the point isn't an argument. AI fits very neatly into China's policy goals in a way that it doesn't for liberal politics. We don't know how the improvements in AI are going to play out - it is very easy to see how it could turn out that these are the missing technologies to make a totalitarian state the most productive equilibrium, or communism, or anything else.
- taneq 7y ago
  > And then, it is literally communist because China loves AI; it hates crypto. And so that, I think, tells you something. China also loves cheap r/c cars, does that make them communist?
  - Animats 7y ago
    "Crypto"? The biggest Bitcoin miners are in China. That's because mining Bitcoin is "exporting", and a legit way to get yuan into dollars or euros. Buy mining hardware with yuan, mine, sell Bitcoin outside China. Not only is it legal, because it's exporting, it's encouraged and some breaks for creating an export business are available.
    - Williamrussell 7y ago
      Well, Bitcoin is valued a lot lower now in 2019. I'm a Christian and I have many investments as well as stock and cryptocurrency (BITCOIN). Also, your education, you need to educate yourself on investing. Everything including the knowledge and monies that I have gained over the years related to cryptocurrency/bitcoin I have learnt all through this guy right here…[DIGITALASSETSCONSULTANCY@HOTMAIL. COM ] I personally fell in love with everything cryptocurrency and I'm invested in blockchain projects that may be disruptive and solve future problems. I met this cryptocurrency expert on a blockchain blog where he helped people retrieved their stolen bitcoin wallets, passwords from online scammers. My life changed for good when I signed up for his mining investment and trading strategies. I started with just $500 and in less than 5 days my investment increased by 1000% was able to accumulate about 176000 USD in less than 3 weeks. I am not used to doing something like this but i believe there are millions of people out there that need to see this and I really can not keep this to myself. I am a very appreciative person and this is a way of saying thank you to the team Digital Assets Consultancy for a job well done. Contact him at his email address if you need help in bitcoin mining or trading or wish to invest to yield maximal profits.
    - incognition 7y ago
      Exactly. Obvious factual errors on Thiel's part tells he's lost the plot
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- frickinLasers 7y ago
  Isn't this the guy who founded Palantir?
goranb 7y ago
That introduction is a guillotinable offense.
- classified 7y ago
  And this time the Scarlet Pimpernel wouldn't lift a finger to save them.
blueyes 7y ago
Thiel's talk starts around 10m40s, after the throat-clearing intro. This is not his most articulate talk, fwiw. Thiel's smart and sometimes very clear, but not here. This feels off the cuff, where he's falling back on pot shots and sound bites.
- josephg 7y ago
  Its very long, but I enjoyed Thiel on The Portal (Eric Weinstein's podcast) a few months back: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1-peter-thiel/id1469999563?i=1000444670908 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1-peter-thiel/id146999... I don't know how this compares to talks he's given, but there were a lot of small ideas in there which I thought were really interesting - like the idea that we're in a period of relative technological stagnation compared to a couple decades ago. And how obvious this observation seems to both Thiel and Weinstein.
  - Animats 7y ago
    We're in a period of relative technological stagnation compared to a couple decades ago. Kind of. There's no new "must have" consumer electronics product. 3D TV was a flop, robot vacuums were a dud, VR goggles make 5% to 15% of the population nauseous, and everybody has a smartphone. The "lose money on every sale and make it up on volume" model (Uber, etc.) is coming apart. Self-driving cars don't work yet. Moore's Law has hit a wall. Wafer fab cost is so high that the next node may be unaffordable. There's lots of stuff to do, though. Solar panels and batteries work pretty well, and there's a few trillion dollars of those to be deployed. But it's not a Make Money Fast business. Electric cars and charging stations work, and those need to be deployed. The battery manufacturers need to get their automation act together and start pumping those things out at high speed at very low cost. There's also lots of room for progress in bioengineering. Editing DNA is just beginning.
    - beetwenty 7y ago
      The sense I get from all of it is that there's a phase shift in technological progress occurring, not dissimilar to the 1970's one where we ceased seeing the bulk of disruptive developments occurring in vehicles and energy, and started seeing them in IT fields. That initial boom produced a lot of new product categories, and then successive decades saw a lot of consolidation and transformation away from nuts and bolts and simple efficiencies towards services and IP holdings and consumer marketing. And we know the nature of that market very well today since everyone present has breathed in it for most or all of our lives at this point. But the nature of the next market is, of course, much harder to glimpse. Like looking into pier glass, it takes effort to get a fragmented view of things. It's not as easy as Thiel's view: AI and surveillance, for example is more broadly authoritarian than it is any specific ideology. And infrastructure often leapfrogs stages in the developing world, and that can be true of a developed country like the U.S. too. There's plenty of good work being done quietly in the current market. The word I'd pay the most attention to is sustainability, though. It's been more-or-less entirely a marketing term for decades, never delivering on the promise, but then, often it takes a while for the products to catch up to the marketing.
captaincrowbar 7y ago
It’s amazing how much the output of Serious People pontificating about AI is coming to resemble that of the AIs themselves.
- ehnto 7y ago
  Perhaps it will be revealed that he had an AI write this talk.
ggm 7y ago
Wait.. I thought I read a "how to recognize snake oil in AI/ML" posting just yesterday...
tus88 7y ago
I thought this was going to be about Stadia.
kjhughes 7y ago
Other than old arguments about innovation deficiencies (wanting flying cars but getting 140 characters), there was little/nothing about "The End of the Computer Age." The talk was more about scaling (Finance, Tech, Cargo, and People) with some insights regarding which the US has a chance to compete effectively against China (only Finance and Tech) and some (related?) advice to the left and the right in the US: Left: Move beyond identity politics. Right: Rethink the doctrine of American exceptionalism. Thought provoking commentary, but mistitled as "The End of the Computer Age".
fadisaleh 7y ago
"...the iPhones that distract us from our environment also distract us from how strangely old and unchanging our environment is, how you're riding a subway that's 100 years old. And I think sort of a healthier sort of progress would happen on many different fronts." This quote stood out to me. It seems like we silently concluded that the physical world has evolved enough, developed enough, even though there's a ton of inefficiencies to fix. I often lament that the built environment of the average American city looks stuck in the 80s, and this quote made me think of that.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  I think the market is what silently concluded that the physical world has evolved enough; software isn't more important, just more profitable. And because the United States is allergic to public spending, that's all that matters.
  - mcphage 7y ago
    > And because the United States is allergic to public spending, that's all that matters. I don't think it's the spending that the US is allergic to, it's the collecting the money to spend.
    - bitwize 7y ago
      Ever been to Connecticut? I-84 is still constantly in rough condition, even as property and income taxes climb.
      - lasagnaphil 7y ago
        As a Korean who visited LA this summer, I was shocked to see how unmaintained the roads were, especially the highways. (There were cracks and debris all over the place)
        bartread 7y ago
        I remember thinking the same back in 2005, which was the first time I'd driven in the US. Cracks and potholes all over the place. At the time I'd assumed it was because California was basically bankrupt (maybe it still is), but slightly shocking that it's still the case. I suddenly felt like I understood why American cars have such soft suspension. The roads were notably worse than in the UK, and by a wide margin: no way I'd want to drive a car with a sportier setup there. What's depressing is that since 2010 there's been a progressive degradation in the state of our roads. In Cambridgeshire the roads are now in a terrible state: cracks, fissures, potholes, road markings barely visible. You can blame public spending cuts for this, and no doubt there's truth in that statement, but there are plenty of road infrastructure projects happening. For example: the (admittedly decades overdue) A14 upgrade, recently completed Ely southern bypass, various smart motorway projects (M1 and M4 spring immediately to mind, as well as recently completed work on M3). This is all well and good, but I would far rather see some of this money diverted to the basics of a safe road network: i.e., ensuring the roads we already have are in good condition. I would particularly like to see funds being used for smart motorways, for which serious safety concerns have emerged, diverted in this way.
Animats 7y ago
It reads like a long rant on Reddit. I'm a lot less impressed with Thiel now. His fascination with "scale" is interesting. Some of the problems we have today come from the conquest of scale. It used to be that big companies couldn't get out of their own way. This limited how big a company could get before smaller competitors were more efficient. With computers and networks, businesses can now be scaled to national, if not planetary, scale. And we get a very small, and shrinking, number of big players. One Google. One Amazon. One Facebook. One Alibaba. One Tencent. Three big US telcos. Three big US banks.
- chrisco255 7y ago
  Scale in tech has been solved, because it's trivial to reproduce a software program. It's not like manufacturing. We've got a dozen or so large automobile manufacturers that are all thriving. There's five big tech companies: Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. And three big telcos is an improvement over the early 20th century that Thiel is idealizing when AT&T was the only game in town. But Thiel himself is a supporter of monopolies and wrote a whole book on the virtues of them in "Zero To One". One thing I feel as though we lack is more visionary entrepreneurs in some of these other fields (or if we don't, they're not very visible). In the early 20th century, you had breakthrough after breakthrough. You had Edison, Tesla, Einstein, Ford, Disney, Eastman (Kodak), Sarnoff (radio), Fisher (washing machine), the Wright Bros, and on and on...so many breakthrough entrepreneurs, scientists and technologists in such a small window of time. If we tried to point to people alive today who have the same impact as the ones mentioned above, we'd probably name Musk. In the early 20th century, we had hundreds of Elon Musks.
  - ehnto 7y ago
    I think most industries have become continuously more specialized. We've likely had fantastic innovations year over year, but they are in parts of the greater product, and by someone who was hired to do exactly that so they were really just doing their job. That doesn't make for a very good story, so we don't hear about the many innovations that continue to improve all of our lives.
  - incognition 7y ago
rasengan0 7y ago
Centuries old subways? I'm typing this on a QWERTY keyboard layout. Innovate people!
- mertnesvat 7y ago
  Hold tight because soon there will be Brain Computer connections with enough bandwidth to allow us type, read, write at the same time.
arunpuri 7y ago
I am not 100% sure but I think this fits here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDpZ7w9uNuc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDpZ7w9uNuc (Newsroom opening scene). I am not American but I believe this can apply so much in a lot of places.
wrs 7y ago
This mostly just reads like stream of consciousness gibberish to me. Is there an actual coherent argument in here somewhere?
- classified 7y ago
  This is the top 1% celebrating themselves. If they had any coherent arguments, we would have been convinced long since. As it is, they're just laughing their asses off while taking candy from a baby (i.e. getting even more rich and powerful).
  - incognition 7y ago
    Is it me or has his thinking got more sloppy? A couple examples, his indictment of the Obamas is that they sent their kids to Harvard but his indictment of America is that we don't focus on the things we do well... such as universities? The assault on science now without any prescriptive solutions. Is he arguing for more populous interpretation of science? Has he had any first hand experience and investigation into the mechanisms of double blind peer review? (In my experience, still prone to gaming but often rigorous and the best method we've got). Re: The indictment of the SV elite. I don't move in the same circles as he does but it's obvious that he's still smarting from the SV elite's rejection of him. His hypocrisy from being owner of Palantir and yet seeming indictment of AI software for governments? Another layer of hypocrisy of espousing libertarian values when he's come to embody the system as much as anyone (in the administration, numerous govt military contracts with Palantir). And yet he's even more shifty than that, embracing NZ citizenship for possible tax evasion avenues. His indictment of Twitter yet entrepreneurs have made material progress in traditional sectors (his old buddy Elon making headway with Tesla). Our indictment of him should be that he's turned his back on values he's formerly espoused, content to rankle in a 'get off my front lawn style' on his large pile of capital while often committing the same hypocrisies of which he feigns disgust.
groby_b 7y ago
Wait - he helped elect a cryptofascist that plunders the public coffers for personal gain, and then he's got the chutzpah to complain about the state of public infrastructure? At the Manhattan Institute? The place that loudly complains that tax payer financed efforts are really just exploitation?
- classified 7y ago
  > ...tax payer financed efforts are really just exploitation Right, and the super rich cannot wait to relieve us tax payers from our plight and pay all those bills for us. Otherwise, what would be the point in never paying any taxes?
buboard 7y ago
This talk mostly reiterates his basic talking points so it feels a lot like rambling. And the title is not justified by the argument. There is, however, a case to be made that the computer tech age has reached an end. Tech companies turning to investing in banking and real estate is not a good sign.
- icebraining 7y ago
  Tech companies are still doing tech. It's more that the "tech" label is being applied to other companies incorrectly.
  - buboard 7y ago
    apple is investing in payments, credit cards and real estate. so does facebook (and google)
    - ehnto 7y ago
      But they haven't stopped doing technology. If anything, they are bringing technology to banking. I am not saying I am feeling great about those particular companies entering the finance industry, but it's not like it's a signal that technology is becoming unimportant. If anything it's just the continued expansion of technology.
      - buboard 7y ago
        time will tell. i think it 's worrying that they are entering these zero-sum markets btw this technology already exists in bitcoin and other coins
  - helen___keller 7y ago
    Train companies are still doing trains, but the era of railway mania (and its associated venture capital bubble) have long since evaporated. We'll see the same with tech, maybe in a few years maybe in a few decades.

92 points by aazaa 7y ago

Transcript: https://www.manhattan-institute.org/events/2019-wriston-lecture-end-computer-age-thiel#transcript https://www.manhattan-institute.org/events/2019-wriston-lect...

TheRealPomax 7y ago

"And so, if we were to rightsize the scaling for our intellectual life, you should describe Harvard, not as one of the thousands of great universities, you should describe it as a Studio 54 nightclub" is really all you need to take away from this. Not for what it says, but for the desperate attempt of those words to make any real sense. Although don't miss out on gems like: "But in practice, the main AI applications that people seem to talk about are using large data to sort of monitor people, know more about people than they know about themselves. And in the limit case, maybe it can solve a lot of the sort of Austrian Economics type problems where you can know enough about people that you know more about them than they know about themselves, and you can sort of enable communism to work, maybe not so much as an economic theory, but at least as a political theory. So it is definitely a Leninist thing. And then, it is literally communist because China loves AI; it hates crypto. And so that, I think, tells you something." AI is literally communist. Thanks Peter.

jmull 7y ago
Thanks, I was wondering if I should read it or not and this gives me some good tidbits to help decide.
chrisco255 7y ago
Maybe not so elegantly put, but there's no question that China has embraced AI as a tool for spying on its own people. For whatever reason, spying seems to be a consistent Orwellian feature of communism. It was a central feature of the Soviet Union and China just seems to be taking the franchise to new heights with its approach to AI. I don't know what to say about the Harvard quote, but with the recent admissions scandal implicating that rich people are buying their way into premium universities and into higher SAT scores, there's some nugget of truth to criticizing the current situation. I wonder if universities aren't suffering Goodheart's Law: "Once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a useful measure." That is to say, once we measured that a university degree lead to higher incomes, better life outcomes, etc. and then we started pressuring everyone to get a four year degree...did it cease to be a good measure for quality employees, creative thinking, problem solving skills, etc? I think there's something to that. When everyone is obsessed with getting the degree, and they're not worried about the practical application of their knowledge, they are doing the world a disservice. And we're all suffering for it, through higher debt and inflated expectations.
- Omnitaus 7y ago
  I'm not sure America is as different from China as you seem to imply here. You don't manage to incarcerate more individuals than "an authoritarian communist dictatorship" four times your size without massively scaling the state's ability to monitor citizens. 20% of the world's prisoners are in America. Is spying a consistent Orwellian feature of American capitalism?
davidivadavid 7y ago
I'm not sure what's unclear about what he's saying. a) Harvard is a pure signaling mechanism that doesn't provide education as much as exclusionary credentials. b) AI/Big data is a way to solve the economic calculation problem that was once seen as one of the main theoretical hurdles against communism. That a country like China favors AI and punishes crypto tells you something (that it's a communist dictatorship). It's pretty straightforward.
- bamboozled 7y ago
  I also liked the fact that he points out he'd like to see innovation not just "in some iPhone app" but more broadly in different fields. I think this is a good point, there isn't enough going on in other areas, like he said people ride the 100 year old subway distracted by their iPhones not realizing the world around them is unchanging mostly. It's true in some ways, who will build or even demand the better faster subways of the future if 99% of the people don't even realize they're on the subway.
  - davidivadavid 7y ago
    Yup. To be fair, that's a point he's been making for ~10 years about the world of atoms and world of bits dichotomy. I think it's also, in part, subtly caused by our narrow understanding of the word "technology" to be "software made in Silicon Valley" as opposed to a broader "tool that serves a human purpose." If we broadened that understanding, we could see engineers applying their skills to problems that would be just as lucrative, but could be more legitimately called "innovative" than working on the umpteenth marginal "tech" app.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  Well, but China doesn't use AI to centrally plan the details of its economy. Corporations, prices, and competition are undisputed features of the economy there. Whether you want to call it communist or not, the computational problem is still as intractable as ever. There's a difference between monitoring and regulating society with computers and solving the classical economic calculation problem. And Harvard is a way for elites to network, but that's not merely arbitrary signalling - it depends on how those elites are selected.
roenxi 7y ago
Quoting him and restating the point isn't an argument. AI fits very neatly into China's policy goals in a way that it doesn't for liberal politics. We don't know how the improvements in AI are going to play out - it is very easy to see how it could turn out that these are the missing technologies to make a totalitarian state the most productive equilibrium, or communism, or anything else.
taneq 7y ago
> And then, it is literally communist because China loves AI; it hates crypto. And so that, I think, tells you something. China also loves cheap r/c cars, does that make them communist?
- Animats 7y ago
  "Crypto"? The biggest Bitcoin miners are in China. That's because mining Bitcoin is "exporting", and a legit way to get yuan into dollars or euros. Buy mining hardware with yuan, mine, sell Bitcoin outside China. Not only is it legal, because it's exporting, it's encouraged and some breaks for creating an export business are available.
  - Williamrussell 7y ago
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  - incognition 7y ago
    Exactly. Obvious factual errors on Thiel's part tells he's lost the plot
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
frickinLasers 7y ago
Isn't this the guy who founded Palantir?

goranb 7y ago

That introduction is a guillotinable offense.

classified 7y ago
And this time the Scarlet Pimpernel wouldn't lift a finger to save them.

blueyes 7y ago

Thiel's talk starts around 10m40s, after the throat-clearing intro. This is not his most articulate talk, fwiw. Thiel's smart and sometimes very clear, but not here. This feels off the cuff, where he's falling back on pot shots and sound bites.

josephg 7y ago
Its very long, but I enjoyed Thiel on The Portal (Eric Weinstein's podcast) a few months back: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1-peter-thiel/id1469999563?i=1000444670908 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1-peter-thiel/id146999... I don't know how this compares to talks he's given, but there were a lot of small ideas in there which I thought were really interesting - like the idea that we're in a period of relative technological stagnation compared to a couple decades ago. And how obvious this observation seems to both Thiel and Weinstein.
- Animats 7y ago
  We're in a period of relative technological stagnation compared to a couple decades ago. Kind of. There's no new "must have" consumer electronics product. 3D TV was a flop, robot vacuums were a dud, VR goggles make 5% to 15% of the population nauseous, and everybody has a smartphone. The "lose money on every sale and make it up on volume" model (Uber, etc.) is coming apart. Self-driving cars don't work yet. Moore's Law has hit a wall. Wafer fab cost is so high that the next node may be unaffordable. There's lots of stuff to do, though. Solar panels and batteries work pretty well, and there's a few trillion dollars of those to be deployed. But it's not a Make Money Fast business. Electric cars and charging stations work, and those need to be deployed. The battery manufacturers need to get their automation act together and start pumping those things out at high speed at very low cost. There's also lots of room for progress in bioengineering. Editing DNA is just beginning.
  - beetwenty 7y ago
    The sense I get from all of it is that there's a phase shift in technological progress occurring, not dissimilar to the 1970's one where we ceased seeing the bulk of disruptive developments occurring in vehicles and energy, and started seeing them in IT fields. That initial boom produced a lot of new product categories, and then successive decades saw a lot of consolidation and transformation away from nuts and bolts and simple efficiencies towards services and IP holdings and consumer marketing. And we know the nature of that market very well today since everyone present has breathed in it for most or all of our lives at this point. But the nature of the next market is, of course, much harder to glimpse. Like looking into pier glass, it takes effort to get a fragmented view of things. It's not as easy as Thiel's view: AI and surveillance, for example is more broadly authoritarian than it is any specific ideology. And infrastructure often leapfrogs stages in the developing world, and that can be true of a developed country like the U.S. too. There's plenty of good work being done quietly in the current market. The word I'd pay the most attention to is sustainability, though. It's been more-or-less entirely a marketing term for decades, never delivering on the promise, but then, often it takes a while for the products to catch up to the marketing.

