16 ms·

The End of the Future (2011)

62 points by simonster 14y ago

wam 14y ago
"Today’s aged hippies no longer understand that there is a difference between the election of a black president and the creation of cheap solar energy; in their minds, the movement towards greater civil rights parallels general progress everywhere. Because of these ideological conflations and commitments, the 1960s Progressive Left cannot ask whether things actually might be getting worse. I wonder whether the endless fake cultural wars around identity politics are the main reason we have been able to ignore the tech slowdown for so long." Any sufficiently deluded rhetoric is indistinguishable from trolling. The "progressive left" has no such blinders. Nor does the "right," in my experience, or most other people. But you could easily reverse this and say that to Peter Thiel, technological progress automatically leads to progress in quality of life for everyone. Or, more disturbingly, that social justice is an irrelevant invention of identity politics. No: those are in actual conflict. The trick of identity politics is to subsume and trivialize real social problems, and it's Thiel who has fallen for it. This is essay is just weird. Thiel sees economic growth being appropriated to justify misguided and counterproductive social policies. That's not even wrong, it's just mundane to the point that it's disingenuous to say that anybody doesn't see that. Is this guy going to stockpile real nuclear waste under his house until a better solution is invented? No, he actually wants to build a floating city where he can make his own rules. A ten year old's fantasy, described by a man who can afford to ignore the practical consequences of his ideal future. This is antithetical to the hacker ethic. Good hackers look at big social and technological problems and think "how do we hack that into something better" instead of whining about how nobody else accepts their top-down solution. Real problems to attack: The pitfalls of implementing representative democracy via legislators who develop strong social ties with each other; how to build infrastructure without becoming Robert Moses; techniques for balancing competing basic needs in a large population; p=np; obesity epidemics; vaccination against destructive ideological memes like this one.
- ramanujan 14y ago
  he actually wants to build a floating city where he can make his own rules Well, suppose just for the sake of argument that seasteading is technologically feasible (you might consider cruise ships a proof of concept). Wouldn't it be good if there was a mechanism for people who strongly and irreconcilably disagree to separate? We have mechanisms for that on an individual level, as people can move from a city or job to a new city or job. We have mechanisms on the level of couples, like divorce. Perhaps most interestingly, we have mechanisms on the level of small to medium size organizations, in that one can start a new company. But right now there is no frontier, no way to peacefully start a new country. If you do believe that there are multiple stable equilibria for societal organization, then it should be a good thing if all the reds and the blues could just separate and self-govern rather than endlessly squabble. Apple is not Google, but both are successful; Singapore is not Sweden, but both are very nice countries. Things that are legal in one jurisdiction are illegal in another (e.g. porn is legal in Sweden but prostitution is not; it's the other way around in Singapore). Similarly, wouldn't it be better if all the fundamentalists could have their own island and teach prayer in their own schools without trying to make my child read the Bible? Or if the blue state residents could actually have a country in which stem cell research was legal without having to do backflips to accomodate religious objections? I ask only that you reconsider the theoretical merits of seasteading as a peaceful means for separation. If nothing else, it'll mean that all these guys go off and drown and stop trying to influence US elections :)
  - wam 14y ago
    Hmm, yeah, I take your point. Finding ways to coexist peacefully is a big problem and I think you're absolutely right to point out that existing strategies for that haven't scaled beyond a certain level. I'm a bit skeptical of seasteading both because it has an upper boundary of utility (size of the habitable ocean) and it seems like a really potent market externality generator (the ocean is already overfished and hugely polluted). But my first objection is more theoretical than practical, and the second one is true of the status quo. Perhaps seasteading is a good hack to a planet crowded with irreconcilable ideologies. Increased mobility between states could mitigate some of the harms of moral arbitrage. (There's a great long now foundation talk by Nils Gilman that bears directly on the problems of social differences between existing geographically bounded states.) I can dig that.
- loup-vaillant 14y ago
  > Real problems to attack: The pitfalls of implementing representative democracy via legislators who develop strong social ties with each other; […] On that one, we could start by dropping the word "democracy" altogether. "Democracy" used to refer to something like Athenian democracy. The people participated directly to the policy making of the city, or were drawn at random when it wasn't practical. They really have the power to rule themselves. What we have now used to be called "representative government". The people do not have the power to rule themselves, they instead elect an elite that presumably would be better at ruling than the people themselves. This is not much, but the mechanism is very similar to "intellectual property". Technically, the correct term is "monopoly". But it has bad connotation, while "property" has good connotation. "Democracy" has good connotation, "representative government" is neutral at best.
- deleted 14y ago
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guard-of-terra 14y ago
"We are no longer moving faster" This is weird, because right now you are reading my comment moments after I have typed it in, and we're likely are not even on the same continent.
zerostar07 14y ago
If you start with false premises, you end up with false conclusions. How is faster travelling a gauge of human progress today? If anything, we need to travel a lot less than we did in previous decades for reasons other than leisure. We can counter energy needs with green and sustainable living. 'More' is not necessarily better. The author may be unaware, but amazing and exciting things are happening in science, just not in computers or physics anymore (or alchemy, or agriculture, or psychoanalysis for that matter). We have more scientists and better tools than ever. There will be leaps, but they take decades to build up, genetic therapies and brain computer interfaces being 2 of them.
- drumdance 14y ago
  Yeah, the travel thing struck me as weird too. Even without supersonic travel, compared to even 10 years ago it's still much easier and cheaper for me to pick a destination anywhere in the world and be there within 72 hours. And in the developed world traveling with a smartphone is nirvana compared to before 2006 or so.
deleted 14y ago
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drumdance 14y ago
He lost me at "the collapse of art and literature after 1945"
washedup 14y ago
The most important point I gathered from this is that the pumping of stimulus in the form of fiat currency has no meaning if it doesn't spur new forms of technological breakthroughs. The value of the currency comes from a foundation, and through many convoluted layers of society, that is built on education, discovery, and passionate individuals. We have many such people in America, but that population has not been growing fast enough to hold up the rest of the country. The economy is simply a way to try and measure the value of those individuals and the advancements they create for everyone else. The problem starts once we assume that more money fixes the economic measurement. It depends on where the funds are directed, and I believe that supplementing these funds to banks is how the Fed tries to create "perceived" value and growth. This creates a loop in the financial world that comes in the form of inflation. Inflation isn't good or bad, it is a by product of the real problem: trying to increase the value of an economy without actually supporting the creation of economic value. Economy is a measure of growth and innovation, and using fiat currency to increase the value of the economy, or more simply put, the "measurement" of economy, is a convenient way of fudging the numbers. The value or measure of economy then becomes based on societal beliefs instead tangible truths (increase in knowledge, health, etc).
- makomk 14y ago
  I actually suspect inflation does fix aspects of the economy that do actually matter, just not ones that most of us think about because we're so used to them being the norm. Remember that money has no worth in itself - they're effectively tokens of exchange. Now, inflation is effectively a tax on sitting on your money and not actually putting it to use. If a lot of people do that it causes problems for the parts of the economy that are actually doing useful trade - suddenly there aren't enough tokens to go around to represent the actual business they're doing, and you get some really weird economic effects that neither I nor anyone else can wrap their heads around because we've never actually experienced them. (I believe this may have actually happened in the past.)
  - washedup 14y ago
    True, there is certainly a level of healthy or optimal inflation. Careful though, trade is only useful if people are willing to spend their money on it. If they choose to hold their money because they believe that the good/service/trade isn't beneficial to them or others, they should hold their money or put it somewhere else. If society decides that the good/service/trade isn't beneficial to itself, then it will work to extinguish it. It is dangerous to create artificial demand. I don't think society should be so afraid of losing jobs or industries, because it frees up labor and resources that can be devoted to more important ventures (importance in society's eyes, which isn't always the optimal solution, but adequate. Similar process that happens in evolution).
truethurts 14y ago
"Leverage is not a solution for scientific progress." But neither is PayPal an example of scientific progress. It's squarely in the same category as credit. A way of separating people from their money. Science is about learning and, hopefully, improving life through that which you find. Of course if you are involved with science for the sheer joy of discovery, improvement of life, yours, is virtually guaranteed. Theil needs to live life as a postdoc in a hard science before he can start invoking science as a call to action to get people to support his investments. National Review is not what it used to be. What would William F. Buckely Jr. say about posers like Theil? I'm pretty sure I know and it wouldn't be very flattering.
- washedup 14y ago
  That's true, but it doesn't make the statement less valid.
  - truethurts 14y ago
    But the statement is not applicable to PayPal nor many of Thiel's "Web 2.0" investments. Yet it is used in the column as if it were. NB Section III. Do you understand?
    - washedup 14y ago
      Yea I get that. He shouldn't use that statement to defend what he has done, and I agree with that. It got me thinking about many of the Web 2.0 funding and if is has been used for developments that improve society as a whole. Many times yes, but not always. Either way, that simple statement holds a lot of weight and is very interesting, regardless of how he uses it to defend his own ventures. You just have to ignore that part and think about the idea he is presenting. I guess I would categorize his defense of his own funding as "fluff", because it adds nothing to his arguments, but only makes himself seem a little selfish.
      - truethurts 14y ago
        It is a subtle thing. He is making some valid arguments. I mean who could argue that leverage/debt/credit is being abused? That is not exactly a new problem. It has been simmering for quite some time. And who in a modern economy could argue that scientific progress should not always be paramount? These are like noble truths. But then he is inserting some positive references about Google, the web and Silicon Valley. Strangely, (positive) references to what I would consider "real science" are missing. This is only how I see it. You may disagree. Who knows, maybe "Web 2.0" will propel the economy upwards, back to year 2000 levels. And capital investment will flow into "real science" again. The number of biotech startups will rise. Jobs in science will become plentiful. New drug candidates will fill development pipelines. And it will have all started with some "Web 2.0 fluff". Thanks in no small part to Silicon Valley venture capitalists like Theil.
guylhem 14y ago
I am quite sorry to say I agree with most of the article. The problem is not a lack of progress, but a very perceptible slowdown. If you prefer to take it that way, we are no longer accelerating. Trace our economic progress on a plot, and the derivative will not be positive. The problem is not so much in social programs or the leftist liberals, it's the burden they now represent and that we may not be able to afford for long if we do not start accelerating again. Watch the parallel with the decline of the Roman empire: "The historian Lactantius, who lived from 240 to 320, tells us that the problem was a bloated welfare state: The number of [welfare] recipients began to exceed the number of contributors [taxpayers] by so much that, with farmers' resources exhausted by the enormous size of the requisitions, fields became deserted" (http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/14/venezuela-inflation-price-controls-opinions-columnists-bruce-bartlett.html http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/14/venezuela-inflation-price-c...) It would be great to be accelerating again, if only to be able to pay for a welfare state since it does not seem possible to agree on dismantling it when we can't keep affording it. I may be ideologically biased, but I would much prefer an acceleration of progress (and to pay for a welfare state) than matching my ideological beliefs in the current slowdown and cutting the welfare state. Maybe it is cyclical - there have beens periods of slowdown before. In Atlas Shrugged, behind the libertarianism, you can see the same very dim view of the future when fascism and communism seemed like the only ways forward for the masses, a moment which must have frightened a lot of people (I sure would have been frightened!) Maybe our problem is the lack of hope in the future, which is reducing our will to live? I like the author conclusion a lot, because it catches the moment in our time when this happened - the hippies. He may be wrong in framing it on their political views - the ignition of culturals wars may have been a strong factor, but at least it contained a hope for a better future.
corporalagumbo 14y ago
