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Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation?

141 points by digisth 12y ago

dicroce 12y ago
Wow, that article is a total bummer. But it seems to me he's cherry picking all of the things that haven't worked out so well, or progressed as fast as we'd like and pronouncing us a failure.... What about all the things that we didn't predict, that we DO have? We are remarkably close to self driving cars... that is awesome... Some recent breakthroughs in AI I suspect will be rippling through our civilization for quite a while to come...
- api 12y ago
  Everything you cite is in or closely related to the IT sector, which is the exception. Every other sector has gone cold or even backwards since ~1970.
  - k__ 12y ago
    But I got the feeling that the other sectors need IT for advancement. IT just has to get on a level that it's full power can be used by everyone.
  - pillowpants2 12y ago
    Self-Driving would classify under transportation.
  - rpedela 12y ago
    There has been plenty of innovation. When mature, electric vehicles mean the cost of fuel is essentially zero. Whenever there has a been a massive drop in energy costs, there has also been an economic boom. Electric vehicles also mean no more air pollution from vehicles which means a healthier population and fewer medical bills. Then you have the whole AI thing which promises to drastically reduce, if not eliminate, accidents as well as reduce traffic congestion. SpaceX is getting pretty damn close to a reusable rocket which will drastically reduce the cost of entering orbit. If that happens, then it is likely that space will become a viable market for private enterprise: tourism, mining, etc. There is a lot of work going on in energy including some designs for fusion that should be commercially viable. I don't know what is going to happen with energy, but there are way too many people working on it for nothing significant to happen in the near future. In healthcare, it seems like every few days I am reading about a person being cured of blindness with stem cells, growing or 3D printing an organ in a lab, or some new insight into how the body ages. I could keep going, but I am tired of typing letters. The point is that "Every other sector has gone cold or even backwards since ~1970" is a false statement.
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      > When mature, electric vehicles mean the cost of fuel is essentially zero. Whenever there has a been a massive drop in energy costs, there has also been an economic boom. But the first sentence is wrong -- it only means the cost of energy for a vehicle is equal to the cost of the same energy on the electric grid, plus the cost of wear on the onboard storage system (battery, etc.) Unless your definition of "mature" for electric vehicles includes existing in a world where energy costs on the electric grid are essentially zero (which is a whole lot bigger of an advance than electric vehicles, and applies a lot more broadly!), mature electric vehicle technology doesn't mean that the energy cost for vehicles in essentially zero, either.
      - dllthomas 12y ago
        I agree with your point, but I think an interesting aspect is that a shift toward pushing our transportation energy through the grid might (maybe) lead to some additional economies of scale that could bring down energy costs more broadly. That said, there might instead be diseconomies of scale that dominate - so certainly not a sure thing.
        dragonwriter 12y ago
        > I think an interesting aspect is that a shift toward pushing our transportation energy through the grid might (maybe) lead to some additional economies of scale that could bring down energy costs more broadly. I do think that both the economies of scale that this involves and the fact that it makes the shift to alternative (whether "cheaper" or "cleaner" or both) fuels one that involves changing grid inputs without requiring changes to vehicles, fueling infrastructure (once you have the electric charging infrastructure in place), etc., are big gains. When I was dismissing the idea that electric vehicles had a near-zero energy cost, I wasn't intending to dismiss the idea that electric vehicles offer some real opportunities for improvement.
      - seanflyon 12y ago
        "essentially zero" is an exaggeration, but electric cars are dramatically cheaper to fuel. They use much less energy and the energy they use is in a much cheaper form (electricity vs gasoline).
  - baddox 12y ago
    Do you consider self-driving cars to be in or closely related to the IT sector?
    - scottlocklin 12y ago
      I consider "self driving cars" as not existing the corporeal world.
      - baddox 12y ago
        But that's the only thing cited in dicroce's comment, and api said "Everything you cite is in or closely related to the IT sector, which is the exception." Also, self driving cars certainly exist in the corporeal world.
  - notahacker 12y ago
    >Everything you cite is in or closely related to the IT sector, which is the exception. Every other sector has gone cold or even backwards since ~1970 Sure, the IT sector has enabled pretty much everything since the 1970s, including most of the world having a telephone in their pocket, and developments like with massive transformative potential like encoding human genomes. But that's like writing off the Industrial Revolution as being a time entirely unremarkable but for developments "in or closely related to the mechanical engineering sector"
  - nostrademons 12y ago
    That's only because you're unaware of innovations that have happened in other sectors and their consequences. In oil, there've been huge breakthroughs in fracking, horizontal drilling, and oil shale and tar sands mining. As a result, U.S. oil imports have fallen by a third since 2008 [1], and domestic crude oil production is up nearly 50%. We've pulled out of Iraq and Afghanistan because the Middle East is no longer strategically important to us, saving thousands of lives in those wars. Oil is expensive now, but the price is relatively stable, meaning that we can plan ahead for the future (like buying a fuel-efficient car instead of an SUV) instead of being at the whims of global politics. In finance, it's now possible to get funding for an idea without being a grizzled 30-year veteran of an industry. If you have a creative project or even something plain-old crazy, you can go on Kickstarter and crowd-fund it with pre-orders. Microfinance is commonplace enough that it's driving down returns, and it's lifted millions of people out of poverty in the developing world. You can accept credit card payments with just an iPad. In education, you can take courses online with world-leading professors at elite universities, all without leaving your living room or paying tuition. In travel, you can take virtual tours of places you might want to visit on your computer, map out on itinerary, read reviews, and book flights, hotel rooms, and activities within minutes, again all without leaving your living room. I'm just old enough to remember travel agents. Remember when you had to drive to meet one, have only a vague idea of what country you wanted to see, take the options they give you because you don't know what else is available, and pay through the nose for all of it? The first Google-assisted trip I took, back in 2004, was a revelation, and that was before Maps or StreetView or smartphones or Kayak or Yelp or the universal ability to book things online. Most of the time when I hear folks say "Things have gotten worse than they used to be", they don't mean "things have gotten worse", they mean "Argh, things have changed and I don't know how anything works anymore and what's my place in the world and how will I support myself and everybody else seems to be doing better than me!" Much of which is an illusion, because everybody else is equally insecure about their prospects and place in the world. But the opportunities are out there, and objectively speaking, we are so much, much better off than we were when I was a kid in the 80s. [1] http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_ep00_im0_mbbl_a.htm http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_ep00_im0_... [2] http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_crd_crpdn_adc_mbbl_a.htm http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_crd_crpdn_adc_mbbl_a.htm
api 12y ago
"I sort-of date the end of rapid technological progress to the late-60s or early-70s. At that point something more or less broke in this country and in the western world more generally which has put us into a zone where there’s much slower technological progress." I've believed for years that we entered something like a minor dark age (dim age?) on or about 1970, and that computers have become synonymous with "technology" because it was the only sector that didn't get the memo. Everything else basically stopped cold around 1970, and some fields (e.g. aerospace) have actually gone into reverse. I am very heartened to see people with the fame and fortune of Peter Thiel et. al. raising this issue and basically agreeing, but I have yet to see an explanation that truly seems to work. Peter I think oversells libertarianism when he blames regulation-- while regulation slows progress by increasing costs and making experimentation hard, free markets' reluctance to invest in "zero to one" ideas also slows progress. Nearly all the "zero to one" stories I am familiar with were government funded, usually in a time of war or threat of war. VCs and other investors normally want to fund "one to N" ideas because there is at least a provable market there and the hard stuff is mostly done already. I've got some other ideas but I'm curious about what HN thinks.
- deleted 12y ago
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- fidotron 12y ago
  The cold war having gone by the tipping point was also a very large factor. This tied into the moonrace, and the spin off innovations from that. As a side note, It has always annoyed me that there's a loud contingent of people that object to human space travel on the basis it's not the most efficient way to conduct science, because that is not the point of it. It is a signal of intent, throwing the baton far into the future and hoping to reach it and somehow making it, with innumerable side benefits. What we've lost is the entire will for moonshots, and no one in society is engaged in anything like it. Sometimes I'm an ultra libertarian too, but I suspect the reason Thiel wouldn't follow this reasoning is purely on the basis of who was doing the spending in that era.
  - api 12y ago
nostromo 12y ago
I think we're at the top of an S curve. And it's reflected in the stock market: http://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-price/ http://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-price/ After 6 years of 0% interest rate, we've clawed our way back to the dot-com bubble, and no higher. Our foot is completely down on the gas pedal, and we're hardly getting anywhere. What will the next S curve be? Space? AI? I'm not sure, but as things stand, I can't help but chuckle remorsefully when I think back to the exuberance I felt when I read my first Kurzweil book.
- tbolse 12y ago
  Interesting idea to use the framework of S curves on this observation. But I think that the typical S curve model will not work on big innovations that are not disruptive towards or at least strongly related to each other in terms of use cases. What you mean is rather the concept of "Kondratiev Waves" [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave
trekky1700 12y ago
Because we wanted flying cars and all we got was online payments.
- michael_nielsen 12y ago
  The funny thing is, if I had to pick just one of those two, I'd definitely go for online payments.
  - nostrademons 12y ago
    So did everybody else. That's why we got online payments. I wonder if much of the angst about how the future hasn't turned out the way we wanted is really "We got everything we wanted and it turns out what we wanted is this?" Markets are really good at fulfilling peoples' desires, but the problem is they fulfill people's actual wants, not what they wish they wanted. So it's like turning a spotlight on our desires and realizing that hey, we're all nothing more than human.
    - deleted 12y ago
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    - jacquesm 12y ago
      No, we got the online payments because they scale. Flying cars have been possible since the 50's or so but they're simply not practical and the concept does not scale well (and not counting Mollers scam, it's a scam and not practical). http://www.terrafugia.com/aircraft/transition http://www.terrafugia.com/aircraft/transition http://www.smithsonianmag.com/videos/category/innovation/the-incredible-flying-car-of-the-1950s/?no-ist http://www.smithsonianmag.com/videos/category/innovation/the...
therzathegza 12y ago
I think the article unfairly bashes rail transport by singling out coal. If you read Warren Buffett's writings, his investment in rail was mostly due to being able to move something 500 miles on one gallon of diesel fuel. Regardless of what is being carried, there are very few things that efficient. Coal sucks, but but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater there. As for the science section, claiming that productivity per scientist is <1% of what it was in 1920s is absolutely laughable. Look at some of the really large projects humanity pulled off like sequencing the human genome for good examples. Interesting article, but seems to be a pretty pessimistic outlook.
- tokai 12y ago
  Actually there have never been so many publications per scientist as there is now. Nearly every metric that is measurable, have been growing exponentially for the last century (no. of scientists, publications, research institutions etc.). There are some indications that we are nearing the top of the s-curve however. Which begs the question: why is all that research not resulting in equal exponential innovation in our society?
  - copperx 12y ago
    Because that research is mostly done to stay employed. There are no incentives to do breakthroughs.
  - kazagistar 12y ago
    Cause all the important research is already done. Seriously. Why do we assume the difficulty of making meaningful progress to be linear? It seems reasonable that each new discovery becomes harder then the previous one, at a rate equal to or faster then the rate at which we speed up science.
- zenogais 12y ago
  I think looking at it as pessimistic is simply wrong. The point is not to be optimistic but to look around and explain the major challenges that seem to be impeding rapid advancement. The biggest problem I see in science seems to be the incentive structure (publish or perish). This overwhelmingly biases against large scale breakthroughs and towards minor amendments and advances. I remember when I first started doing research around 2011 I was extremely disappointed by the low quality and shallow vision of a lot of research being produced today (this was in AI). The volume was incredibly but the content was anemic. So I don't think the <1% figure is totally wrong-headed - we're in an age of 9-5 scientists whose desires to create long-term breakthroughs are often met with negative incentives while bulk publishing low-quality content is considered productive and desirable.
AnimalMuppet 12y ago
We're close to getting cars that can drive themselves. We have cars that can detect when the brakes are locking and fix it, so that you never go into a skid. We have railroad locomotives that can tell when an axle is just starting to slip, and cut the power to that one axle, so that the wheels never slip even at full power on slick rails. We have jet aircraft engines that can report when a part is getting close to failure, so that it can be replaced at a soon-but-convenient time before it actually fails in flight. Desktop computers. Laptops. Cell phones. CT scanners. The internet. The Large Hadron Collider. The Hubble Space Telescope. Progress has slowed since the 1970s? Really? Progress in physical things has not so much slowed since the 1970s; it has gone into improving efficiency, convenience, and reliability. For example: In the 1970s, you were supposed to tune a car engine (plugs, points, timing) regularly. On my 2005, I had to do it after 100,000 miles. It used to be a great achievement to keep a car running for 100,000 miles; now it's just time for the first tuneup. For another: My 2005 is far more stable and easy to drive than what I had in the 1970s. This means I crash less often. That's progress.
- JamesArgo 12y ago
  I like this take. Last century we built many amazing bodies, this century we give them brains.
- tachyonbeam 12y ago
  There's also electric cars, which are basically already here and can't be stopped at this point. Solar panels, which have crossed the $1 per watt barrier a while ago. I believe that relatively soon we'll have genetics-driven psychiatry and medicine. Depressed people won't automatically be prescribed SSRIs, but what is deemed most suitable based on their genetic profile. Nobody will need to ask you if you're allergic to penicillin or anaesthetics, those mistakes won't happen anymore. Then there's deep neural networks. We now have computer programs that can recognize what's in an image more accurately than human beings. Domestic robots might well happen during our lifetime. They're going to be basic at first, but you can't stop progress.
  - barney54 12y ago
jostmey 12y ago
Yeah, we went to the moon and then what happened? Genetic engineering has been around since the 70's but society has largely rejected its applications. And consider the Energy sector - when was the last nuclear power plant constructed in the United States?
- maxerickson 12y ago
  The vast majority of animal feed in the US is GMO. (For starters, roundup ready field corn and soy).
  - jostmey 12y ago
    That is true but Genetic Engineering has largely been limited to cross-breeding plants. You truly lack imagination if think that roundup resistant crops represent the pinnacle of Genetic Engineering.
    - deleted 12y ago
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    - a_bonobo 12y ago
      One of my favorite current genetic engineering programs is to turn rice from a C_3 plant into a C_4 plant. C_4 plants have a more complicated photosynthesis system allowing them to fix CO_2 more efficiently, and since C_4 seems to have evolved relatively recent they are still rare. Only about 5% of all plants are C_4, but they fixate 30% of carbon fixated by plants! If we could engineer rice into a C_4 plant, we'd a) get faster growing rice with more yield and b) since rice is grown all over the world, we'd with one stroke get rid of a massive amount of carbon from the atmosphere. No-one has tried to do this before (it's a bit like ripping out a car's engine you know very little about and replacing it by a more sophisticated engine you know very little about), but they're hopeful to have 'prototype' C_4 rice plants by 2016. Edit: It's being funded by the Gates foundation and several governments so it's not a pipe dream. It's one of the most exciting and 'grand' projects in plant biotech at the moment!
- api 12y ago
foobarqux 12y ago
Eric Schmidt challenged Thiel's main points in a debate two years ago. http://fora.tv/program_landing_frameview?id=16152&type=clip&autoplay=0 http://fora.tv/program_landing_frameview?id=16152&type=clip&...
- maurycy 12y ago
  And badly lost. He's not even a sparring partner for Thiel.
alricb 12y ago
Things do advance, but they're a lot less spectacular, sometimes because we're running into hard physical limitations. Supersonic flight, for instance: it's just super difficult to make it economically feasible. But subsonic aircraft are much better than they were back in the 1970s. Cars are leaps and bounds above what they were in the 80s: more reliable, safer, faster. Scientists are also running against physical limitations: to do Big science, you need expensive equipment, like the LHC, but also electron beam microscopes, sophisticated automatic lab equipment, etc. so you need a lot of people to make this stuff works. The problems we do get are more social than scientific: most new buildings aren't much better than the ones from the 70s, but that's because people aren't applying the science that exists. Transportation and energy are similar: it's not sufficient that the technology can be used, the social and economic structure has to be there to support it. For instance, you could dream about a citywide automated contained transportation system in Montreal. You'd have a big east-west conveyor, with links to the mainland at each end of the island, plus a big north-south corridor to get across the island and cross the St. Lawrence. Then you'd only need small electric trucks to move the containers to and from stations along the conveyors. But that's never going to happen because you couldn't put the structure in place.
- sumitviii 12y ago
  I think you didn't read the article carefully. We don't need more people doing the same stuff. We need people willing to waste all their cash to BUILD something from new discoveries. Earlier new technologies used to be priced sky-high. Now cost benefit analysis is the only thing that matters.
FD3SA 12y ago
The takeaway from Thiel's fairly accurate assessment of broad technological progress is the following: You get what you incentivize. Winner-take-all free market capitalism is not synonymous with advanced, century-long research and development projects at the national scale. Our current socioeconomic system rewards convincing others to depart with their money in the quickest way possible. Ponzi-schemes, marketing, financial trickery, etc. are the preferred methods. Why do we see so many get rich quick startups (to the dismay of Sam Altman and YC) instead of fusion startups? Because that's the most rational way to succeed in today's economy. You'd have to be an idiot to waste your time trying to build a working fusion reactor in your basement when you could just code up a photo sharing app and get acquired for billions. That's why we all idolize Elon Musk; he's only ever tackled difficult industries. How much easier would it have been for him to have made a Facebook, Instagram, etc. clone and become an investor just like the rest of his cohort of successful entrepreneurs? Look gang, we have to stop lying to ourselves. YC and VCs are great for startups that require a few laptops and a bunch of determined programmers. They really are not suited to decade long research projects which have produced such things as: Multi-stage rockets, genetic sequencing, computers, the Internet, fission reactors, etc. I love the startup culture, hacker culture and the sheer spirit of creativity and determination it espouses. But serious science and technology research is very expensive, very long term, and financially extremely risky. That's why in the last century, it has almost exclusively been financed by governments under threat of war (WWI, WWII, Cold War). Thiel prescribes deregulation and Libertarian governments as a solution to the failure of Big R&D. I think he is wrong, precisely because of the last hundred years. Big R&D is expensive and risky, and requires a very long commitment timeline for results. Corporations cannot and will not bear the financial risk of long term research. Neither will individuals or investors. Thus, I propose the only solution that has any precedence: Big R&D as a government mandate. Much like education, healthcare, and social benefits, Big R&D must become a central pillar of a modern society. I envision a Cold War era science race between nations, research labs, and individuals, but in the spirit of science, not war. Research would be a continuous national challenge, much like the Apollo project under Kennedy, but encompassing all of the sciences and continuing past a single administration. There would be work at every level for citizens in the nation's research industry to slowly offset the losses incurred by automation. When all basic needs are met by a very efficient, very high tech and mostly automated free market system, research would become our generator of economic activity. It would provide a consistent safety net for citizens exiting the free market, and prepare them for an eventual return if the opportunity arises (e.g. a new technological breakthrough is ready for the market). Think of research labs like Bell Labs or Xerox PARC, but government funded, intertwined with a cutting edge educational platform (e.g. edX), and in every municipality. In conclusion, I think the free market has done all it can for research. Capitalism is great at providing needs and wants very efficiently in the short term and making incremental technological progress, but is terrible for making big leaps by solving very hard problems that have substantial capital requirements. For that, we have to look back to our previous successes in Big R&D.
JimboOmega 12y ago
I love the tension between the "OMG Robots will do everything, even write code!" and "Technological progress has essentially ground to a standstill" camps. It's refreshing to see something from the standstill camp; thanks to self driving cars the former has been enjoying its day in the sun. Especially so since it fits with a nice cultural narrative about the haves and the have-nots; the theory being that all the robots will take all the jobs and leave only a small elite to live in hyper-luxury (see: Elysium). It's nice to see the counterpoint. There was a time (ca. 2008) where oil price rises were predicted to continue to $500/bbl or more by, er, well now. There was this crisis of resources, of which the technology to extract them had peaked... (speaking of, how can we ignore fracking?). Anyway the bubble burst and the narrative changed. Google's self-driving car gained a lot of hype and suddenly people were worried about automation again (think of all the drivers!).
- jameswilsterman 12y ago
  I don't think these camps are mutually exclusive. For example, I believe that Thiel is right about the past 40 years, but we are starting to get back on track again (thanks in part to Larry Page) and the next 40 years will be much more broadly innovative.
- michaelochurch 12y ago
  Robots will do everything, even write code! They're called compilers. Programmers still have jobs. There was a time (ca. 2008) where oil price rises were predicted to continue to $500/bbl or more by, er, well now. Peak oil. We've been at/around 85 million barrels per day for about ten years. It seems to be more of a plateau, not exponential decline. However, prices are going up and so is environmental harm in getting the stuff, and those trends show no sign of slowing. We still have to get off the shit. We just have more time than the doomsayers (always a minority even in "peak oil"-aware circles) thought. Whether we have 10 or 150 years before an oil-powered economy becomes unsustainable, it's not good for the planet to be belching all that carbon into the atmosphere.
gorkemyurt 12y ago
Abundance; great book that's insanely optimistic about the future. Sure it cherrypicks the "what went well" part of our history, but a lot more has went well compared to a couple of failing industries.. http://www.amazon.com/Abundance-Future-Better-Than-Think/dp/1451614217 http://www.amazon.com/Abundance-Future-Better-Than-Think/dp/...
tdees40 12y ago
There's a reasonable argument that the entire industrial revolution was just the result of cheap carbon, and we've been running on that ever since. The Haber Process allowed us to get out of agriculture (and thus have time to make all of these breakthroughs) and then electrification (courtesy coal/gas) got us out of having to do manual labor. So we had lots of free time! And we used that to develop transistors and MRI machines and spaceships and everything else. But the returns to that free time seem to be diminishing rapidly, and we still rely on power growth to get GDP growth.
- ArkyBeagle 12y ago
  A lot of the stuff we do that uses transistors doesn't show up as GDP.
skybrian 12y ago
Thiel is focused on lagging indicators and this results in excessive pessimism. For example, the average price of energy is a lagging indicator. If you're focused on this then you'll completely miss all improvements in the cost of clean energy until the day when it's better than the average price of all energy. In fact, in the early days it's just making the average price more expensive. If you want to know where we're going rather than looking in the rear-view mirror, you need separate metrics for watching new tech while it's still new and more expensive.
dharma1 12y ago
Maybe the low hanging fruit have been picked but I think there will be a steady stream of innovation in the near future - more efficient and cheaper renewables, better battery tech, better cures to disease etc. I think the next big shift will happen when the remaining 4-5 billion people are empowered with high quality education and computing devices and the potential of the whole of humanity can be put to use. It's a numbers game, more brains working on innovation=more innovation. This global levelling of the playing field and equal access to technology and means of innovation is playing out slowly, maybe too slowly for it to feel like an "acceleration" to us who live through it. Give it another 10-20 years. Right now it's like we're running at 20% capacity when you look at the total number of people on the planet, at how much of that potential is not utilised. China will take the lead, already has started to in some cases (in the case of AI, Andrew Ng's jump to Baidu was interesting) - http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/08/28/interview-inside-google-brain-founder-andrew-ngs-plans-to-transform-baidu/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/08/28/interview-i...
chillingeffect 12y ago
Has technological progress slowed since the 1970s? I think there's evidence technology is moving along quite quickly: We've gone from expensive, slow, geographically-constrained telegrams and short-range, anarchic CB radio to gigahertz communication, carrying gigabits of data in the pockets of 1.5 Gigapeople. We have the ISS, in space, 257 miles above us, 24/7, docking several times weekly with spacecraft from several continents. We have GPS. We have a world-wide data network and speech-controlled word-processing and publishing so billions of people can write and deliver a book, paper, speech, etc. with pictures and diagrams complete with automatic language translation. The days of hand-staining long-exposure slide film for use in a projector are over. We eradicated smallpox. We invented MRI, robotic surgery, Tamoxifen, Raloxifene. We have successfully transplanted hearts and lungs, livers, intestines, hands, arms, legs and even faces, bladders, ovaries and penises. We've gone from one farmer supplying 57.7 people to 155 people. Yes you can point to vast stretches of mediocre scientists and companies who are also-rans. That's just a condition of humanity. Not everyone can sequence the entire human genome. If someone wants much more miraculous results out of the natural world than what we have today, you're seeking mystical discoveries, not technological ones.
- noir_lord 12y ago
  I was reading today of the first person to have a 3D printed skull implanted that was an exact physical replica of the one she originally had before disease deformed it. That lady would have died 20 years ago, now she is expected to live. Progress has stopped....bollocks we may not do showy grandscale stuff anymore but the sheer rate of improvement across so many fields is there if you look.
joeclark77 12y ago
Mark Steyn has also commented brilliantly on the fizzling out of technological innovation: http://www.steynonline.com/6425/holding-pattern http://www.steynonline.com/6425/holding-pattern Quote: "The first half of the 20th century overhauled the pattern of our lives: The light bulb abolished night; the internal combustion engine tamed distance. They fundamentally reconceived the rhythms of life. That's why our young man propelled from 1890 to 1950 would be flummoxed at every turn. A young fellow catapulted from 1950 to today would, on the surface, feel instantly at home – and then notice a few cool electronic toys. And, after that, he might wonder about the defining down of 'accomplishment': Wow, you've invented a more compact and portable delivery system for Justin Bieber!"
mark_l_watson 12y ago
I have not closely followed Theil's entrepreneurship or previously read his writing, but I did buy his "Zero to One" book on Audible earlier today. The premise of the book, on the higher value of inventing totally new things rather than copying, sounded good to me.
dbpokorny 12y ago
The essay "What happened to the future?" is, I think, notable for what it does not contain, which is any mention of mathematics. The Digital Math Library project has been going on for years in the background (mostly in Europe). They have been doing conferences for years, and, at 30,000 feet, it looks like fascinating work: http://cicm-conference.org/2014/cicm.php?event=nop&menu=general http://cicm-conference.org/2014/cicm.php?event=nop&menu=gene... The computerization of mathematical reasoning, and in particular directing AI toward the study of the "pre-rigorous reasoning" aspect of mathematical work is, in my opinion, a great "plan of attack" toward general AI. Mathematics is about problem solving, and if computers can learn to do problem-solving well in the mathematical domain, in a general way, it seems to me that there is hope that computers will be able to solve problems in other domains as well.
tbolse 12y ago
Some additional thoughts: Maybe Thiel is right with his thesis. But I think we don't see the impacts of the latest "technology" like Facebook and Twitter or any social network that might come as a successor clearly yet. I had the same opinions, because it doesn't really feal like rocket science or flying cars. A German professor called Peter Kruse, changed my mind. He has a really interesting perspective on todays interconectedness using a system theroetical view: His thesis is (roughly): What we are currently doing is rapidly increasing the interconnectedness or the networking density of our society almost worldwide (e.g. social networks Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, you name it) and the devices we use (e.g. IoT), we have also increased spontaneous activities in these networks (e.g. web 2.0 services where people can be interactive), additionally we have implemented functions that enable circular stimulus in these networks (retweet and share functions). If these 3 effects come together there is the tendency that these systems will carry signals that resonate and amplify themselfs. It is almost impossible to forecast when and how this happens, because these networks are non-linear. If you post something that resonates with a lot of people you can be very powerful from one moment to another. Technology is only the enabler here and I have no doubt that this has a huge impact on society - see the revolution in Egypt for example. One outcome is a shift of power, because it is really hard to control these networks. Even though we have very sophisticated mass-surveilance most events happen very uncontrolled.
michaelochurch 12y ago
Technology has shitty leadership, and society as a whole has even worse leadership. Thiel is right. Global economic growth was 5-6% per year in the 1960s. Now it's around 4%. The main culprit: disinvestment in R&D. Those "cushy jobs" for engineers whom the MBA dickheads claimed "weren't earning their keep" were actually the R&D pushing the country (and the world) forward. Transportation is another thing we suck at, as a country. We're frozen in the 1960s, but with worst traffic. Trains are expensive and slow, planes are only cheap if you play the constantly changing, convoluted system, and cars are probably up against the limits of human reflexes and the roads. Finally, the middle class has had its collective face ripped off by the Satanic Trinity (housing, healthcare, tuition costs). Things that used to be comparable to utility bills are now life-wrecking constraints and, because no one has any fucking savings anymore, entrepreneurship is at an all-time low (whatever nonsense the VCs fund isn't entrepreneurship; in that world, investors are just bosses by another name). Thiel is right. We've had a lack of vision and leadership for a long time and it has really slowed the world down.
- enraged_camel 12y ago
  >>Finally, the middle class has had its collective face ripped off by the Satanic Trinity (housing, healthcare, tuition costs). Things that used to be comparable to utility bills are now life-wrecking constraints and, because no one has any fucking savings anymore, entrepreneurship is at an all-time low. This is why unconditional basic income is an absolute necessity, in my opinion. It's the only way to save the middle class. If every individual received $1,000 per month from the government, they could start working part-time and have much more time and energy left for creative pursuits, including entrepreneurial endeavors. As things stand though, most brilliant minds work for (and are wage-slaves of) corporations and all their work does is enrich the people at the top.
InclinedPlane 12y ago
If most of my wealth came from a dubiously valuable social media site, I might be just as pessimistic about technology.
jeffreyrogers 12y ago
Thiel is more or less reiterating the points that the economist Tyler Cowen has been making for several years. I just read Zero to One and found it good, but not great. Cowen's book, Average is Over [1], covers much of the same ideas and is better reasoned. (Cowen's earlier book, The Great Stagnation, is also quite good). [1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00C1N5WOI?btkr=1 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00C1N5WOI?btkr=1
RobPfeifer 12y ago
The real reason - it gives him a differentiated brand which drives certain types of entrepreneurs to Founder's Fund. Since he started down this branding exercise with that New Yorker piece in 2011, I'm sure he gets much more inbound interest at Founder's Fund. Plus, his hedge fund was being wound down, making him refocus on his VC brand. Everything with a grain of salt people!
zarkov99 12y ago
Because most of what passes for innovation in the last decade is vapid garbage with negligible impact on society's well being.
graycat 12y ago
The title of this thread asks a question, and here is my guess at an answer: Progress 1900-1941. Mostly based on practical 'tinkering' with a little science and engineering at just the college level. With a few exceptions, didn't need research contributions. Some Exceptions: Antibiotics, anesthetics, chemistry and chemical engineering. Also Bell Labs had started working on transistors based in part part on understanding of quantum mechanics. WWII interrupted the work, but soon after the war Bell Labs had the transistor. Progress 1941-1960. Heavily driven by big spending, lots of drive, for US national security, especially WWII and the Cold War. E.g., US DoD spending helped create Silicon Valley. Progress 1960-1974. Throttled by US efforts in Viet Nam, the oil shock, and inflation from Viet Nam spending. Progress 1974-present. Moore's law, the Internet, some pharmaceuticals, some in materials. Otherwise progress was throttled. And here I will have to attempt to describe a cause, my idea, apparently not mentioned so far. There's plenty of good pure and applied research on the shelves of the research libraries. There are plenty of well trained people in the results of the pure and applied research and how to do more such research, in science, engineering, technology, etc. But for this material on the shelves of the libraries and these trained workers to contribute to the US economy and standard of living as Thiel discusses, we need a lot of other people to go along, approve, fund, act as CEOs, Members of Boards of Directors, etc. Then, these other people upchuck at what the well trained people know, feel threatened, inadequate, intimidated. They fear that going along with the corresponding projects would be imprudent for them as managers and/or financially irresponsible. Or, through 1940, work was mostly in a management hierarchy where the supervisor knew more and the subordinates were there to add muscle and/or person-hours to the work of the supervisor. Now that situation has changed: Mostly the people who really understand the technical material and how to apply it are just the worker bees, and the rest of the organizational hierarchy is trembling because they do not understand, in the old model, enough about the technical material really to manage the work. There are some big exceptions: The US DoD is able to get leading edge research into systems into the field. E.g., GPS, the SR-71, indeed, the H bomb. And so can the pharmaceutical industry. And what has been done in the lithography for microelectronics is astounding. But, my view of information technology in Silicon Valley, it can't: That is, send them a project plan with a technical paper, and Sand Hill Road will just toss it into the trash; really. NSF, NIH, DARPA, ONR, etc. are fully able to review and evaluate technical material for projects, but nearly no one on Sand Hill Road can. Indeed, nearly no venture partners have the qualifications to serve as problem sponsors for DoD, DoE, NSF, NIH, etc., tenure track faculty in STEM fields in research universities, direct research, get research grants, review research papers, publish in good journals, serve on the editorial boards of good journals, etc. Elsewhere in the US economy, middle managers do not want to bet their careers on technical projects they do not understand from their highly technical subordinates. Basically the need is to get people with good technical backgrounds in positions where they have the authority to request, evaluate (or have evaluated), approve, fund, and oversee projects that exploit the pure/applied STEM work on the library shelves. So, for the high level technical material we need to exploit, we need middle management well enough educated with such material to be able effectively to manage the exploitation. At least the middle managers must be able to direct competent evaluations of high end technical material.
zanny 12y ago
> because there’s no one in the system who has any idea what to do with the money Hey look, validation of my outlook on basic income. Links the go-to source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM For some reason, we seem to have forgotten that the best investment is in people. You want your innovation, all the potential is trapped living on scraps a day in soul crushing poverty or near-poverty, while you move around your trillions with nothing to spend it on - because you are literally running out of things to get you more money, because nobody else has any left to give.
- deleted 12y ago
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julie1 12y ago
My parents could go on vacation, enjoy life and come back from work with a clear break. I am to be a coder, whose dreams are constantly polluted by solving work problem, uncertain of my future, hardly going on vacations, and I should see a progress in the fact my parents could be important and it was normal they had a life and be "reasonably" reachable, and I am not important and have a sort of intrusive technology not leaving room for a life out of work. I would gladly trade it for my parent's generation condition of life, all included. Our societies priorities are really not well adjusted at my opinion. But I need to feed my loved one and myself, so I shut my mouth, and work in this mad system, like everyone...but it piss me off to be still young enough to love life with her, and can only tell her we can hope we will be able to do it later ... eventually. I care not about iphone, because I am more likely than you to become poor. I want cheap food, cheap energy, and healthy time to enjoy life with the ones I care for. My only wealth are my friends (and family) and my friends especially are being crushed by the exaggerated amount of work we push in industry like banking, advertisement, distraction industry and the media. What do we do to save the world? We code awesome softwares to have the feeling we help humanity. Yeah. We improve humanity for the better good. Pushing a rock hard because you are scared, does not make it go in the right direction if you never put an eye on the road.
jqm 12y ago
Well, we couldn't bomb people with drones remotely from half way around the world 3 decades ago.... But seriously, I blame the growth of the bureaucracy. Bureaucracy not only takes resources needed for innovation, it flat out stifles it. This happens at many levels... the government, the employers... lots of people going to work and not only not productively working, but actively keeping others from doing so while loudly proclaiming their right to a share of the pie.
tim333 12y ago
>“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” The flying car thing is actually getting closer with the likes of the Terrafugia, and the advances with self driving cars give me hope that they may progress with self piloting aircraft. At the moment piloting planes is a bit tricky for everyday use. I did a private pilot's licence and it's hard work as is flying a small aircraft in terms of radioing the various air traffic controllers and similar tasks. (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/automobiles/terrafugia-transition.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/automobiles/terrafugia-tra...)
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141 points by digisth 12y ago

Wow, that article is a total bummer. But it seems to me he's cherry picking all of the things that haven't worked out so well, or progressed as fast as we'd like and pronouncing us a failure.... What about all the things that we didn't predict, that we DO have? We are remarkably close to self driving cars... that is awesome... Some recent breakthroughs in AI I suspect will be rippling through our civilization for quite a while to come...

api 12y ago
Everything you cite is in or closely related to the IT sector, which is the exception. Every other sector has gone cold or even backwards since ~1970.
- k__ 12y ago
  But I got the feeling that the other sectors need IT for advancement. IT just has to get on a level that it's full power can be used by everyone.
- pillowpants2 12y ago
  Self-Driving would classify under transportation.
- rpedela 12y ago
  There has been plenty of innovation. When mature, electric vehicles mean the cost of fuel is essentially zero. Whenever there has a been a massive drop in energy costs, there has also been an economic boom. Electric vehicles also mean no more air pollution from vehicles which means a healthier population and fewer medical bills. Then you have the whole AI thing which promises to drastically reduce, if not eliminate, accidents as well as reduce traffic congestion. SpaceX is getting pretty damn close to a reusable rocket which will drastically reduce the cost of entering orbit. If that happens, then it is likely that space will become a viable market for private enterprise: tourism, mining, etc. There is a lot of work going on in energy including some designs for fusion that should be commercially viable. I don't know what is going to happen with energy, but there are way too many people working on it for nothing significant to happen in the near future. In healthcare, it seems like every few days I am reading about a person being cured of blindness with stem cells, growing or 3D printing an organ in a lab, or some new insight into how the body ages. I could keep going, but I am tired of typing letters. The point is that "Every other sector has gone cold or even backwards since ~1970" is a false statement.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > When mature, electric vehicles mean the cost of fuel is essentially zero. Whenever there has a been a massive drop in energy costs, there has also been an economic boom. But the first sentence is wrong -- it only means the cost of energy for a vehicle is equal to the cost of the same energy on the electric grid, plus the cost of wear on the onboard storage system (battery, etc.) Unless your definition of "mature" for electric vehicles includes existing in a world where energy costs on the electric grid are essentially zero (which is a whole lot bigger of an advance than electric vehicles, and applies a lot more broadly!), mature electric vehicle technology doesn't mean that the energy cost for vehicles in essentially zero, either.
    - dllthomas 12y ago
      I agree with your point, but I think an interesting aspect is that a shift toward pushing our transportation energy through the grid might (maybe) lead to some additional economies of scale that could bring down energy costs more broadly. That said, there might instead be diseconomies of scale that dominate - so certainly not a sure thing.
      - dragonwriter 12y ago
        > I think an interesting aspect is that a shift toward pushing our transportation energy through the grid might (maybe) lead to some additional economies of scale that could bring down energy costs more broadly. I do think that both the economies of scale that this involves and the fact that it makes the shift to alternative (whether "cheaper" or "cleaner" or both) fuels one that involves changing grid inputs without requiring changes to vehicles, fueling infrastructure (once you have the electric charging infrastructure in place), etc., are big gains. When I was dismissing the idea that electric vehicles had a near-zero energy cost, I wasn't intending to dismiss the idea that electric vehicles offer some real opportunities for improvement.
    - seanflyon 12y ago
      "essentially zero" is an exaggeration, but electric cars are dramatically cheaper to fuel. They use much less energy and the energy they use is in a much cheaper form (electricity vs gasoline).
- baddox 12y ago
  Do you consider self-driving cars to be in or closely related to the IT sector?
  - scottlocklin 12y ago
    I consider "self driving cars" as not existing the corporeal world.
    - baddox 12y ago
      But that's the only thing cited in dicroce's comment, and api said "Everything you cite is in or closely related to the IT sector, which is the exception." Also, self driving cars certainly exist in the corporeal world.
- notahacker 12y ago
  >Everything you cite is in or closely related to the IT sector, which is the exception. Every other sector has gone cold or even backwards since ~1970 Sure, the IT sector has enabled pretty much everything since the 1970s, including most of the world having a telephone in their pocket, and developments like with massive transformative potential like encoding human genomes. But that's like writing off the Industrial Revolution as being a time entirely unremarkable but for developments "in or closely related to the mechanical engineering sector"
- nostrademons 12y ago
  That's only because you're unaware of innovations that have happened in other sectors and their consequences. In oil, there've been huge breakthroughs in fracking, horizontal drilling, and oil shale and tar sands mining. As a result, U.S. oil imports have fallen by a third since 2008 [1], and domestic crude oil production is up nearly 50%. We've pulled out of Iraq and Afghanistan because the Middle East is no longer strategically important to us, saving thousands of lives in those wars. Oil is expensive now, but the price is relatively stable, meaning that we can plan ahead for the future (like buying a fuel-efficient car instead of an SUV) instead of being at the whims of global politics. In finance, it's now possible to get funding for an idea without being a grizzled 30-year veteran of an industry. If you have a creative project or even something plain-old crazy, you can go on Kickstarter and crowd-fund it with pre-orders. Microfinance is commonplace enough that it's driving down returns, and it's lifted millions of people out of poverty in the developing world. You can accept credit card payments with just an iPad. In education, you can take courses online with world-leading professors at elite universities, all without leaving your living room or paying tuition. In travel, you can take virtual tours of places you might want to visit on your computer, map out on itinerary, read reviews, and book flights, hotel rooms, and activities within minutes, again all without leaving your living room. I'm just old enough to remember travel agents. Remember when you had to drive to meet one, have only a vague idea of what country you wanted to see, take the options they give you because you don't know what else is available, and pay through the nose for all of it? The first Google-assisted trip I took, back in 2004, was a revelation, and that was before Maps or StreetView or smartphones or Kayak or Yelp or the universal ability to book things online. Most of the time when I hear folks say "Things have gotten worse than they used to be", they don't mean "things have gotten worse", they mean "Argh, things have changed and I don't know how anything works anymore and what's my place in the world and how will I support myself and everybody else seems to be doing better than me!" Much of which is an illusion, because everybody else is equally insecure about their prospects and place in the world. But the opportunities are out there, and objectively speaking, we are so much, much better off than we were when I was a kid in the 80s. [1] http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_ep00_im0_mbbl_a.htm http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_ep00_im0_... [2] http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_crd_crpdn_adc_mbbl_a.htm http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_crd_crpdn_adc_mbbl_a.htm

api 12y ago

"I sort-of date the end of rapid technological progress to the late-60s or early-70s. At that point something more or less broke in this country and in the western world more generally which has put us into a zone where there’s much slower technological progress." I've believed for years that we entered something like a minor dark age (dim age?) on or about 1970, and that computers have become synonymous with "technology" because it was the only sector that didn't get the memo. Everything else basically stopped cold around 1970, and some fields (e.g. aerospace) have actually gone into reverse. I am very heartened to see people with the fame and fortune of Peter Thiel et. al. raising this issue and basically agreeing, but I have yet to see an explanation that truly seems to work. Peter I think oversells libertarianism when he blames regulation-- while regulation slows progress by increasing costs and making experimentation hard, free markets' reluctance to invest in "zero to one" ideas also slows progress. Nearly all the "zero to one" stories I am familiar with were government funded, usually in a time of war or threat of war. VCs and other investors normally want to fund "one to N" ideas because there is at least a provable market there and the hard stuff is mostly done already. I've got some other ideas but I'm curious about what HN thinks.

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fidotron 12y ago
The cold war having gone by the tipping point was also a very large factor. This tied into the moonrace, and the spin off innovations from that. As a side note, It has always annoyed me that there's a loud contingent of people that object to human space travel on the basis it's not the most efficient way to conduct science, because that is not the point of it. It is a signal of intent, throwing the baton far into the future and hoping to reach it and somehow making it, with innumerable side benefits. What we've lost is the entire will for moonshots, and no one in society is engaged in anything like it. Sometimes I'm an ultra libertarian too, but I suspect the reason Thiel wouldn't follow this reasoning is purely on the basis of who was doing the spending in that era.
- api 12y ago

nostromo 12y ago

I think we're at the top of an S curve. And it's reflected in the stock market: http://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-price/ http://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-price/ After 6 years of 0% interest rate, we've clawed our way back to the dot-com bubble, and no higher. Our foot is completely down on the gas pedal, and we're hardly getting anywhere. What will the next S curve be? Space? AI? I'm not sure, but as things stand, I can't help but chuckle remorsefully when I think back to the exuberance I felt when I read my first Kurzweil book.

tbolse 12y ago
Interesting idea to use the framework of S curves on this observation. But I think that the typical S curve model will not work on big innovations that are not disruptive towards or at least strongly related to each other in terms of use cases. What you mean is rather the concept of "Kondratiev Waves" [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave

trekky1700 12y ago

Because we wanted flying cars and all we got was online payments.

michael_nielsen 12y ago
The funny thing is, if I had to pick just one of those two, I'd definitely go for online payments.
- nostrademons 12y ago
  So did everybody else. That's why we got online payments. I wonder if much of the angst about how the future hasn't turned out the way we wanted is really "We got everything we wanted and it turns out what we wanted is this?" Markets are really good at fulfilling peoples' desires, but the problem is they fulfill people's actual wants, not what they wish they wanted. So it's like turning a spotlight on our desires and realizing that hey, we're all nothing more than human.
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  - jacquesm 12y ago
    No, we got the online payments because they scale. Flying cars have been possible since the 50's or so but they're simply not practical and the concept does not scale well (and not counting Mollers scam, it's a scam and not practical). http://www.terrafugia.com/aircraft/transition http://www.terrafugia.com/aircraft/transition http://www.smithsonianmag.com/videos/category/innovation/the-incredible-flying-car-of-the-1950s/?no-ist http://www.smithsonianmag.com/videos/category/innovation/the...

therzathegza 12y ago

I think the article unfairly bashes rail transport by singling out coal. If you read Warren Buffett's writings, his investment in rail was mostly due to being able to move something 500 miles on one gallon of diesel fuel. Regardless of what is being carried, there are very few things that efficient. Coal sucks, but but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater there. As for the science section, claiming that productivity per scientist is <1% of what it was in 1920s is absolutely laughable. Look at some of the really large projects humanity pulled off like sequencing the human genome for good examples. Interesting article, but seems to be a pretty pessimistic outlook.

tokai 12y ago
Actually there have never been so many publications per scientist as there is now. Nearly every metric that is measurable, have been growing exponentially for the last century (no. of scientists, publications, research institutions etc.). There are some indications that we are nearing the top of the s-curve however. Which begs the question: why is all that research not resulting in equal exponential innovation in our society?
- copperx 12y ago
  Because that research is mostly done to stay employed. There are no incentives to do breakthroughs.
- kazagistar 12y ago
  Cause all the important research is already done. Seriously. Why do we assume the difficulty of making meaningful progress to be linear? It seems reasonable that each new discovery becomes harder then the previous one, at a rate equal to or faster then the rate at which we speed up science.
zenogais 12y ago
I think looking at it as pessimistic is simply wrong. The point is not to be optimistic but to look around and explain the major challenges that seem to be impeding rapid advancement. The biggest problem I see in science seems to be the incentive structure (publish or perish). This overwhelmingly biases against large scale breakthroughs and towards minor amendments and advances. I remember when I first started doing research around 2011 I was extremely disappointed by the low quality and shallow vision of a lot of research being produced today (this was in AI). The volume was incredibly but the content was anemic. So I don't think the <1% figure is totally wrong-headed - we're in an age of 9-5 scientists whose desires to create long-term breakthroughs are often met with negative incentives while bulk publishing low-quality content is considered productive and desirable.

AnimalMuppet 12y ago

We're close to getting cars that can drive themselves. We have cars that can detect when the brakes are locking and fix it, so that you never go into a skid. We have railroad locomotives that can tell when an axle is just starting to slip, and cut the power to that one axle, so that the wheels never slip even at full power on slick rails. We have jet aircraft engines that can report when a part is getting close to failure, so that it can be replaced at a soon-but-convenient time before it actually fails in flight. Desktop computers. Laptops. Cell phones. CT scanners. The internet. The Large Hadron Collider. The Hubble Space Telescope. Progress has slowed since the 1970s? Really? Progress in physical things has not so much slowed since the 1970s; it has gone into improving efficiency, convenience, and reliability. For example: In the 1970s, you were supposed to tune a car engine (plugs, points, timing) regularly. On my 2005, I had to do it after 100,000 miles. It used to be a great achievement to keep a car running for 100,000 miles; now it's just time for the first tuneup. For another: My 2005 is far more stable and easy to drive than what I had in the 1970s. This means I crash less often. That's progress.

JamesArgo 12y ago
I like this take. Last century we built many amazing bodies, this century we give them brains.
tachyonbeam 12y ago
There's also electric cars, which are basically already here and can't be stopped at this point. Solar panels, which have crossed the $1 per watt barrier a while ago. I believe that relatively soon we'll have genetics-driven psychiatry and medicine. Depressed people won't automatically be prescribed SSRIs, but what is deemed most suitable based on their genetic profile. Nobody will need to ask you if you're allergic to penicillin or anaesthetics, those mistakes won't happen anymore. Then there's deep neural networks. We now have computer programs that can recognize what's in an image more accurately than human beings. Domestic robots might well happen during our lifetime. They're going to be basic at first, but you can't stop progress.
- barney54 12y ago

jostmey 12y ago

Yeah, we went to the moon and then what happened? Genetic engineering has been around since the 70's but society has largely rejected its applications. And consider the Energy sector - when was the last nuclear power plant constructed in the United States?

maxerickson 12y ago
The vast majority of animal feed in the US is GMO. (For starters, roundup ready field corn and soy).
- jostmey 12y ago
  That is true but Genetic Engineering has largely been limited to cross-breeding plants. You truly lack imagination if think that roundup resistant crops represent the pinnacle of Genetic Engineering.
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  - a_bonobo 12y ago
    One of my favorite current genetic engineering programs is to turn rice from a C_3 plant into a C_4 plant. C_4 plants have a more complicated photosynthesis system allowing them to fix CO_2 more efficiently, and since C_4 seems to have evolved relatively recent they are still rare. Only about 5% of all plants are C_4, but they fixate 30% of carbon fixated by plants! If we could engineer rice into a C_4 plant, we'd a) get faster growing rice with more yield and b) since rice is grown all over the world, we'd with one stroke get rid of a massive amount of carbon from the atmosphere. No-one has tried to do this before (it's a bit like ripping out a car's engine you know very little about and replacing it by a more sophisticated engine you know very little about), but they're hopeful to have 'prototype' C_4 rice plants by 2016. Edit: It's being funded by the Gates foundation and several governments so it's not a pipe dream. It's one of the most exciting and 'grand' projects in plant biotech at the moment!
api 12y ago

foobarqux 12y ago

Eric Schmidt challenged Thiel's main points in a debate two years ago. http://fora.tv/program_landing_frameview?id=16152&type=clip&autoplay=0 http://fora.tv/program_landing_frameview?id=16152&type=clip&...

maurycy 12y ago
And badly lost. He's not even a sparring partner for Thiel.

alricb 12y ago

Things do advance, but they're a lot less spectacular, sometimes because we're running into hard physical limitations. Supersonic flight, for instance: it's just super difficult to make it economically feasible. But subsonic aircraft are much better than they were back in the 1970s. Cars are leaps and bounds above what they were in the 80s: more reliable, safer, faster. Scientists are also running against physical limitations: to do Big science, you need expensive equipment, like the LHC, but also electron beam microscopes, sophisticated automatic lab equipment, etc. so you need a lot of people to make this stuff works. The problems we do get are more social than scientific: most new buildings aren't much better than the ones from the 70s, but that's because people aren't applying the science that exists. Transportation and energy are similar: it's not sufficient that the technology can be used, the social and economic structure has to be there to support it. For instance, you could dream about a citywide automated contained transportation system in Montreal. You'd have a big east-west conveyor, with links to the mainland at each end of the island, plus a big north-south corridor to get across the island and cross the St. Lawrence. Then you'd only need small electric trucks to move the containers to and from stations along the conveyors. But that's never going to happen because you couldn't put the structure in place.

sumitviii 12y ago
I think you didn't read the article carefully. We don't need more people doing the same stuff. We need people willing to waste all their cash to BUILD something from new discoveries. Earlier new technologies used to be priced sky-high. Now cost benefit analysis is the only thing that matters.

