4 ms·

Maybe the concept of "we wanted flying chars - got 140 chars" was a little bit misguided. People don't want faster cars , or they'd buy them, but boy do they wa

Maybe the concept of "we wanted flying chars - got 140 chars" was a little bit misguided. People don't want faster cars , or they'd buy them, but boy do they want to entertain themselves and overcommunicate with their circle through their phones. They may not even want self-driving cars. If 40% work remotely , driving becomes a leasurely activity, so maybe improving communication networks is more important than adding computers to cars. Tons of airlines and tour operators are going bankrupt with the pandemic in europe. The tourism bubble was a hugely wasteful treadmill perpetuated by people forced live in tiny spaces in expensive cities. Airlines didn't want faster or bigger planes, they wanted cheaper airports. Surely COVID was a great accelerator for trends that preexisted. Biotech seems the biggest winner, not because it accelerated discovery, but because it removed regulatory hurdles. It remains to be seen how effective the change will be, as the vaccines haven't yet been rolled out. OTOH technologies like VR don't seem to be going anywhere despite being heavily pushed.

Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
VR needs more advanced and miniaturized battery and display technology. In it's current form it's blurry, clunky, overly constrained and unrealized by any game. If it had a killer game the people would come despite the other shortcomings. A killer game is unlikely without the others progressing further.
- tuatoru 6y ago
  And "better gaming" is not productivity-enhancing in the way that penicillin or telephones were. Sure, VR may be useful for training (or even actual work) in some industries, but the operative word here is "some". Few workers will don VR headsets in their working lives.
adventured 6y ago
The core separation was always arbitrary and overly staged to the benefit of the author's position. Peter Thiel is fond of dividing between atoms and bits, where he then proclaims that the only substantial progress has been in the world of bits. That's a poorly staged argument for his benefit, as in reality progress in the world of bits is progress in the world of atoms. It's all the same real world. It's a borderline mystical separation, like pretending the body and brain are not connected, or that the body has a distinct magical soul separate from the physical (and Thiel is loaded with mystical beliefs, so it makes sense that his irrationality would predictably repeat). It's a particularly amusing logic failure by Thiel because he attempts to take up a pro-science, pro-reason position. As one example, the mass global adoption of email (and numerous other similarly effective instant communication tools) over the last 20-25 years is a tangible, real thing and it involves atoms as much as a skyscraper or an automobile does. If our computing improves by ten fold, if we build giant globe-spanning systems for commerce, communication, media, entertainment, knowledge/education - that's all extraordinary progress in the world of atoms. You get a sense of Thiel's personal snobbery and bias in what he chooses to proclaim to be real progress. The very rapid advance of the GPU the past two decades, along with what it enables in the so-called world of bits (which, again, is actually the world of atoms as well), is every bit as important as many prominent world of atoms events in the 20th century, yet Thiel's position is to debase such accomplishments, because his argument is harmed by that advancement. Building data centers is building a mill or factory. That obviously isn't to imply they employ the same number of people (which is a distinct issue of automation, efficiency, etc). Thiel & Co. like to pretend there's some magic to steel or plastic and there is nothing special (atoms tangible) about a data center - and all the technology that goes with it - linked up at the speed of light to the rest of the world. It's nothing more than a silly and arbitrary line they've drawn to the benefit of their position.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  This is downright silly -improvements in material science, like inventing stainless steel, immediately levels up all industries in all of civilisation, from heavy industry to street furniture to cuttlery. Faster GPU's do not directly improve life of an average Joe, they might enable some second order effect, like research or production of educational videos, etc. But the effects are much smaller and you can only equate the two if you are living in fantasy land
  - Ekaros 6y ago
    If we go from GPUs to CPUs and memory or even generic IC. Faster CPUs meant also more efficient and smaller CPUs meaning cheaper CPUs. Brining down the price of mobile phones and computers. And even increasing the rates of data transfer. I can't say that there has not been massive change for average Joe in last 30 years due to this...
    - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      Tes ofcourse but imagine if that kimd of improvement happened in metallurgy, we'd have space elevators, you could have a vication on Ganymede and the concept of rare metal would cease to exist
- tuatoru 6y ago
  I find this argument sophomoric and that it misses the point. You are combining the infrastructure with the thing itself. Maybe emails are sent using a physical infrastructure. How many atoms would it take to send the same number of physical mails (letters on paper)? Remember to account for the atoms in the transport infrastructure, as you are doing for emails. Theil's comparison is between progress in moving information around versus progress in our ability to create physical structures - to move mass around. More importantly, though, the advent of email has not shown up in productivity statstics. Office worker productivty growth did not change observably after email became ubiquitous. Thiel perhaps believes that a x10 improvement in speed of creating physical structures would show up in productivity figures. I'm doubtful, because I think the stagnation has happened for reasons other than stagnation in our ability to move mass.
ClumsyPilot 6y ago
> "People don't want faster cars , or they'd buy them" Firstly they do, most cars go 3 - 5 times above the speed limit. Never saw a car that can't exceed the speed limit and is not in a museum. Secondly, flying cars are not about speed, they are about freedom of movement and lack of congestion. >"Airlines didn't want faster or bigger planes, they wanted cheaper airports." What are you referrring to or comparing to, planes from 1920's, or the past few decades? Becauae we've made great strides in efficiency of said planes in the past few decades. Also its the travelers that want this or that, Airlines don't want anything.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  You re talking about top speeds which have incremental improvemetns, but people's popular choices are not roadsters, but rather bulky and slow SUVs. And if we re talking about flying cars, we don't know the demand they 'd have, but even now people don't move outside of crowded cities just to avoid congestion. > efficiency of said planes And yet planes are slower and smaller. Sure, i m talking about what travelers want. Turns out people arent willing to pay extra for faster or bigger planes like the concorde or A380, and airlines adapted
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    > "slow SUVs" Thats a meaningless statement without numbers. How many people are buying SUVs? I live im Britain, there are hardly any SUV's, most of the world is not living in US. A roadster is not just a faster car, its tiny, useless and expensive to boot. It can't travel a mile down a road in Russia without getting stuck. It still can't (legally) exceed the speed limit. It's utility advantage over a compact is zero. If people bought roadsters, that still has no relevance to flying cars. People live in cities because that's where the well paid jobs are. Many mouve out when they hit pention. It's a completely separate set of tradeoffs that has nothing to do with the subject The whole argument about flying cars makes no sense. > people arent willing to pay extra for faster or bigger planes Its the other way round - people pay extra for smaller planes that take them directly to their destination, as opposed to taking a big plane and then change flights in a spoke and hub model. Also planes are not any slower, speeds of all subsonic planes have been very consistent.
sgt_obvious 6y ago
[Summary/Long:] "Low-hanging fruits been plucked, the use of space has had some meaningful productivity gains," "immigrants moving seems trading higher salaries for higher expenses," "inaccurate is posing the regime of exponential growth as a normal state of affairs that can be returned to If you assume it was going to last forever you get mathematically absurd results. For example if you assume 3% per year growth in wages over the next 1000 years then every worker is going to be making 274 quadrillion dollars per year. In 2000 years they are making 1.89x10^30 dollars. In 3000 years they are making 1.23x10^43 dollars. In 4000 years it’s 9x10^55 dollars, which is enough money to buy each atom that makes up the planet earth at a price of $100000 per atom." > "Does it sound obvious that some people can cope better with limitations than others?" [short/conclusion:] (painoptimized^^) Duh "We want flying cars" But... um How else do we get the (armored) anti-riot water cannon truck upstairs ? May robots carry'em ? P-: hint: it wasn't intentionally but "anecdotes that have a place in a 'bigger' picture" for a first look, wow...interestic thread, you have... (-:

Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago

VR needs more advanced and miniaturized battery and display technology. In it's current form it's blurry, clunky, overly constrained and unrealized by any game. If it had a killer game the people would come despite the other shortcomings. A killer game is unlikely without the others progressing further.

tuatoru 6y ago
And "better gaming" is not productivity-enhancing in the way that penicillin or telephones were. Sure, VR may be useful for training (or even actual work) in some industries, but the operative word here is "some". Few workers will don VR headsets in their working lives.

adventured 6y ago

The core separation was always arbitrary and overly staged to the benefit of the author's position. Peter Thiel is fond of dividing between atoms and bits, where he then proclaims that the only substantial progress has been in the world of bits. That's a poorly staged argument for his benefit, as in reality progress in the world of bits is progress in the world of atoms. It's all the same real world. It's a borderline mystical separation, like pretending the body and brain are not connected, or that the body has a distinct magical soul separate from the physical (and Thiel is loaded with mystical beliefs, so it makes sense that his irrationality would predictably repeat). It's a particularly amusing logic failure by Thiel because he attempts to take up a pro-science, pro-reason position. As one example, the mass global adoption of email (and numerous other similarly effective instant communication tools) over the last 20-25 years is a tangible, real thing and it involves atoms as much as a skyscraper or an automobile does. If our computing improves by ten fold, if we build giant globe-spanning systems for commerce, communication, media, entertainment, knowledge/education - that's all extraordinary progress in the world of atoms. You get a sense of Thiel's personal snobbery and bias in what he chooses to proclaim to be real progress. The very rapid advance of the GPU the past two decades, along with what it enables in the so-called world of bits (which, again, is actually the world of atoms as well), is every bit as important as many prominent world of atoms events in the 20th century, yet Thiel's position is to debase such accomplishments, because his argument is harmed by that advancement. Building data centers is building a mill or factory. That obviously isn't to imply they employ the same number of people (which is a distinct issue of automation, efficiency, etc). Thiel & Co. like to pretend there's some magic to steel or plastic and there is nothing special (atoms tangible) about a data center - and all the technology that goes with it - linked up at the speed of light to the rest of the world. It's nothing more than a silly and arbitrary line they've drawn to the benefit of their position.