This is just hokum. Collapse of art and literature? Soft totalitarianism of political correctness? The "sordid worlds" of popular entertainment? Thiel sounds likes just another rich guy losing all connection to reality and morphing into a know-it-all railing against popular tastes. What does he know? And all of this "nature red in tooth and claw" shit - "most human beings through the millennia have existed in a naturally brutal, unchanging, and impoverished state" - who is he to spit on thousands of generations of living, breathing people, and say their lives were shit? What gives him that right? The other thing I find strange is his talk of a still-to-come "energy revolution." Thiel sounds like just another false prophet of growth. I'm pretty sure we already had an energy revolution - fossil fuels. Massive reservoirs of stored energy that we discovered, learnt how to extract, process, and utilise, leading to a bewildering array of techniques and technologies. Does it dissapoint Thiel that the fruits of these achievements have gone to relatively simple things - more homes, cars, appliances, holidays and health care for more people. Does it disappoint him too that population and desire expansion soak up our technological advances? We live in the most resource-intensive society in history - and apparently it's still not enough. We need to grow some more. It hasn't worked before, but next time, it'll be enough, for sure. So what does Thiel want? Science to break the fundamental rules of physics? Science to break the fundamental principles of living species? Seems like Thiel is pretty uncomfortable with human eistence. He wants that 50s vision - clean, pristine, glowing, perfect, anxiety-free (a vision invented to sell vacuum cleaners to the most anxious generation in history, if I recall correctly.) Thiel is the classic modern: living in the most disease, conflict, death and accident-free society of all time, terrified of the physical realities of human existence, callously dismissive of 99% of all that humans have experienced on this planet, bitterly dismissive of the achievements of modern technology, blithely dismissive of popular tastes, wanting to have his cake (liberal human rights and the free market system) and eat it (techno-transcendence and mass adoption of his political views) too. My advice to Thiel would be to decide exactly what it is that he wants (more fundamental physics research, better solar/wind/algae, more noble pop culture, authoritarian domination by a cultural elite, space resource extraction, better education, better sci-fi novels), figure out what's at the heart of his chosen problem and (just like a good hacker) go and come up with an innovative solution to transform the problem himself. Either research or advocate or fund or all three. But he should stop trying to preach like this on the failures of our civilization, because he is just talking out of his ass.
Xcelerate 14y ago
Maybe I'm a little biased, but I think we're headed toward a new revolution in science. My work in molecular dynamics has convinced me that we aren't too far away from enough computing power to completely simulate many phenomena that are too complex to otherwise understand. Biology in particular is very complex, and I'm not entirely sure researchers can come up with models that are subtle and complete enough to accurately describe significant processes without becoming too mind-boggling for a human mind to grasp. On the other hand, if you can just simulate all these processes, drug development becomes a series of algorithms that optimize the desired effect while minimizing undesired effects. Some types of technology will require quantum computers. To simulate a system of N qubits using a classical computer requires 2^N states which quickly overpowers even the most advanced supercomputers. But if we can make even rudimentary quantum computers our simulation efforts will be significantly advanced (hey, we can factor the number 21, so it's a start!). To give you an idea of the current state of simulation research, we still require a lot of approximation models. What would you do if you wanted the most accurate simulation of a system you could get? Well, you would create one wavefunction of all the particles in the system and simulate its time evolution (Dirac equation). Of course, we can barely do this for simple atoms right now, so instead combinations of experimental data and basic QM simulations are used to get information about atomic/molecular interactions. For a large molecular system, these interactions are studied to create a new approximation model (like coarse-grain simulations). The problem is that each higher abstraction loses touch with experimental reality. Current biological simulations are really only "suggestive" instead of predictive. On the other hand, argon and nitrogen simulations match up almost exactly with experimental data. Again, as computing power develops, less abstractions will be necessary and simulations will become closer and closer to their experimental counterparts. To give an analogy for some of you computer graphics people, consider the huge number of "tricks" used in rasterization engines for video games to make the images look photorealistic. However, even a simple global illumination algorithm (bidirectional path tracing, photon mapping, Metropolis light transport) give incredibly realistic results but require far more time. It's a tradeoff between models (hard to come up with good ones) and computational capacity (but doesn't require much thinking).
adaml_623 14y ago
"Modern Western civilization stands on the twin plinths of science and technology. " central tenant of the article but kind of debateable. Western civilisation was around before the industrial revolution and esentially before science became science. I would say Western civilisation stands quite firmly on the plinth of a its primary forms of social organisation. Most notable and most important of these structures is the corporation. And it is the export of the corporation to other cultures that has enabled their major advances in the last century.
calinet6 14y ago
Peter Thiel. Enough said. Spare us your fantasy-world rhetoric, Peter. Nothing is worse than a libertarian who thinks his success is anything more than a statistically probable anecdote. “Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed.” —Herman Melville
felanthropop 14y ago
tl;dr summary: We're all screwed and the hippie progressives and tea partiers can't save us because they aren't being really innovative and getting to the heart of the problem. So first off- I agree. Second, this post is way too long, pisses off the left, and doesn't provide solutions that I had the attention for. So, I'll provide some. Put money into education and infrastructure, and teach our kids to be innovative, then get our debt fixed in a way that doesn't cause massive change and disable business. That isn't the Libertarian stance, but it is a the moderate stance, which no party supports these days.
- corporalagumbo 14y ago
  I agree in principle. But I think the assumption that pumping more money into fields like education will generate a substantive improvement has failed. The problem with our education systems is cultural, not fiscal. School does not teach children how to think and argue, it teaches them how to pass tests and coast. This article is a good example of the many many things that could be done other than pumping in more money to improve ed. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4557023 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4557023
nhashem 14y ago