FD3SA 12y ago

The takeaway from Thiel's fairly accurate assessment of broad technological progress is the following: You get what you incentivize. Winner-take-all free market capitalism is not synonymous with advanced, century-long research and development projects at the national scale. Our current socioeconomic system rewards convincing others to depart with their money in the quickest way possible. Ponzi-schemes, marketing, financial trickery, etc. are the preferred methods. Why do we see so many get rich quick startups (to the dismay of Sam Altman and YC) instead of fusion startups? Because that's the most rational way to succeed in today's economy. You'd have to be an idiot to waste your time trying to build a working fusion reactor in your basement when you could just code up a photo sharing app and get acquired for billions. That's why we all idolize Elon Musk; he's only ever tackled difficult industries. How much easier would it have been for him to have made a Facebook, Instagram, etc. clone and become an investor just like the rest of his cohort of successful entrepreneurs? Look gang, we have to stop lying to ourselves. YC and VCs are great for startups that require a few laptops and a bunch of determined programmers. They really are not suited to decade long research projects which have produced such things as: Multi-stage rockets, genetic sequencing, computers, the Internet, fission reactors, etc. I love the startup culture, hacker culture and the sheer spirit of creativity and determination it espouses. But serious science and technology research is very expensive, very long term, and financially extremely risky. That's why in the last century, it has almost exclusively been financed by governments under threat of war (WWI, WWII, Cold War). Thiel prescribes deregulation and Libertarian governments as a solution to the failure of Big R&D. I think he is wrong, precisely because of the last hundred years. Big R&D is expensive and risky, and requires a very long commitment timeline for results. Corporations cannot and will not bear the financial risk of long term research. Neither will individuals or investors. Thus, I propose the only solution that has any precedence: Big R&D as a government mandate. Much like education, healthcare, and social benefits, Big R&D must become a central pillar of a modern society. I envision a Cold War era science race between nations, research labs, and individuals, but in the spirit of science, not war. Research would be a continuous national challenge, much like the Apollo project under Kennedy, but encompassing all of the sciences and continuing past a single administration. There would be work at every level for citizens in the nation's research industry to slowly offset the losses incurred by automation. When all basic needs are met by a very efficient, very high tech and mostly automated free market system, research would become our generator of economic activity. It would provide a consistent safety net for citizens exiting the free market, and prepare them for an eventual return if the opportunity arises (e.g. a new technological breakthrough is ready for the market). Think of research labs like Bell Labs or Xerox PARC, but government funded, intertwined with a cutting edge educational platform (e.g. edX), and in every municipality. In conclusion, I think the free market has done all it can for research. Capitalism is great at providing needs and wants very efficiently in the short term and making incremental technological progress, but is terrible for making big leaps by solving very hard problems that have substantial capital requirements. For that, we have to look back to our previous successes in Big R&D.

JimboOmega 12y ago

I love the tension between the "OMG Robots will do everything, even write code!" and "Technological progress has essentially ground to a standstill" camps. It's refreshing to see something from the standstill camp; thanks to self driving cars the former has been enjoying its day in the sun. Especially so since it fits with a nice cultural narrative about the haves and the have-nots; the theory being that all the robots will take all the jobs and leave only a small elite to live in hyper-luxury (see: Elysium). It's nice to see the counterpoint. There was a time (ca. 2008) where oil price rises were predicted to continue to $500/bbl or more by, er, well now. There was this crisis of resources, of which the technology to extract them had peaked... (speaking of, how can we ignore fracking?). Anyway the bubble burst and the narrative changed. Google's self-driving car gained a lot of hype and suddenly people were worried about automation again (think of all the drivers!).

jameswilsterman 12y ago
I don't think these camps are mutually exclusive. For example, I believe that Thiel is right about the past 40 years, but we are starting to get back on track again (thanks in part to Larry Page) and the next 40 years will be much more broadly innovative.
michaelochurch 12y ago
Robots will do everything, even write code! They're called compilers. Programmers still have jobs. There was a time (ca. 2008) where oil price rises were predicted to continue to $500/bbl or more by, er, well now. Peak oil. We've been at/around 85 million barrels per day for about ten years. It seems to be more of a plateau, not exponential decline. However, prices are going up and so is environmental harm in getting the stuff, and those trends show no sign of slowing. We still have to get off the shit. We just have more time than the doomsayers (always a minority even in "peak oil"-aware circles) thought. Whether we have 10 or 150 years before an oil-powered economy becomes unsustainable, it's not good for the planet to be belching all that carbon into the atmosphere.

gorkemyurt 12y ago

Abundance; great book that's insanely optimistic about the future. Sure it cherrypicks the "what went well" part of our history, but a lot more has went well compared to a couple of failing industries.. http://www.amazon.com/Abundance-Future-Better-Than-Think/dp/1451614217 http://www.amazon.com/Abundance-Future-Better-Than-Think/dp/...

tdees40 12y ago

There's a reasonable argument that the entire industrial revolution was just the result of cheap carbon, and we've been running on that ever since. The Haber Process allowed us to get out of agriculture (and thus have time to make all of these breakthroughs) and then electrification (courtesy coal/gas) got us out of having to do manual labor. So we had lots of free time! And we used that to develop transistors and MRI machines and spaceships and everything else. But the returns to that free time seem to be diminishing rapidly, and we still rely on power growth to get GDP growth.

ArkyBeagle 12y ago
A lot of the stuff we do that uses transistors doesn't show up as GDP.

skybrian 12y ago

Thiel is focused on lagging indicators and this results in excessive pessimism. For example, the average price of energy is a lagging indicator. If you're focused on this then you'll completely miss all improvements in the cost of clean energy until the day when it's better than the average price of all energy. In fact, in the early days it's just making the average price more expensive. If you want to know where we're going rather than looking in the rear-view mirror, you need separate metrics for watching new tech while it's still new and more expensive.

dharma1 12y ago

Maybe the low hanging fruit have been picked but I think there will be a steady stream of innovation in the near future - more efficient and cheaper renewables, better battery tech, better cures to disease etc. I think the next big shift will happen when the remaining 4-5 billion people are empowered with high quality education and computing devices and the potential of the whole of humanity can be put to use. It's a numbers game, more brains working on innovation=more innovation. This global levelling of the playing field and equal access to technology and means of innovation is playing out slowly, maybe too slowly for it to feel like an "acceleration" to us who live through it. Give it another 10-20 years. Right now it's like we're running at 20% capacity when you look at the total number of people on the planet, at how much of that potential is not utilised. China will take the lead, already has started to in some cases (in the case of AI, Andrew Ng's jump to Baidu was interesting) - http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/08/28/interview-inside-google-brain-founder-andrew-ngs-plans-to-transform-baidu/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2014/08/28/interview-i...

chillingeffect 12y ago

Has technological progress slowed since the 1970s? I think there's evidence technology is moving along quite quickly: We've gone from expensive, slow, geographically-constrained telegrams and short-range, anarchic CB radio to gigahertz communication, carrying gigabits of data in the pockets of 1.5 Gigapeople. We have the ISS, in space, 257 miles above us, 24/7, docking several times weekly with spacecraft from several continents. We have GPS. We have a world-wide data network and speech-controlled word-processing and publishing so billions of people can write and deliver a book, paper, speech, etc. with pictures and diagrams complete with automatic language translation. The days of hand-staining long-exposure slide film for use in a projector are over. We eradicated smallpox. We invented MRI, robotic surgery, Tamoxifen, Raloxifene. We have successfully transplanted hearts and lungs, livers, intestines, hands, arms, legs and even faces, bladders, ovaries and penises. We've gone from one farmer supplying 57.7 people to 155 people. Yes you can point to vast stretches of mediocre scientists and companies who are also-rans. That's just a condition of humanity. Not everyone can sequence the entire human genome. If someone wants much more miraculous results out of the natural world than what we have today, you're seeking mystical discoveries, not technological ones.

noir_lord 12y ago
I was reading today of the first person to have a 3D printed skull implanted that was an exact physical replica of the one she originally had before disease deformed it. That lady would have died 20 years ago, now she is expected to live. Progress has stopped....bollocks we may not do showy grandscale stuff anymore but the sheer rate of improvement across so many fields is there if you look.

joeclark77 12y ago

Mark Steyn has also commented brilliantly on the fizzling out of technological innovation: http://www.steynonline.com/6425/holding-pattern http://www.steynonline.com/6425/holding-pattern Quote: "The first half of the 20th century overhauled the pattern of our lives: The light bulb abolished night; the internal combustion engine tamed distance. They fundamentally reconceived the rhythms of life. That's why our young man propelled from 1890 to 1950 would be flummoxed at every turn. A young fellow catapulted from 1950 to today would, on the surface, feel instantly at home – and then notice a few cool electronic toys. And, after that, he might wonder about the defining down of 'accomplishment': Wow, you've invented a more compact and portable delivery system for Justin Bieber!"