ClumsyPilot 6y ago
This is downright silly -improvements in material science, like inventing stainless steel, immediately levels up all industries in all of civilisation, from heavy industry to street furniture to cuttlery. Faster GPU's do not directly improve life of an average Joe, they might enable some second order effect, like research or production of educational videos, etc. But the effects are much smaller and you can only equate the two if you are living in fantasy land
- Ekaros 6y ago
  If we go from GPUs to CPUs and memory or even generic IC. Faster CPUs meant also more efficient and smaller CPUs meaning cheaper CPUs. Brining down the price of mobile phones and computers. And even increasing the rates of data transfer. I can't say that there has not been massive change for average Joe in last 30 years due to this...
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    Tes ofcourse but imagine if that kimd of improvement happened in metallurgy, we'd have space elevators, you could have a vication on Ganymede and the concept of rare metal would cease to exist
tuatoru 6y ago
I find this argument sophomoric and that it misses the point. You are combining the infrastructure with the thing itself. Maybe emails are sent using a physical infrastructure. How many atoms would it take to send the same number of physical mails (letters on paper)? Remember to account for the atoms in the transport infrastructure, as you are doing for emails. Theil's comparison is between progress in moving information around versus progress in our ability to create physical structures - to move mass around. More importantly, though, the advent of email has not shown up in productivity statstics. Office worker productivty growth did not change observably after email became ubiquitous. Thiel perhaps believes that a x10 improvement in speed of creating physical structures would show up in productivity figures. I'm doubtful, because I think the stagnation has happened for reasons other than stagnation in our ability to move mass.

ClumsyPilot 6y ago

> "People don't want faster cars , or they'd buy them" Firstly they do, most cars go 3 - 5 times above the speed limit. Never saw a car that can't exceed the speed limit and is not in a museum. Secondly, flying cars are not about speed, they are about freedom of movement and lack of congestion. >"Airlines didn't want faster or bigger planes, they wanted cheaper airports." What are you referrring to or comparing to, planes from 1920's, or the past few decades? Becauae we've made great strides in efficiency of said planes in the past few decades. Also its the travelers that want this or that, Airlines don't want anything.

cblconfederate 6y ago
You re talking about top speeds which have incremental improvemetns, but people's popular choices are not roadsters, but rather bulky and slow SUVs. And if we re talking about flying cars, we don't know the demand they 'd have, but even now people don't move outside of crowded cities just to avoid congestion. > efficiency of said planes And yet planes are slower and smaller. Sure, i m talking about what travelers want. Turns out people arent willing to pay extra for faster or bigger planes like the concorde or A380, and airlines adapted
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  > "slow SUVs" Thats a meaningless statement without numbers. How many people are buying SUVs? I live im Britain, there are hardly any SUV's, most of the world is not living in US. A roadster is not just a faster car, its tiny, useless and expensive to boot. It can't travel a mile down a road in Russia without getting stuck. It still can't (legally) exceed the speed limit. It's utility advantage over a compact is zero. If people bought roadsters, that still has no relevance to flying cars. People live in cities because that's where the well paid jobs are. Many mouve out when they hit pention. It's a completely separate set of tradeoffs that has nothing to do with the subject The whole argument about flying cars makes no sense. > people arent willing to pay extra for faster or bigger planes Its the other way round - people pay extra for smaller planes that take them directly to their destination, as opposed to taking a big plane and then change flights in a spoke and hub model. Also planes are not any slower, speeds of all subsonic planes have been very consistent.

sgt_obvious 6y ago

[Summary/Long:] "Low-hanging fruits been plucked, the use of space has had some meaningful productivity gains," "immigrants moving seems trading higher salaries for higher expenses," "inaccurate is posing the regime of exponential growth as a normal state of affairs that can be returned to If you assume it was going to last forever you get mathematically absurd results. For example if you assume 3% per year growth in wages over the next 1000 years then every worker is going to be making 274 quadrillion dollars per year. In 2000 years they are making 1.89x10^30 dollars. In 3000 years they are making 1.23x10^43 dollars. In 4000 years it’s 9x10^55 dollars, which is enough money to buy each atom that makes up the planet earth at a price of $100000 per atom." > "Does it sound obvious that some people can cope better with limitations than others?" [short/conclusion:] (painoptimized^^) Duh "We want flying cars" But... um How else do we get the (armored) anti-riot water cannon truck upstairs ? May robots carry'em ? P-: hint: it wasn't intentionally but "anecdotes that have a place in a 'bigger' picture" for a first look, wow...interestic thread, you have... (-: