6 ms·

Kasparov and Thiel: Our dangerous illusion of tech progress

40 points by salar 14y ago

salar 14y ago
Paywall circumvention: http://www.google.com/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2F8adeca00-2996-11e2-a5ca-00144feabdc0.html%3Fftcamp%3Dpublished_links%252Frss%252Fcomment%252Ffeed%252F%252Fproduct%23axzz2BfuakLjE http://www.google.com/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms...
- CaptConrado 14y ago
  Thanks
- brendonjohn 14y ago
  damn, you beat me to it.
- Groxx 14y ago
  Not working for me :/
mindstab 14y ago
I think this article must come from a point of incredible ignorance about most of what science has been up to. Across the board there have been incredible advances in chemistry, physics, quantum physics (which allows us our tiny powerful processors in things like cellphones and laptops and tablets), commercial aerospace, normal aerospace (jet-set lifestyle was a term for rich in the 60s because you could afford to fly, now EVERYONE flies, we just haven't increased the speed for a bunch of well laid out elsewhere reasons[1]). Also, we're on the verge of self driving cars. Further it misunderstands progress in general. It seems to think progress in all fields must be linear so big advancements in new fields of days of yore should still be advancing at such rates today ignoring rapidly growing complexity as the field matures. Computers, the newest field, has advanced the most recently because it is still relatively new. This kind of thinking is just wrong and somewhat old fashioned. Just because we didn't get the future that star trek and pulp 60's sci-fi promised us doesn't mean we collectively screwed up somehow. The refrain "where's my flying car" or "where's my jetpack" is just misguided. We are living in the future, just not one predicted. Transportation speeds stopped increasing rapidly and went from exponential back to linear to nearly stalled, but as mentioned they scaled from a few rich to all. And there are good reasons for this, not cowardice etc. Meanwhile unexpectedly computation and communication technology exploded. I can video chat with everyone I know anywhere in the world for effectively free. I carry around a better than star trek communicator. This is old man thinking, stuck in one view of how the world was going to be and ignoring how the world is. It's ignorant and offensive and misguided. There is very little merit in this and it's ironic he's accusing the candidates of ignoring reality. Further reference: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/the_myth_of_the_starship.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/the_myth... http://warren-ellis.livejournal.com/92053.html http://warren-ellis.livejournal.com/92053.html http://www.doktorsleepless.com/index.php/You_Will_Never_Own_a_Jetpack:_Warren_Ellis%E2%80%99_Doktor_Sleepless_by_Steven_Shaviro http://www.doktorsleepless.com/index.php/You_Will_Never_Own_...
- 001sky 14y ago
  I think this 'critique' is actually not well stated. confusing for example innovation (0,1) with scaled deployment (1 to N). Also, self driving cars are not impressive: go to LA. LA has been a disaster since the 1930s. Part of the problem is that what has been done to LA cannot ever be reversed, from the perspective of environmental damage, sociology, or sheer economics. The world has made choices with a certain element of path-dependency: yesterdays technology holding back future progress. Its not about the Jestson's per-se; its about being stuck with boat-anchor technology from the point of the development of actual human interaction. Do you really want to be stuck in a self-driving car in the 405 at rush hour? Or would you rather be walking to work, or taking a skateboard across a perfectly smooth elevated sidewalk on a clear night in Santa Monica (made up example, but feasible and likely more pleasant). Making faster, more powerful cars and bigger freeways did not eliminate traffic. Just the opposite. Self driving cars will have to overcome the social problem, but for this you likely need actual or orthogonal innovation. Not just more of the same, easier, less work, etc.
  - mindstab 14y ago
    Ok but that's not really what he's talking about. I totally agree that being able to have everyone walk to work may be a better goal than self driving cars and sadly because of past choices our best option is probably demolishing cities (not terribly feasible). However the status quo doesn't have to be maintained, rezoning and incremental new development can fix much of this (look outside American city development) but now we are also dangerously off topic. Thiel says "the world has willingly retreated from a culture of risk and exploration towards one of safety and regulation. We have discarded a century of can-do ambition built on rapid advances in technology and replaced it with a cautiousness far too satisfied with incremental