captaincrowbar 7y ago

It’s amazing how much the output of Serious People pontificating about AI is coming to resemble that of the AIs themselves.

ehnto 7y ago
Perhaps it will be revealed that he had an AI write this talk.

ggm 7y ago

Wait.. I thought I read a "how to recognize snake oil in AI/ML" posting just yesterday...

tus88 7y ago

I thought this was going to be about Stadia.

kjhughes 7y ago

Other than old arguments about innovation deficiencies (wanting flying cars but getting 140 characters), there was little/nothing about "The End of the Computer Age." The talk was more about scaling (Finance, Tech, Cargo, and People) with some insights regarding which the US has a chance to compete effectively against China (only Finance and Tech) and some (related?) advice to the left and the right in the US: Left: Move beyond identity politics. Right: Rethink the doctrine of American exceptionalism. Thought provoking commentary, but mistitled as "The End of the Computer Age".

fadisaleh 7y ago

"...the iPhones that distract us from our environment also distract us from how strangely old and unchanging our environment is, how you're riding a subway that's 100 years old. And I think sort of a healthier sort of progress would happen on many different fronts." This quote stood out to me. It seems like we silently concluded that the physical world has evolved enough, developed enough, even though there's a ton of inefficiencies to fix. I often lament that the built environment of the average American city looks stuck in the 80s, and this quote made me think of that.

_bxg1 7y ago
I think the market is what silently concluded that the physical world has evolved enough; software isn't more important, just more profitable. And because the United States is allergic to public spending, that's all that matters.
- mcphage 7y ago
  > And because the United States is allergic to public spending, that's all that matters. I don't think it's the spending that the US is allergic to, it's the collecting the money to spend.
  - bitwize 7y ago
    Ever been to Connecticut? I-84 is still constantly in rough condition, even as property and income taxes climb.
    - lasagnaphil 7y ago
      As a Korean who visited LA this summer, I was shocked to see how unmaintained the roads were, especially the highways. (There were cracks and debris all over the place)
      - bartread 7y ago
        I remember thinking the same back in 2005, which was the first time I'd driven in the US. Cracks and potholes all over the place. At the time I'd assumed it was because California was basically bankrupt (maybe it still is), but slightly shocking that it's still the case. I suddenly felt like I understood why American cars have such soft suspension. The roads were notably worse than in the UK, and by a wide margin: no way I'd want to drive a car with a sportier setup there. What's depressing is that since 2010 there's been a progressive degradation in the state of our roads. In Cambridgeshire the roads are now in a terrible state: cracks, fissures, potholes, road markings barely visible. You can blame public spending cuts for this, and no doubt there's truth in that statement, but there are plenty of road infrastructure projects happening. For example: the (admittedly decades overdue) A14 upgrade, recently completed Ely southern bypass, various smart motorway projects (M1 and M4 spring immediately to mind, as well as recently completed work on M3). This is all well and good, but I would far rather see some of this money diverted to the basics of a safe road network: i.e., ensuring the roads we already have are in good condition. I would particularly like to see funds being used for smart motorways, for which serious safety concerns have emerged, diverted in this way.

Animats 7y ago

It reads like a long rant on Reddit. I'm a lot less impressed with Thiel now. His fascination with "scale" is interesting. Some of the problems we have today come from the conquest of scale. It used to be that big companies couldn't get out of their own way. This limited how big a company could get before smaller competitors were more efficient. With computers and networks, businesses can now be scaled to national, if not planetary, scale. And we get a very small, and shrinking, number of big players. One Google. One Amazon. One Facebook. One Alibaba. One Tencent. Three big US telcos. Three big US banks.

chrisco255 7y ago
Scale in tech has been solved, because it's trivial to reproduce a software program. It's not like manufacturing. We've got a dozen or so large automobile manufacturers that are all thriving. There's five big tech companies: Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. And three big telcos is an improvement over the early 20th century that Thiel is idealizing when AT&T was the only game in town. But Thiel himself is a supporter of monopolies and wrote a whole book on the virtues of them in "Zero To One". One thing I feel as though we lack is more visionary entrepreneurs in some of these other fields (or if we don't, they're not very visible). In the early 20th century, you had breakthrough after breakthrough. You had Edison, Tesla, Einstein, Ford, Disney, Eastman (Kodak), Sarnoff (radio), Fisher (washing machine), the Wright Bros, and on and on...so many breakthrough entrepreneurs, scientists and technologists in such a small window of time. If we tried to point to people alive today who have the same impact as the ones mentioned above, we'd probably name Musk. In the early 20th century, we had hundreds of Elon Musks.
- ehnto 7y ago
  I think most industries have become continuously more specialized. We've likely had fantastic innovations year over year, but they are in parts of the greater product, and by someone who was hired to do exactly that so they were really just doing their job. That doesn't make for a very good story, so we don't hear about the many innovations that continue to improve all of our lives.
- incognition 7y ago

rasengan0 7y ago

Centuries old subways? I'm typing this on a QWERTY keyboard layout. Innovate people!

mertnesvat 7y ago
Hold tight because soon there will be Brain Computer connections with enough bandwidth to allow us type, read, write at the same time.

arunpuri 7y ago

I am not 100% sure but I think this fits here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDpZ7w9uNuc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDpZ7w9uNuc (Newsroom opening scene). I am not American but I believe this can apply so much in a lot of places.

wrs 7y ago

This mostly just reads like stream of consciousness gibberish to me. Is there an actual coherent argument in here somewhere?

classified 7y ago
This is the top 1% celebrating themselves. If they had any coherent arguments, we would have been convinced long since. As it is, they're just laughing their asses off while taking candy from a baby (i.e. getting even more rich and powerful).
- incognition 7y ago
  Is it me or has his thinking got more sloppy? A couple examples, his indictment of the Obamas is that they sent their kids to Harvard but his indictment of America is that we don't focus on the things we do well... such as universities? The assault on science now without any prescriptive solutions. Is he arguing for more populous interpretation of science? Has he had any first hand experience and investigation into the mechanisms of double blind peer review? (In my experience, still prone to gaming but often rigorous and the best method we've got). Re: The indictment of the SV elite. I don't move in the same circles as he does but it's obvious that he's still smarting from the SV elite's rejection of him. His hypocrisy from being owner of Palantir and yet seeming indictment of AI software for governments? Another layer of hypocrisy of espousing libertarian values when he's come to embody the system as much as anyone (in the administration, numerous govt military contracts with Palantir). And yet he's even more shifty than that, embracing NZ citizenship for possible tax evasion avenues. His indictment of Twitter yet entrepreneurs have made material progress in traditional sectors (his old buddy Elon making headway with Tesla). Our indictment of him should be that he's turned his back on values he's formerly espoused, content to rankle in a 'get off my front lawn style' on his large pile of capital while often committing the same hypocrisies of which he feigns disgust.

groby_b 7y ago

Wait - he helped elect a cryptofascist that plunders the public coffers for personal gain, and then he's got the chutzpah to complain about the state of public infrastructure? At the Manhattan Institute? The place that loudly complains that tax payer financed efforts are really just exploitation?

classified 7y ago
> ...tax payer financed efforts are really just exploitation Right, and the super rich cannot wait to relieve us tax payers from our plight and pay all those bills for us. Otherwise, what would be the point in never paying any taxes?

buboard 7y ago

This talk mostly reiterates his basic talking points so it feels a lot like rambling. And the title is not justified by the argument. There is, however, a case to be made that the computer tech age has reached an end. Tech companies turning to investing in banking and real estate is not a good sign.

icebraining 7y ago
Tech companies are still doing tech. It's more that the "tech" label is being applied to other companies incorrectly.
- buboard 7y ago
  apple is investing in payments, credit cards and real estate. so does facebook (and google)
  - ehnto 7y ago
    But they haven't stopped doing technology. If anything, they are bringing technology to banking. I am not saying I am feeling great about those particular companies entering the finance industry, but it's not like it's a signal that technology is becoming unimportant. If anything it's just the continued expansion of technology.
    - buboard 7y ago
      time will tell. i think it 's worrying that they are entering these zero-sum markets btw this technology already exists in bitcoin and other coins
- helen___keller 7y ago
  Train companies are still doing trains, but the era of railway mania (and its associated venture capital bubble) have long since evaporated. We'll see the same with tech, maybe in a few years maybe in a few decades.