The National Review is a conservative publication. It's unfortunate that an interesting hypothesis -- our society is no longer innovating and advancing as much as it used to -- is backed up by obviously conservative partisan points that are loosely based in fact at best, or otherwise complete fabrications. I was actually tempted to flag this post but instead, I think it will be more productive to respond. The power of government over private enterprises is the ability to guide innovation that may not provide any benefits in the short-term. There is a line of thinking that any spending on government projects is wasteful and inefficient, and for established technologies, that's true. I wouldn't want to have a government search engine instead of Google/Bing/Yahoo/DDG/et al all pushing themselves to get better and better. But do they exist without ARPANET? Does SpaceX exist without NASA? I doubt it. Also, for government spending on technology projects, the ROI is not based on the single project's performance but any ancillary benefits as well. Even if you think spending billions of dollars just to put a man on the moon is a waste, I doubt you can argue with the other technological innovation that spawned as a result (often by the private sector), such as LEDs, artifical limbs[0]. And for Thiel to address stagnant wages without mentioning income equality is so completely disingenuous. This graph -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IncomeInequality7.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IncomeInequality7.svg -- represents exactly what Thiel is talking about, except notice how two of the lines didn't plateau but increased quite dramatically. Did Thiel's wages only increase 0.7% per year? Again, I doubt it. My opinion is that the dramatic tax cuts starting in the 1980s have fed this income inequality, because the current design of our private sector is pretty much optimized to concentrate wealth. As a software engineer, if you've delivered a project that brought them thousands or millions of additional profits with little to no impact on your paycheck, there ya go. For our profession we're wisening up to not tolerating this (such as Patrick McKenzie's blog posts[1]), but other people aren't so lucky. For some sobering data points, look at these two graphs showing average Fortune 500 CEO pay from 1989 to now, and the value of the S&P 500 from 1989 to now -- http://www.forbes.com/lists/2011/12/ceo-pay-20-year-historical-chart.html http://www.forbes.com/lists/2011/12/ceo-pay-20-year-historic... https://www.google.com/finance/historical?cid=626307&startdate=1%2F1%2F1989&enddate=Sep+24%2C+2012&num=30&ei=671fUIiaLsigiALBeA https://www.google.com/finance/historical?cid=626307&sta.... The S&P 500 is up about 550% during this time, and so is CEO compensation. So our executives have had their paychecks increase exactly as much as the value of their companies, and the typical worker gets their annual 2.7% raise that barely beats inflation and gets fucked. Stagnant wages have nothing to do with the "end of the future," they have to do with executives getting paid in stock, thus need to optimize quarterly profits, thus have a direct incentive to pay their employees as little as possible because that would decrease profits, and thus their stock price. Henry Ford paid his employees well above the market rate at the time because he wanted them to be able to buy his cars -- that brand of capitalist is pretty much endangered now, and now a CEO sharing $3 million with his employees is considered big news[2]. Lastly, how does Thiel not mention the impact of corporate donations to political campaigns as hamstringing innovations? You think all the oil companies are just twiddling its thumbs, assuming at some point we'll stop wanting to run on our cars by burning prehistoric goo and they'll just shut down the business and go golfing? No, they're making sure as many politicians as it can will protect its interests, and that means pretty much blocking any government investment in renewable energy whenever possible. Do you think Mitt Romney is against Obama's new car MPG efficiency standards because of "onerous regulations," or that it will lead to less profits for his Republican friends at Haliburton?[5] Obama's much maligned "stimulus" -- the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009[3] -- allocated $27 billion towards renewable energy. While Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity smugly bring up Solyndra every time they can, they don't mention how the US increased the total amount of renewable energy production more in 2009-2011 than it did from 2002-2008[4]. Makes me wonder how much farther we'd be if we still lived in the days where we lauded the government for for making major technological bets that paid off with things like nuclear power, space travel, and the internet, instead of calling it "out of control government spending" in order to justify more tax cuts. Sorry to go all Rachel Maddow on you. For what it's worth, I'm not a communist or a socialist. I believe strongly in the free market and private enterprise. In the technology sector, we see countless examples of free market principles and competition giving us faster software, smarter phones, and cheaper computers. But I've always seen this as complementary to innovation funded by government. If VCs as we know them today existed in the 1960s, can you imagine one of them scratching his chin and saying, "So you want to put a man on the moon. How are you going to make money? Actually, don't worry about that, I'm sure it'll be awesome, here's billions of dollars." I tried to write a TL;DR here trying to sum up my points in this wall of text, but the TL;DR itself ended up being -- yep, too long -- so I'm just going to go with this: TL;DR: There's a lot of misinformation in Thiel's article that ended up reading to me as mostly conservative partisan bullshit, and I already get enough exposure to Fox News every time I visit my wife's parents. [0] http://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2008/tech_benefits.html http://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2008/tech_benefits.html [1] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ [2] http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2012/07/ceo-of-lenovo-gives-3-million-in-bonuses-to-employees/ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2012/07/ceo-of-lenovo-g... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvestment_Act_of_2009#Energy_efficiency_and_renewable_energy_research_and_investment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvestm... [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_United_States#Current_trends http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_United_... [5]http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/08/28/744811/romney-opposes-fuel-efficiency-standards-actually-moving-us-toward-energy-independence/ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/08/28/744811/romney-op...
anuraj 14y ago
That Peter Thiel is surprisingly blind to India and China's technological progress says it all. There are two forces at work here 1) world GDP growth deceleration 2) massive shift of economic base to emerging economies. The realignment can surely be expected to bring about massive innovations into these economies and that is not a bad thing at all.
- PKop 14y ago
  You haven't seen much from Thiel it seems. He addresses the lage growth of economies such as China extensively, and identifies that much of their growth is not adding new science or technology to collective knowledge but simply "catching up" to the U.S., others, with much "copying" of technological process. This, he says, implies that eventually once they reach parity, there will be inevitable slowdown and in addition does not solve the overall situation of slowdown in worldwide technological and scientific innovation. 2008 http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/9302 http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/9302 2010 http://lockerz.com/u/20643924/decalz/7182285/charlie_rose_peter_thiel_interview http://lockerz.com/u/20643924/decalz/7182285/charlie_rose_pe... EDIT: From summer 2012, very good: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/07/17/transcript-schmidt-thiel/ http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/07/17/transcript-schmidt-th...
  - anuraj 14y ago
    I have, but I don't think the analysis is worth it. He seems really shallow at it. The massive transformation technology has brought about in India and China cannot just be termed catchup. There are many innovations to list that western economies have not witnessed so far.

62 points by simonster 14y ago

wam 14y ago

"Today’s aged hippies no longer understand that there is a difference between the election of a black president and the creation of cheap solar energy; in their minds, the movement towards greater civil rights parallels general progress everywhere. Because of these ideological conflations and commitments, the 1960s Progressive Left cannot ask whether things actually might be getting worse. I wonder whether the endless fake cultural wars around identity politics are the main reason we have been able to ignore the tech slowdown for so long." Any sufficiently deluded rhetoric is indistinguishable from trolling. The "progressive left" has no such blinders. Nor does the "right," in my experience, or most other people. But you could easily reverse this and say that to Peter Thiel, technological progress automatically leads to progress in quality of life for everyone. Or, more disturbingly, that social justice is an irrelevant invention of identity politics. No: those are in actual conflict. The trick of identity politics is to subsume and trivialize real social problems, and it's Thiel who has fallen for it. This is essay is just weird. Thiel sees economic growth being appropriated to justify misguided and counterproductive social policies. That's not even wrong, it's just mundane to the point that it's disingenuous to say that anybody doesn't see that. Is this guy going to stockpile real nuclear waste under his house until a better solution is invented? No, he actually wants to build a floating city where he can make his own rules. A ten year old's fantasy, described by a man who can afford to ignore the practical consequences of his ideal future. This is antithetical to the hacker ethic. Good hackers look at big social and technological problems and think "how do we hack that into something better" instead of whining about how nobody else accepts their top-down solution. Real problems to attack: The pitfalls of implementing representative democracy via legislators who develop strong social ties with each other; how to build infrastructure without becoming Robert Moses; techniques for balancing competing basic needs in a large population; p=np; obesity epidemics; vaccination against destructive ideological memes like this one.

ramanujan 14y ago
he actually wants to build a floating city where he can make his own rules Well, suppose just for the sake of argument that seasteading is technologically feasible (you might consider cruise ships a proof of concept). Wouldn't it be good if there was a mechanism for people who strongly and irreconcilably disagree to separate? We have mechanisms for that on an individual level, as people can move from a city or job to a new city or job. We have mechanisms on the level of couples, like divorce. Perhaps most interestingly, we have mechanisms on the level of small to medium size organizations, in that one can start a new company. But right now there is no frontier, no way to peacefully start a new country. If you do believe that there are multiple stable equilibria for societal organization, then it should be a good thing if all the reds and the blues could just separate and self-govern rather than endlessly squabble. Apple is not Google, but both are successful; Singapore is not Sweden, but both are very nice countries. Things that are legal in one jurisdiction are illegal in another (e.g. porn is legal in Sweden but prostitution is not; it's the other way around in Singapore). Similarly, wouldn't it be better if all the fundamentalists could have their own island and teach prayer in their own schools without trying to make my child read the Bible? Or if the blue state residents could actually have a country in which stem cell research was legal without having to do backflips to accomodate religious objections? I ask only that you reconsider the theoretical merits of seasteading as a peaceful means for separation. If nothing else, it'll mean that all these guys go off and drown and stop trying to influence US elections :)
- wam 14y ago
  Hmm, yeah, I take your point. Finding ways to coexist peacefully is a big problem and I think you're absolutely right to point out that existing strategies for that haven't scaled beyond a certain level. I'm a bit skeptical of seasteading both because it has an upper boundary of utility (size of the habitable ocean) and it seems like a really potent market externality generator (the ocean is already overfished and hugely polluted). But my first objection is more theoretical than practical, and the second one is true of the status quo. Perhaps seasteading is a good hack to a planet crowded with irreconcilable ideologies. Increased mobility between states could mitigate some of the harms of moral arbitrage. (There's a great long now foundation talk by Nils Gilman that bears directly on the problems of social differences between existing geographically bounded states.) I can dig that.
loup-vaillant 14y ago
> Real problems to attack: The pitfalls of implementing representative democracy via legislators who develop strong social ties with each other; […] On that one, we could start by dropping the word "democracy" altogether. "Democracy" used to refer to something like Athenian democracy. The people participated directly to the policy making of the city, or were drawn at random when it wasn't practical. They really have the power to rule themselves. What we have now used to be called "representative government". The people do not have the power to rule themselves, they instead elect an elite that presumably would be better at ruling than the people themselves. This is not much, but the mechanism is very similar to "intellectual property". Technically, the correct term is "monopoly". But it has bad connotation, while "property" has good connotation. "Democracy" has good connotation, "representative government" is neutral at best.
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guard-of-terra 14y ago

"We are no longer moving faster" This is weird, because right now you are reading my comment moments after I have typed it in, and we're likely are not even on the same continent.

zerostar07 14y ago

If you start with false premises, you end up with false conclusions. How is faster travelling a gauge of human progress today? If anything, we need to travel a lot less than we did in previous decades for reasons other than leisure. We can counter energy needs with green and sustainable living. 'More' is not necessarily better. The author may be unaware, but amazing and exciting things are happening in science, just not in computers or physics anymore (or alchemy, or agriculture, or psychoanalysis for that matter). We have more scientists and better tools than ever. There will be leaps, but they take decades to build up, genetic therapies and brain computer interfaces being 2 of them.

drumdance 14y ago
Yeah, the travel thing struck me as weird too. Even without supersonic travel, compared to even 10 years ago it's still much easier and cheaper for me to pick a destination anywhere in the world and be there within 72 hours. And in the developed world traveling with a smartphone is nirvana compared to before 2006 or so.

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drumdance 14y ago

He lost me at "the collapse of art and literature after 1945"

washedup 14y ago

The most important point I gathered from this is that the pumping of stimulus in the form of fiat currency has no meaning if it doesn't spur new forms of technological breakthroughs. The value of the currency comes from a foundation, and through many convoluted layers of society, that is built on education, discovery, and passionate individuals. We have many such people in America, but that population has not been growing fast enough to hold up the rest of the country. The economy is simply a way to try and measure the value of those individuals and the advancements they create for everyone else. The problem starts once we assume that more money fixes the economic measurement. It depends on where the funds are directed, and I believe that supplementing these funds to banks is how the Fed tries to create "perceived" value and growth. This creates a loop in the financial world that comes in the form of inflation. Inflation isn't good or bad, it is a by product of the real problem: trying to increase the value of an economy without actually supporting the creation of economic value. Economy is a measure of growth and innovation, and using fiat currency to increase the value of the economy, or more simply put, the "measurement" of economy, is a convenient way of fudging the numbers. The value or measure of economy then becomes based on societal beliefs instead tangible truths (increase in knowledge, health, etc).

makomk 14y ago
I actually suspect inflation does fix aspects of the economy that do actually matter, just not ones that most of us think about because we're so used to them being the norm. Remember that money has no worth in itself - they're effectively tokens of exchange. Now, inflation is effectively a tax on sitting on your money and not actually putting it to use. If a lot of people do that it causes problems for the parts of the economy that are actually doing useful trade - suddenly there aren't enough tokens to go around to represent the actual business they're doing, and you get some really weird economic effects that neither I nor anyone else can wrap their heads around because we've never actually experienced them. (I believe this may have actually happened in the past.)
- washedup 14y ago
  True, there is certainly a level of healthy or optimal inflation. Careful though, trade is only useful if people are willing to spend their money on it. If they choose to hold their money because they believe that the good/service/trade isn't beneficial to them or others, they should hold their money or put it somewhere else. If society decides that the good/service/trade isn't beneficial to itself, then it will work to extinguish it. It is dangerous to create artificial demand. I don't think society should be so afraid of losing jobs or industries, because it frees up labor and resources that can be devoted to more important ventures (importance in society's eyes, which isn't always the optimal solution, but adequate. Similar process that happens in evolution).

truethurts 14y ago

"Leverage is not a solution for scientific progress." But neither is PayPal an example of scientific progress. It's squarely in the same category as credit. A way of separating people from their money. Science is about learning and, hopefully, improving life through that which you find. Of course if you are involved with science for the sheer joy of discovery, improvement of life, yours, is virtually guaranteed. Theil needs to live life as a postdoc in a hard science before he can start invoking science as a call to action to get people to support his investments. National Review is not what it used to be. What would William F. Buckely Jr. say about posers like Theil? I'm pretty sure I know and it wouldn't be very flattering.

washedup 14y ago
That's true, but it doesn't make the statement less valid.
- truethurts 14y ago
  But the statement is not applicable to PayPal nor many of Thiel's "Web 2.0" investments. Yet it is used in the column as if it were. NB Section III. Do you understand?
  - washedup 14y ago
    Yea I get that. He shouldn't use that statement to defend what he has done, and I agree with that. It got me thinking about many of the Web 2.0 funding and if is has been used for developments that improve society as a whole. Many times yes, but not always. Either way, that simple statement holds a lot of weight and is very interesting, regardless of how he uses it to defend his own ventures. You just have to ignore that part and think about the idea he is presenting. I guess I would categorize his defense of his own funding as "fluff", because it adds nothing to his arguments, but only makes himself seem a little selfish.
    - truethurts 14y ago
      It is a subtle thing. He is making some valid arguments. I mean who could argue that leverage/debt/credit is being abused? That is not exactly a new problem. It has been simmering for quite some time. And who in a modern economy could argue that scientific progress should not always be paramount? These are like noble truths. But then he is inserting some positive references about Google, the web and Silicon Valley. Strangely, (positive) references to what I would consider "real science" are missing. This is only how I see it. You may disagree. Who knows, maybe "Web 2.0" will propel the economy upwards, back to year 2000 levels. And capital investment will flow into "real science" again. The number of biotech startups will rise. Jobs in science will become plentiful. New drug candidates will fill development pipelines. And it will have all started with some "Web 2.0 fluff". Thanks in no small part to Silicon Valley venture capitalists like Theil.

guylhem 14y ago

I am quite sorry to say I agree with most of the article. The problem is not a lack of progress, but a very perceptible slowdown. If you prefer to take it that way, we are no longer accelerating. Trace our economic progress on a plot, and the derivative will not be positive. The problem is not so much in social programs or the leftist liberals, it's the burden they now represent and that we may not be able to afford for long if we do not start accelerating again. Watch the parallel with the decline of the Roman empire: "The historian Lactantius, who lived from 240 to 320, tells us that the problem was a bloated welfare state: The number of [welfare] recipients began to exceed the number of contributors [taxpayers] by so much that, with farmers' resources exhausted by the enormous size of the requisitions, fields became deserted" (http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/14/venezuela-inflation-price-controls-opinions-columnists-bruce-bartlett.html http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/14/venezuela-inflation-price-c...) It would be great to be accelerating again, if only to be able to pay for a welfare state since it does not seem possible to agree on dismantling it when we can't keep affording it. I may be ideologically biased, but I would much prefer an acceleration of progress (and to pay for a welfare state) than matching my ideological beliefs in the current slowdown and cutting the welfare state. Maybe it is cyclical - there have beens periods of slowdown before. In Atlas Shrugged, behind the libertarianism, you can see the same very dim view of the future when fascism and communism seemed like the only ways forward for the masses, a moment which must have frightened a lot of people (I sure would have been frightened!) Maybe our problem is the lack of hope in the future, which is reducing our will to live? I like the author conclusion a lot, because it catches the moment in our time when this happened - the hippies. He may be wrong in framing it on their political views - the ignition of culturals wars may have been a strong factor, but at least it contained a hope for a better future.

corporalagumbo 14y ago

This is just hokum. Collapse of art and literature? Soft totalitarianism of political correctness? The "sordid worlds" of popular entertainment? Thiel sounds likes just another rich guy losing all connection to reality and morphing into a know-it-all railing against popular tastes. What does he know? And all of this "nature red in tooth and claw" shit - "most human beings through the millennia have existed in a naturally brutal, unchanging, and impoverished state" - who is he to spit on thousands of generations of living, breathing people, and say their lives were shit? What gives him that right? The other thing I find strange is his talk of a still-to-come "energy revolution." Thiel sounds like just another false prophet of growth. I'm pretty sure we already had an energy revolution - fossil fuels. Massive reservoirs of stored energy that we discovered, learnt how to extract, process, and utilise, leading to a bewildering array of techniques and technologies. Does it dissapoint Thiel that the fruits of these achievements have gone to relatively simple things - more homes, cars, appliances, holidays and health care for more people. Does it disappoint him too that population and desire expansion soak up our technological advances? We live in the most resource-intensive society in history - and apparently it's still not enough. We need to grow some more. It hasn't worked before, but next time, it'll be enough, for sure. So what does Thiel want? Science to break the fundamental rules of physics? Science to break the fundamental principles of living species? Seems like Thiel is pretty uncomfortable with human eistence. He wants that 50s vision - clean, pristine, glowing, perfect, anxiety-free (a vision invented to sell vacuum cleaners to the most anxious generation in history, if I recall correctly.) Thiel is the classic modern: living in the most disease, conflict, death and accident-free society of all time, terrified of the physical realities of human existence, callously dismissive of 99% of all that humans have experienced on this planet, bitterly dismissive of the achievements of modern technology, blithely dismissive of popular tastes, wanting to have his cake (liberal human rights and the free market system) and eat it (techno-transcendence and mass adoption of his political views) too. My advice to Thiel would be to decide exactly what it is that he wants (more fundamental physics research, better solar/wind/algae, more noble pop culture, authoritarian domination by a cultural elite, space resource extraction, better education, better sci-fi novels), figure out what's at the heart of his chosen problem and (just like a good hacker) go and come up with an innovative solution to transform the problem himself. Either research or advocate or fund or all three. But he should stop trying to preach like this on the failures of our civilization, because he is just talking out of his ass.

Xcelerate 14y ago

Maybe I'm a little biased, but I think we're headed toward a new revolution in science. My work in molecular dynamics has convinced me that we aren't too far away from enough computing power to completely simulate many phenomena that are too complex to otherwise understand. Biology in particular is very complex, and I'm not entirely sure researchers can come up with models that are subtle and complete enough to accurately describe significant processes without becoming too mind-boggling for a human mind to grasp. On the other hand, if you can just simulate all these processes, drug development becomes a series of algorithms that optimize the desired effect while minimizing undesired effects. Some types of technology will require quantum computers. To simulate a system of N qubits using a classical computer requires 2^N states which quickly overpowers even the most advanced supercomputers. But if we can make even rudimentary quantum computers our simulation efforts will be significantly advanced (hey, we can factor the number 21, so it's a start!). To give you an idea of the current state of simulation research, we still require a lot of approximation models. What would you do if you wanted the most accurate simulation of a system you could get? Well, you would create one wavefunction of all the particles in the system and simulate its time evolution (Dirac equation). Of course, we can barely do this for simple atoms right now, so instead combinations of experimental data and basic QM simulations are used to get information about atomic/molecular interactions. For a large molecular system, these interactions are studied to create a new approximation model (like coarse-grain simulations). The problem is that each higher abstraction loses touch with experimental reality. Current biological simulations are really only "suggestive" instead of predictive. On the other hand, argon and nitrogen simulations match up almost exactly with experimental data. Again, as computing power develops, less abstractions will be necessary and simulations will become closer and closer to their experimental counterparts. To give an analogy for some of you computer graphics people, consider the huge number of "tricks" used in rasterization engines for video games to make the images look photorealistic. However, even a simple global illumination algorithm (bidirectional path tracing, photon mapping, Metropolis light transport) give incredibly realistic results but require far more time. It's a tradeoff between models (hard to come up with good ones) and computational capacity (but doesn't require much thinking).

adaml_623 14y ago

"Modern Western civilization stands on the twin plinths of science and technology. " central tenant of the article but kind of debateable. Western civilisation was around before the industrial revolution and esentially before science became science. I would say Western civilisation stands quite firmly on the plinth of a its primary forms of social organisation. Most notable and most important of these structures is the corporation. And it is the export of the corporation to other cultures that has enabled their major advances in the last century.

calinet6 14y ago

Peter Thiel. Enough said. Spare us your fantasy-world rhetoric, Peter. Nothing is worse than a libertarian who thinks his success is anything more than a statistically probable anecdote. “Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed.” —Herman Melville

felanthropop 14y ago

tl;dr summary: We're all screwed and the hippie progressives and tea partiers can't save us because they aren't being really innovative and getting to the heart of the problem. So first off- I agree. Second, this post is way too long, pisses off the left, and doesn't provide solutions that I had the attention for. So, I'll provide some. Put money into education and infrastructure, and teach our kids to be innovative, then get our debt fixed in a way that doesn't cause massive change and disable business. That isn't the Libertarian stance, but it is a the moderate stance, which no party supports these days.

corporalagumbo 14y ago
I agree in principle. But I think the assumption that pumping more money into fields like education will generate a substantive improvement has failed. The problem with our education systems is cultural, not fiscal. School does not teach children how to think and argue, it teaches them how to pass tests and coast. This article is a good example of the many many things that could be done other than pumping in more money to improve ed. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4557023 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4557023

nhashem 14y ago

The National Review is a conservative publication. It's unfortunate that an interesting hypothesis -- our society is no longer innovating and advancing as much as it used to -- is backed up by obviously conservative partisan points that are loosely based in fact at best, or otherwise complete fabrications. I was actually tempted to flag this post but instead, I think it will be more productive to respond. The power of government over private enterprises is the ability to guide innovation that may not provide any benefits in the short-term. There is a line of thinking that any spending on government projects is wasteful and inefficient, and for established technologies, that's true. I wouldn't want to have a government search engine instead of Google/Bing/Yahoo/DDG/et al all pushing themselves to get better and better. But do they exist without ARPANET? Does SpaceX exist without NASA? I doubt it. Also, for government spending on technology projects, the ROI is not based on the single project's performance but any ancillary benefits as well. Even if you think spending billions of dollars just to put a man on the moon is a waste, I doubt you can argue with the other technological innovation that spawned as a result (often by the private sector), such as LEDs, artifical limbs[0]. And for Thiel to address stagnant wages without mentioning income equality is so completely disingenuous. This graph -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IncomeInequality7.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IncomeInequality7.svg -- represents exactly what Thiel is talking about, except notice how two of the lines didn't plateau but increased quite dramatically. Did Thiel's wages only increase 0.7% per year? Again, I doubt it. My opinion is that the dramatic tax cuts starting in the 1980s have fed this income inequality, because the current design of our private sector is pretty much optimized to concentrate wealth. As a software engineer, if you've delivered a project that brought them thousands or millions of additional profits with little to no impact on your paycheck, there ya go. For our profession we're wisening up to not tolerating this (such as Patrick McKenzie's blog posts[1]), but other people aren't so lucky. For some sobering data points, look at these two graphs showing average Fortune 500 CEO pay from 1989 to now, and the value of the S&P 500 from 1989 to now -- http://www.forbes.com/lists/2011/12/ceo-pay-20-year-historical-chart.html http://www.forbes.com/lists/2011/12/ceo-pay-20-year-historic... https://www.google.com/finance/historical?cid=626307&startdate=1%2F1%2F1989&enddate=Sep+24%2C+2012&num=30&ei=671fUIiaLsigiALBeA https://www.google.com/finance/historical?cid=626307&sta.... The S&P 500 is up about 550% during this time, and so is CEO compensation. So our executives have had their paychecks increase exactly as much as the value of their companies, and the typical worker gets their annual 2.7% raise that barely beats inflation and gets fucked. Stagnant wages have nothing to do with the "end of the future," they have to do with executives getting paid in stock, thus need to optimize quarterly profits, thus have a direct incentive to pay their employees as little as possible because that would decrease profits, and thus their stock price. Henry Ford paid his employees well above the market rate at the time because he wanted them to be able to buy his cars -- that brand of capitalist is pretty much endangered now, and now a CEO sharing $3 million with his employees is considered big news[2]. Lastly, how does Thiel not mention the impact of corporate donations to political campaigns as hamstringing innovations? You think all the oil companies are just twiddling its thumbs, assuming at some point we'll stop wanting to run on our cars by burning prehistoric goo and they'll just shut down the business and go golfing? No, they're making sure as many politicians as it can will protect its interests, and that means pretty much blocking any government investment in renewable energy whenever possible. Do you think Mitt Romney is against Obama's new car MPG efficiency standards because of "onerous regulations," or that it will lead to less profits for his Republican friends at Haliburton?[5] Obama's much maligned "stimulus" -- the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009[3] -- allocated $27 billion towards renewable energy. While Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity smugly bring up Solyndra every time they can, they don't mention how the US increased the total amount of renewable energy production more in 2009-2011 than it did from 2002-2008[4]. Makes me wonder how much farther we'd be if we still lived in the days where we lauded the government for for making major technological bets that paid off with things like nuclear power, space travel, and the internet, instead of calling it "out of control government spending" in order to justify more tax cuts. Sorry to go all Rachel Maddow on you. For what it's worth, I'm not a communist or a socialist. I believe strongly in the free market and private enterprise. In the technology sector, we see countless examples of free market principles and competition giving us faster software, smarter phones, and cheaper computers. But I've always seen this as complementary to innovation funded by government. If VCs as we know them today existed in the 1960s, can you imagine one of them scratching his chin and saying, "So you want to put a man on the moon. How are you going to make money? Actually, don't worry about that, I'm sure it'll be awesome, here's billions of dollars." I tried to write a TL;DR here trying to sum up my points in this wall of text, but the TL;DR itself ended up being -- yep, too long -- so I'm just going to go with this: TL;DR: There's a lot of misinformation in Thiel's article that ended up reading to me as mostly conservative partisan bullshit, and I already get enough exposure to Fox News every time I visit my wife's parents. [0] http://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2008/tech_benefits.html http://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2008/tech_benefits.html [1] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ [2] http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2012/07/ceo-of-lenovo-gives-3-million-in-bonuses-to-employees/ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2012/07/ceo-of-lenovo-g... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvestment_Act_of_2009#Energy_efficiency_and_renewable_energy_research_and_investment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvestm... [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_United_States#Current_trends http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_United_... [5]http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/08/28/744811/romney-opposes-fuel-efficiency-standards-actually-moving-us-toward-energy-independence/ http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/08/28/744811/romney-op...

anuraj 14y ago

That Peter Thiel is surprisingly blind to India and China's technological progress says it all. There are two forces at work here 1) world GDP growth deceleration 2) massive shift of economic base to emerging economies. The realignment can surely be expected to bring about massive innovations into these economies and that is not a bad thing at all.

PKop 14y ago
You haven't seen much from Thiel it seems. He addresses the lage growth of economies such as China extensively, and identifies that much of their growth is not adding new science or technology to collective knowledge but simply "catching up" to the U.S., others, with much "copying" of technological process. This, he says, implies that eventually once they reach parity, there will be inevitable slowdown and in addition does not solve the overall situation of slowdown in worldwide technological and scientific innovation. 2008 http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/9302 http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/9302 2010 http://lockerz.com/u/20643924/decalz/7182285/charlie_rose_peter_thiel_interview http://lockerz.com/u/20643924/decalz/7182285/charlie_rose_pe... EDIT: From summer 2012, very good: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/07/17/transcript-schmidt-thiel/ http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/07/17/transcript-schmidt-th...
- anuraj 14y ago
  I have, but I don't think the analysis is worth it. He seems really shallow at it. The massive transformation technology has brought about in India and China cannot just be termed catchup. There are many innovations to list that western economies have not witnessed so far.