improvements." This is his standard libertarian line. More risk, less big government and safety nets. Putting a gun to more peoples heads (metaphorically) will somehow instantly make the world better, create more innovation, and etc etc etc. (There's actually some pretty good data backed evidence instead of gut feeling backed evidence that good social safety nets promote a healthier society that’s more innovative that came up in coursera's Michigan University Model Thinking class [https://www.coursera.org/course/modelthinking] https://www.coursera.org/course/modelthinking]) And he also buys into that false thinking of "yesterday was better" when he talks about "However, we bounded forward in the 1950s and 1960s thanks to a generation of scientists who did not just believe in a better future but invented it" and "The genuine progress in IT from the 1970s up to the 2000s masked the relative stagnation of energy, transportation, space, materials, agriculture and medicine." I don't buy this narrative at all for the reasons stated above. As I pointed out above, I don't buy his perceived stagnation and lack of innovation and I strongly don't buy into his current fears and solutions. Also, this is pretty much general libertarian/Peter Theil philosophy very loosely redressed to try and seem new and relevant in light of the recent election, but it's the same old view. In that light, some people agree with it, and some don't but there's nothing new here in this article either.
iyulaev 14y ago
This echoes TGS and such. OK. You've convinced me. But the article concludes without giving any constructive suggestion, other than some vague notion that youngsters today should really innovate. Give me some more concrete advice. What do?
- gsibble 14y ago
  I think that's the point. Invention and technological innovation doesn't come with concrete advice. It requires risk and individuals pushing their visions forward along their own path.
  - MaysonL 14y ago
    Which is why it took a government regulated monopoly to come up with Unix and the transistor...
- daninus14 14y ago
  What to do? IMHO you have to kill all the regulation and the government mafia (yeah, that's what it is) preventing new businesses. I know of many people that have not started companies in the US because of the limitations for immigration (these people were computer scientists, mathematicians, physicists, some undergrad, some with PhDs). Examples abound. Beer is one that I like since I tried to start a brewery with a few chemical engineering friends a while back in Georgia. There is a regulation that breweries can only sell to distributors, and distributors can only sell to retail stores, and retail stores, pubs, and restaurants are the only entities allowed to sell alcohol. Heck, if you brew your own beer and it's more than 50 gallons a year (that's 9 batches) you can go to jail for up to 20 years. We stopped our project because of the ridiculous regulations. We had an idea of how bad it was going in, but it was beyond our expectations. I met more than 200 people that brewed on a consistent basis much superior beers than 90% of what you can get in the market (the 10% were imports), who would love to start a brewery but couldn't. They worked in the different layers of the distributors and restaurants, with their ideas crushed. This was just an example, in nearly every industry, including agriculture and manufacturing, this is the case. You want innovation, you have to fight against the ever growing crony government you have that plays special favors to each industry in countless ways to go towards a free market and allow competition. There are no incentives to innovate. You may say my beer example is outdated, well look at Dodd Frank with the banking industry, look at the federal reserve system which is destroying the money markets and causing the financial bubbles. Peter Thiel mentions that technological innovation is a way to leave recessions faster. He knows how to avoid them altogether, but suggesting ending the federal reserve is so politically incorrect (ever heard a democrat or republican even talk about this who is not alienated by his own party) that it has become a waste of time. The free market is the answer. There is more regulation in the US than in Sweden by the way, which is usually quoted as a Socialist state. The US is far more regulated than Sweden, even in healthcare and education!
001sky 14y ago
On the campuses of Google and Apple, high-design bathrooms or espresso bars might look very different from the average non-tech company but their balance sheets show the same vast piles of idle cash you’ll find at Pfizer or Chevron. If we were living in an era of accelerating technological progress, Apple could reinvest its returns in new projects instead of fighting patent battles over old ones while moonlighting as the world’s biggest hedge fund. -- Insiders with idle cash: The sound of silence speaking a thousand words.
Mvandenbergh 14y ago
First of all, all respect to Peter Thiel. Everyone I know who has worked with him has had nothing but good things to say about him. Having said that, it is worth noting that for all his dedication to the idea of inventing disruptive technologies that has not been his own path to success. Paypal is a pretty boring financial transaction processor, he ran a hedge fund for a while (yawn!), his investment in Facebook paid off big. Where is the disruption there? Facebook is great, but it wasn't even the first social network. A quick glance at the companies in which he personally has invested reveals lots of good investments - in fairly typical incrementalist companies! I know FF has invested in SpaceX which has a legitimate claim to being the kind of company he wants to see more of, but that isn't how he made his money in the first place. My problem with the substance of the article is that it takes for granted that we can always invent wholly new things in every possible category or industry. Let's take transport as an example. Did people stop innovating in transportation because it wasn't profitable, because they were afraid? Nonsense. First of all, they didn't stop innovating. There weren't 350 kph trains in 1940 and any car made more than 30 years ago is a comically underpowered death-trap compared to an entry level car today. Second, there are physical laws that simply constrain the phase space of possible solutions. Every new discovery can change those boundaries somewhat and every now and then someone will bring new ideas together to simply invent a brand new transport modality. However, fundamentally the densities and coefficients of friction of solid surfaces, air, and water drive the kinds of transport we can can come up with.
- gsibble 14y ago
  At the time they started PayPal it was anything but a boring financial transaction processor. It pretty much changed the face of online payments.
  - seanlinehan 14y ago
    Not to mention that Paypal was started with the intent of being a revolutionary currency... one that wasn't bounded by any government. It failed at its revolution but made a lot of money instead.
- duschang27 14y ago
guylhem 14y ago
This is unfortunately very true. We don't have a stagnation of tech progress, we keep going forward- but the grow rate seems to be decreasing. Some people apparently think existing innovation (ex: mindstab comment) suffice to disprove this. It's not. Just look at the 40 or 60 to see some real innovation - like antibiotics, nuclear bombs- i.e. paradigm changing innovation in various domains. What did we got lately? Computers, internet, cellphone, social networking - ok, but it's a bit short, and it's mostly in one domain only. IMHO, for any self consistent conservative, it's far more worrisome than theoretical weather change, especially because we got used to this fast pace of innovation and growth, and there have built the core of our societies on such assumptions (interest rate for money, population grow for social security, etc) - like, we are expecting technology will improve so that we get new ways problematic (orbital mirrors, tweaking the albedo, ...) to fight climate change if it is indeed man made and The idea of a deceleration of progress has some merit - to me it's like multiple warnings indicators lighting up, even if I don't know any theory to explain it, except a reduction of the "will to live" in western societies (Nietzsche style)
- stcredzero 14y ago
  Just look at the 40 or 60 to see some real innovation - like antibiotics, nuclear bombs- i.e. paradigm changing innovation in various domains. Thorium reactors have the potential to be paradigm changing.
  - caretu 14y ago
    Not really. It would just be an incremental improvement in nuclear fission. A traveling wave reactor would probably be better as it would use existing depleted uranium as fuel, and would produce abundant energy while making uranium stockpiles less of a problem. Not even fusion would be paradigm changing, unless its cold fusion
    - AlexandrB 14y ago
      By that logic, nuclear energy was not paradigm changing. Essentially we're still just heating water and using it to move a generator - just like coal or oil power.
pyrotechnick 14y ago
HERE BE DRAGONS * Paywall * Forced registration * Advertisements galore * Popups It's laughable anyone would consider an organisation willing to produce this abomination of a website an authority on technical progress. I'm tremendously disappointed this had made the front page.
- fragsworth 14y ago
  I can't even see how you're supposed to get to the article after closing one of their popups. It just goes to their front page.
  - wmf 14y ago
    Did you read the popup saying you need to register?
brendonjohn 14y ago
"FT.com articles are only available to registered users and subscribers" ....Thankyou to the google cache for providing the article. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/8adeca00-2996-11e2-a5ca-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2BgXphivT http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/8adeca00-2996-11e2-a5ca-00144...
jroid 14y ago
So, does that mean singularity won't happen anytime soon ? :-(
- ynniv 14y ago
  Nah, Moore's law is still on schedule: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57541381-76/ibm-brings-carbon-nanotube-based-computers-a-step-closer/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57541381-76/ibm-brings-car...
guelo 14y ago
It's weird for a libertarian to be praising the progress made in the 50s and 60s, a lot of which was the result of huge defense-related government investments. His economic history doesn't make sense either, implying that there were no bubbles and busts before 1970. And, as others have said, he is minimizing huge gains in a bunch of other fields. Weird article.
- dr_doom 14y ago
  Was the united states really spending more on defense during the 50's and 60's than it is now? I think we spent over a trillion dollars this year.
  - mng2 14y ago
    As a fraction of GDP, yes.
- guylhem 14y ago
  It not weird - I'm a libertarian too and I'm worried about the situation in the west. It's bad when you notice that even with big government contracts the growth was much better. Something is happening - we just don't know what. We each have your pet ideas, based on our ideologies; IMHO the welfare state demotivation is suspect #1, but I'm ready to consider other hypothesis - even those that include government spending.
btilly 14y ago
Everyone tends to respect Kasparov because of his amazing chess prowess. He is also a very active and involved person in the world - just look at his activities in Russian politics. Unfortunately when you get outside his area of expertise, he often combines confidence and ignorance. The best example is http://www.revisedhistory.org/view-garry-kasparov.php http://www.revisedhistory.org/view-garry-kasparov.php where he tries to argue that about a thousand years of history did not happen. His arguments are, of course, all bunk. As will be obvious to anyone who has passing familiarity with the serious famines due to climate change in the 1300s, the impact of the British agricultural revolution on food production in the 1700s, and the widespread use of abacuses for calculation until the introduction of Arabic notation. This article is superficially reasonable, but similarly bad. Major tech advances in the recent past - many of which we'll see changing our future - include gigantic magnetoresistance, practical genome mapping, memresisters, continued improvements in battery technology and practical analysis of large data sets. (Enabling technologies like facial recognition, automated translation, and the like.) The more you look, the more there is to be amazed at. Did you know that there is a serious effort to create a handheld device that can take a small tissue sample and identify any species on Earth? We've done DNA analysis on a t-rex, and there are people trying to get funding to bring mammoths back to life. Experiencing it day by day we take it for granted. But looking back from the perspective of 50 years from now, the list of changes will be major.
chrito 14y ago
The fundamental point around "incrementalism" makes a lot of sense. Even government is largely incremental these days... the margin of winning the presidency seemed so small that it probably boiled downed to a series of micro-optimizations. If you buy that... why would a great micro-optimizer run the country any differently? And even with technological progress poster-child Apple... the big outstanding question is whether Tim Cook will end up turning the company in to a micro-optimization that converges toward it's current local maxima? But maybe it's all just cyclical... once all the low hanging fruit is picked over 1000 of times, the world at large will naturally be forced to be less incremental.
AbhijeetK 14y ago
I think that they're making a very valid point. While there is a lot of innovation and really interesting research taking place in labs, I don't know how much of it is being translated into the marketplace. Most of the investments being made in tech these days seem to be in web 2.0 companies claiming to be 'Uber for ballroom dancers' or 'Instagram for nurses' or something of the sort. Not that such investments are a bad thing, they produce a lot of cool products. But barring a few companies like General Fusion and SpaceX, I haven't heard much about startups trying to tackle truly crazy and massive problems - most companies you read about in the tech press tend to be much more 'cool idea' than 'grand idea'. If anybody has more examples of startups trying to tackle paradigm-changing problems, can you share them here?

40 points by salar 14y ago

salar 14y ago

Paywall circumvention: http://www.google.com/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2F8adeca00-2996-11e2-a5ca-00144feabdc0.html%3Fftcamp%3Dpublished_links%252Frss%252Fcomment%252Ffeed%252F%252Fproduct%23axzz2BfuakLjE http://www.google.com/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms...

CaptConrado 14y ago
Thanks
brendonjohn 14y ago
damn, you beat me to it.
Groxx 14y ago
Not working for me :/

mindstab 14y ago

I think this article must come from a point of incredible ignorance about most of what science has been up to. Across the board there have been incredible advances in chemistry, physics, quantum physics (which allows us our tiny powerful processors in things like cellphones and laptops and tablets), commercial aerospace, normal aerospace (jet-set lifestyle was a term for rich in the 60s because you could afford to fly, now EVERYONE flies, we just haven't increased the speed for a bunch of well laid out elsewhere reasons[1]). Also, we're on the verge of self driving cars. Further it misunderstands progress in general. It seems to think progress in all fields must be linear so big advancements in new fields of days of yore should still be advancing at such rates today ignoring rapidly growing complexity as the field matures. Computers, the newest field, has advanced the most recently because it is still relatively new. This kind of thinking is just wrong and somewhat old fashioned. Just because we didn't get the future that star trek and pulp 60's sci-fi promised us doesn't mean we collectively screwed up somehow. The refrain "where's my flying car" or "where's my jetpack" is just misguided. We are living in the future, just not one predicted. Transportation speeds stopped increasing rapidly and went from exponential back to linear to nearly stalled, but as mentioned they scaled from a few rich to all. And there are good reasons for this, not cowardice etc. Meanwhile unexpectedly computation and communication technology exploded. I can video chat with everyone I know anywhere in the world for effectively free. I carry around a better than star trek communicator. This is old man thinking, stuck in one view of how the world was going to be and ignoring how the world is. It's ignorant and offensive and misguided. There is very little merit in this and it's ironic he's accusing the candidates of ignoring reality. Further reference: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/the_myth_of_the_starship.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/the_myth... http://warren-ellis.livejournal.com/92053.html http://warren-ellis.livejournal.com/92053.html http://www.doktorsleepless.com/index.php/You_Will_Never_Own_a_Jetpack:_Warren_Ellis%E2%80%99_Doktor_Sleepless_by_Steven_Shaviro http://www.doktorsleepless.com/index.php/You_Will_Never_Own_...

001sky 14y ago
I think this 'critique' is actually not well stated. confusing for example innovation (0,1) with scaled deployment (1 to N). Also, self driving cars are not impressive: go to LA. LA has been a disaster since the 1930s. Part of the problem is that what has been done to LA cannot ever be reversed, from the perspective of environmental damage, sociology, or sheer economics. The world has made choices with a certain element of path-dependency: yesterdays technology holding back future progress. Its not about the Jestson's per-se; its about being stuck with boat-anchor technology from the point of the development of actual human interaction. Do you really want to be stuck in a self-driving car in the 405 at rush hour? Or would you rather be walking to work, or taking a skateboard across a perfectly smooth elevated sidewalk on a clear night in Santa Monica (made up example, but feasible and likely more pleasant). Making faster, more powerful cars and bigger freeways did not eliminate traffic. Just the opposite. Self driving cars will have to overcome the social problem, but for this you likely need actual or orthogonal innovation. Not just more of the same, easier, less work, etc.
- mindstab 14y ago
  Ok but that's not really what he's talking about. I totally agree that being able to have everyone walk to work may be a better goal than self driving cars and sadly because of past choices our best option is probably demolishing cities (not terribly feasible). However the status quo doesn't have to be maintained, rezoning and incremental new development can fix much of this (look outside American city development) but now we are also dangerously off topic. Thiel says "the world has willingly retreated from a culture of risk and exploration towards one of safety and regulation. We have discarded a century of can-do ambition built on rapid advances in technology and replaced it with a cautiousness far too satisfied with incremental improvements." This is his standard libertarian line. More risk, less big government and safety nets. Putting a gun to more peoples heads (metaphorically) will somehow instantly make the world better, create more innovation, and etc etc etc. (There's actually some pretty good data backed evidence instead of gut feeling backed evidence that good social safety nets promote a healthier society that’s more innovative that came up in coursera's Michigan University Model Thinking class [https://www.coursera.org/course/modelthinking] https://www.coursera.org/course/modelthinking]) And he also buys into that false thinking of "yesterday was better" when he talks about "However, we bounded forward in the 1950s and 1960s thanks to a generation of scientists who did not just believe in a better future but invented it" and "The genuine progress in IT from the 1970s up to the 2000s masked the relative stagnation of energy, transportation, space, materials, agriculture and medicine." I don't buy this narrative at all for the reasons stated above. As I pointed out above, I don't buy his perceived stagnation and lack of innovation and I strongly don't buy into his current fears and solutions. Also, this is pretty much general libertarian/Peter Theil philosophy very loosely redressed to try and seem new and relevant in light of the recent election, but it's the same old view. In that light, some people agree with it, and some don't but there's nothing new here in this article either.

iyulaev 14y ago

This echoes TGS and such. OK. You've convinced me. But the article concludes without giving any constructive suggestion, other than some vague notion that youngsters today should really innovate. Give me some more concrete advice. What do?

gsibble 14y ago
I think that's the point. Invention and technological innovation doesn't come with concrete advice. It requires risk and individuals pushing their visions forward along their own path.
- MaysonL 14y ago
  Which is why it took a government regulated monopoly to come up with Unix and the transistor...
daninus14 14y ago
What to do? IMHO you have to kill all the regulation and the government mafia (yeah, that's what it is) preventing new businesses. I know of many people that have not started companies in the US because of the limitations for immigration (these people were computer scientists, mathematicians, physicists, some undergrad, some with PhDs). Examples abound. Beer is one that I like since I tried to start a brewery with a few chemical engineering friends a while back in Georgia. There is a regulation that breweries can only sell to distributors, and distributors can only sell to retail stores, and retail stores, pubs, and restaurants are the only entities allowed to sell alcohol. Heck, if you brew your own beer and it's more than 50 gallons a year (that's 9 batches) you can go to jail for up to 20 years. We stopped our project because of the ridiculous regulations. We had an idea of how bad it was going in, but it was beyond our expectations. I met more than 200 people that brewed on a consistent basis much superior beers than 90% of what you can get in the market (the 10% were imports), who would love to start a brewery but couldn't. They worked in the different layers of the distributors and restaurants, with their ideas crushed. This was just an example, in nearly every industry, including agriculture and manufacturing, this is the case. You want innovation, you have to fight against the ever growing crony government you have that plays special favors to each industry in countless ways to go towards a free market and allow competition. There are no incentives to innovate. You may say my beer example is outdated, well look at Dodd Frank with the banking industry, look at the federal reserve system which is destroying the money markets and causing the financial bubbles. Peter Thiel mentions that technological innovation is a way to leave recessions faster. He knows how to avoid them altogether, but suggesting ending the federal reserve is so politically incorrect (ever heard a democrat or republican even talk about this who is not alienated by his own party) that it has become a waste of time. The free market is the answer. There is more regulation in the US than in Sweden by the way, which is usually quoted as a Socialist state. The US is far more regulated than Sweden, even in healthcare and education!

001sky 14y ago

On the campuses of Google and Apple, high-design bathrooms or espresso bars might look very different from the average non-tech company but their balance sheets show the same vast piles of idle cash you’ll find at Pfizer or Chevron. If we were living in an era of accelerating technological progress, Apple could reinvest its returns in new projects instead of fighting patent battles over old ones while moonlighting as the world’s biggest hedge fund. -- Insiders with idle cash: The sound of silence speaking a thousand words.

Mvandenbergh 14y ago

First of all, all respect to Peter Thiel. Everyone I know who has worked with him has had nothing but good things to say about him. Having said that, it is worth noting that for all his dedication to the idea of inventing disruptive technologies that has not been his own path to success. Paypal is a pretty boring financial transaction processor, he ran a hedge fund for a while (yawn!), his investment in Facebook paid off big. Where is the disruption there? Facebook is great, but it wasn't even the first social network. A quick glance at the companies in which he personally has invested reveals lots of good investments - in fairly typical incrementalist companies! I know FF has invested in SpaceX which has a legitimate claim to being the kind of company he wants to see more of, but that isn't how he made his money in the first place. My problem with the substance of the article is that it takes for granted that we can always invent wholly new things in every possible category or industry. Let's take transport as an example. Did people stop innovating in transportation because it wasn't profitable, because they were afraid? Nonsense. First of all, they didn't stop innovating. There weren't 350 kph trains in 1940 and any car made more than 30 years ago is a comically underpowered death-trap compared to an entry level car today. Second, there are physical laws that simply constrain the phase space of possible solutions. Every new discovery can change those boundaries somewhat and every now and then someone will bring new ideas together to simply invent a brand new transport modality. However, fundamentally the densities and coefficients of friction of solid surfaces, air, and water drive the kinds of transport we can can come up with.

gsibble 14y ago
At the time they started PayPal it was anything but a boring financial transaction processor. It pretty much changed the face of online payments.
- seanlinehan 14y ago
  Not to mention that Paypal was started with the intent of being a revolutionary currency... one that wasn't bounded by any government. It failed at its revolution but made a lot of money instead.
duschang27 14y ago

guylhem 14y ago

This is unfortunately very true. We don't have a stagnation of tech progress, we keep going forward- but the grow rate seems to be decreasing. Some people apparently think existing innovation (ex: mindstab comment) suffice to disprove this. It's not. Just look at the 40 or 60 to see some real innovation - like antibiotics, nuclear bombs- i.e. paradigm changing innovation in various domains. What did we got lately? Computers, internet, cellphone, social networking - ok, but it's a bit short, and it's mostly in one domain only. IMHO, for any self consistent conservative, it's far more worrisome than theoretical weather change, especially because we got used to this fast pace of innovation and growth, and there have built the core of our societies on such assumptions (interest rate for money, population grow for social security, etc) - like, we are expecting technology will improve so that we get new ways problematic (orbital mirrors, tweaking the albedo, ...) to fight climate change if it is indeed man made and The idea of a deceleration of progress has some merit - to me it's like multiple warnings indicators lighting up, even if I don't know any theory to explain it, except a reduction of the "will to live" in western societies (Nietzsche style)

stcredzero 14y ago
Just look at the 40 or 60 to see some real innovation - like antibiotics, nuclear bombs- i.e. paradigm changing innovation in various domains. Thorium reactors have the potential to be paradigm changing.
- caretu 14y ago
  Not really. It would just be an incremental improvement in nuclear fission. A traveling wave reactor would probably be better as it would use existing depleted uranium as fuel, and would produce abundant energy while making uranium stockpiles less of a problem. Not even fusion would be paradigm changing, unless its cold fusion
  - AlexandrB 14y ago
    By that logic, nuclear energy was not paradigm changing. Essentially we're still just heating water and using it to move a generator - just like coal or oil power.

pyrotechnick 14y ago

HERE BE DRAGONS * Paywall * Forced registration * Advertisements galore * Popups It's laughable anyone would consider an organisation willing to produce this abomination of a website an authority on technical progress. I'm tremendously disappointed this had made the front page.

fragsworth 14y ago
I can't even see how you're supposed to get to the article after closing one of their popups. It just goes to their front page.
- wmf 14y ago
  Did you read the popup saying you need to register?

brendonjohn 14y ago

"FT.com articles are only available to registered users and subscribers" ....Thankyou to the google cache for providing the article. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/8adeca00-2996-11e2-a5ca-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2BgXphivT http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/8adeca00-2996-11e2-a5ca-00144...

jroid 14y ago

So, does that mean singularity won't happen anytime soon ? :-(

ynniv 14y ago
Nah, Moore's law is still on schedule: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57541381-76/ibm-brings-carbon-nanotube-based-computers-a-step-closer/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57541381-76/ibm-brings-car...

guelo 14y ago

It's weird for a libertarian to be praising the progress made in the 50s and 60s, a lot of which was the result of huge defense-related government investments. His economic history doesn't make sense either, implying that there were no bubbles and busts before 1970. And, as others have said, he is minimizing huge gains in a bunch of other fields. Weird article.

dr_doom 14y ago
Was the united states really spending more on defense during the 50's and 60's than it is now? I think we spent over a trillion dollars this year.
- mng2 14y ago
  As a fraction of GDP, yes.
guylhem 14y ago
It not weird - I'm a libertarian too and I'm worried about the situation in the west. It's bad when you notice that even with big government contracts the growth was much better. Something is happening - we just don't know what. We each have your pet ideas, based on our ideologies; IMHO the welfare state demotivation is suspect #1, but I'm ready to consider other hypothesis - even those that include government spending.

btilly 14y ago

Everyone tends to respect Kasparov because of his amazing chess prowess. He is also a very active and involved person in the world - just look at his activities in Russian politics. Unfortunately when you get outside his area of expertise, he often combines confidence and ignorance. The best example is http://www.revisedhistory.org/view-garry-kasparov.php http://www.revisedhistory.org/view-garry-kasparov.php where he tries to argue that about a thousand years of history did not happen. His arguments are, of course, all bunk. As will be obvious to anyone who has passing familiarity with the serious famines due to climate change in the 1300s, the impact of the British agricultural revolution on food production in the 1700s, and the widespread use of abacuses for calculation until the introduction of Arabic notation. This article is superficially reasonable, but similarly bad. Major tech advances in the recent past - many of which we'll see changing our future - include gigantic magnetoresistance, practical genome mapping, memresisters, continued improvements in battery technology and practical analysis of large data sets. (Enabling technologies like facial recognition, automated translation, and the like.) The more you look, the more there is to be amazed at. Did you know that there is a serious effort to create a handheld device that can take a small tissue sample and identify any species on Earth? We've done DNA analysis on a t-rex, and there are people trying to get funding to bring mammoths back to life. Experiencing it day by day we take it for granted. But looking back from the perspective of 50 years from now, the list of changes will be major.

chrito 14y ago

The fundamental point around "incrementalism" makes a lot of sense. Even government is largely incremental these days... the margin of winning the presidency seemed so small that it probably boiled downed to a series of micro-optimizations. If you buy that... why would a great micro-optimizer run the country any differently? And even with technological progress poster-child Apple... the big outstanding question is whether Tim Cook will end up turning the company in to a micro-optimization that converges toward it's current local maxima? But maybe it's all just cyclical... once all the low hanging fruit is picked over 1000 of times, the world at large will naturally be forced to be less incremental.

AbhijeetK 14y ago

I think that they're making a very valid point. While there is a lot of innovation and really interesting research taking place in labs, I don't know how much of it is being translated into the marketplace. Most of the investments being made in tech these days seem to be in web 2.0 companies claiming to be 'Uber for ballroom dancers' or 'Instagram for nurses' or something of the sort. Not that such investments are a bad thing, they produce a lot of cool products. But barring a few companies like General Fusion and SpaceX, I haven't heard much about startups trying to tackle truly crazy and massive problems - most companies you read about in the tech press tend to be much more 'cool idea' than 'grand idea'. If anybody has more examples of startups trying to tackle paradigm-changing problems, can you share them here?