mark_l_watson 12y ago

I have not closely followed Theil's entrepreneurship or previously read his writing, but I did buy his "Zero to One" book on Audible earlier today. The premise of the book, on the higher value of inventing totally new things rather than copying, sounded good to me.

dbpokorny 12y ago

The essay "What happened to the future?" is, I think, notable for what it does not contain, which is any mention of mathematics. The Digital Math Library project has been going on for years in the background (mostly in Europe). They have been doing conferences for years, and, at 30,000 feet, it looks like fascinating work: http://cicm-conference.org/2014/cicm.php?event=nop&menu=general http://cicm-conference.org/2014/cicm.php?event=nop&menu=gene... The computerization of mathematical reasoning, and in particular directing AI toward the study of the "pre-rigorous reasoning" aspect of mathematical work is, in my opinion, a great "plan of attack" toward general AI. Mathematics is about problem solving, and if computers can learn to do problem-solving well in the mathematical domain, in a general way, it seems to me that there is hope that computers will be able to solve problems in other domains as well.

tbolse 12y ago

Some additional thoughts: Maybe Thiel is right with his thesis. But I think we don't see the impacts of the latest "technology" like Facebook and Twitter or any social network that might come as a successor clearly yet. I had the same opinions, because it doesn't really feal like rocket science or flying cars. A German professor called Peter Kruse, changed my mind. He has a really interesting perspective on todays interconectedness using a system theroetical view: His thesis is (roughly): What we are currently doing is rapidly increasing the interconnectedness or the networking density of our society almost worldwide (e.g. social networks Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, you name it) and the devices we use (e.g. IoT), we have also increased spontaneous activities in these networks (e.g. web 2.0 services where people can be interactive), additionally we have implemented functions that enable circular stimulus in these networks (retweet and share functions). If these 3 effects come together there is the tendency that these systems will carry signals that resonate and amplify themselfs. It is almost impossible to forecast when and how this happens, because these networks are non-linear. If you post something that resonates with a lot of people you can be very powerful from one moment to another. Technology is only the enabler here and I have no doubt that this has a huge impact on society - see the revolution in Egypt for example. One outcome is a shift of power, because it is really hard to control these networks. Even though we have very sophisticated mass-surveilance most events happen very uncontrolled.

michaelochurch 12y ago

Technology has shitty leadership, and society as a whole has even worse leadership. Thiel is right. Global economic growth was 5-6% per year in the 1960s. Now it's around 4%. The main culprit: disinvestment in R&D. Those "cushy jobs" for engineers whom the MBA dickheads claimed "weren't earning their keep" were actually the R&D pushing the country (and the world) forward. Transportation is another thing we suck at, as a country. We're frozen in the 1960s, but with worst traffic. Trains are expensive and slow, planes are only cheap if you play the constantly changing, convoluted system, and cars are probably up against the limits of human reflexes and the roads. Finally, the middle class has had its collective face ripped off by the Satanic Trinity (housing, healthcare, tuition costs). Things that used to be comparable to utility bills are now life-wrecking constraints and, because no one has any fucking savings anymore, entrepreneurship is at an all-time low (whatever nonsense the VCs fund isn't entrepreneurship; in that world, investors are just bosses by another name). Thiel is right. We've had a lack of vision and leadership for a long time and it has really slowed the world down.

enraged_camel 12y ago
>>Finally, the middle class has had its collective face ripped off by the Satanic Trinity (housing, healthcare, tuition costs). Things that used to be comparable to utility bills are now life-wrecking constraints and, because no one has any fucking savings anymore, entrepreneurship is at an all-time low. This is why unconditional basic income is an absolute necessity, in my opinion. It's the only way to save the middle class. If every individual received $1,000 per month from the government, they could start working part-time and have much more time and energy left for creative pursuits, including entrepreneurial endeavors. As things stand though, most brilliant minds work for (and are wage-slaves of) corporations and all their work does is enrich the people at the top.

InclinedPlane 12y ago

If most of my wealth came from a dubiously valuable social media site, I might be just as pessimistic about technology.

jeffreyrogers 12y ago

Thiel is more or less reiterating the points that the economist Tyler Cowen has been making for several years. I just read Zero to One and found it good, but not great. Cowen's book, Average is Over [1], covers much of the same ideas and is better reasoned. (Cowen's earlier book, The Great Stagnation, is also quite good). [1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00C1N5WOI?btkr=1 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00C1N5WOI?btkr=1

RobPfeifer 12y ago

The real reason - it gives him a differentiated brand which drives certain types of entrepreneurs to Founder's Fund. Since he started down this branding exercise with that New Yorker piece in 2011, I'm sure he gets much more inbound interest at Founder's Fund. Plus, his hedge fund was being wound down, making him refocus on his VC brand. Everything with a grain of salt people!

zarkov99 12y ago

Because most of what passes for innovation in the last decade is vapid garbage with negligible impact on society's well being.

graycat 12y ago

The title of this thread asks a question, and here is my guess at an answer: Progress 1900-1941. Mostly based on practical 'tinkering' with a little science and engineering at just the college level. With a few exceptions, didn't need research contributions. Some Exceptions: Antibiotics, anesthetics, chemistry and chemical engineering. Also Bell Labs had started working on transistors based in part part on understanding of quantum mechanics. WWII interrupted the work, but soon after the war Bell Labs had the transistor. Progress 1941-1960. Heavily driven by big spending, lots of drive, for US national security, especially WWII and the Cold War. E.g., US DoD spending helped create Silicon Valley. Progress 1960-1974. Throttled by US efforts in Viet Nam, the oil shock, and inflation from Viet Nam spending. Progress 1974-present. Moore's law, the Internet, some pharmaceuticals, some in materials. Otherwise progress was throttled. And here I will have to attempt to describe a cause, my idea, apparently not mentioned so far. There's plenty of good pure and applied research on the shelves of the research libraries. There are plenty of well trained people in the results of the pure and applied research and how to do more such research, in science, engineering, technology, etc. But for this material on the shelves of the libraries and these trained workers to contribute to the US economy and standard of living as Thiel discusses, we need a lot of other people to go along, approve, fund, act as CEOs, Members of Boards of Directors, etc. Then, these other people upchuck at what the well trained people know, feel threatened, inadequate, intimidated. They fear that going along with the corresponding projects would be imprudent for them as managers and/or financially irresponsible. Or, through 1940, work was mostly in a management hierarchy where the supervisor knew more and the subordinates were there to add muscle and/or person-hours to the work of the supervisor. Now that situation has changed: Mostly the people who really understand the technical material and how to apply it are just the worker bees, and the rest of the organizational hierarchy is trembling because they do not understand, in the old model, enough about the technical material really to manage the work. There are some big exceptions: The US DoD is able to get leading edge research into systems into the field. E.g., GPS, the SR-71, indeed, the H bomb. And so can the pharmaceutical industry. And what has been done in the lithography for microelectronics is astounding. But, my view of information technology in Silicon Valley, it can't: That is, send them a project plan with a technical paper, and Sand Hill Road will just toss it into the trash; really. NSF, NIH, DARPA, ONR, etc. are fully able to review and evaluate technical material for projects, but nearly no one on Sand Hill Road can. Indeed, nearly no venture partners have the qualifications to serve as problem sponsors for DoD, DoE, NSF, NIH, etc., tenure track faculty in STEM fields in research universities, direct research, get research grants, review research papers, publish in good journals, serve on the editorial boards of good journals, etc. Elsewhere in the US economy, middle managers do not want to bet their careers on technical projects they do not understand from their highly technical subordinates. Basically the need is to get people with good technical backgrounds in positions where they have the authority to request, evaluate (or have evaluated), approve, fund, and oversee projects that exploit the pure/applied STEM work on the library shelves. So, for the high level technical material we need to exploit, we need middle management well enough educated with such material to be able effectively to manage the exploitation. At least the middle managers must be able to direct competent evaluations of high end technical material.

zanny 12y ago

> because there’s no one in the system who has any idea what to do with the money Hey look, validation of my outlook on basic income. Links the go-to source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM For some reason, we seem to have forgotten that the best investment is in people. You want your innovation, all the potential is trapped living on scraps a day in soul crushing poverty or near-poverty, while you move around your trillions with nothing to spend it on - because you are literally running out of things to get you more money, because nobody else has any left to give.

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julie1 12y ago

My parents could go on vacation, enjoy life and come back from work with a clear break. I am to be a coder, whose dreams are constantly polluted by solving work problem, uncertain of my future, hardly going on vacations, and I should see a progress in the fact my parents could be important and it was normal they had a life and be "reasonably" reachable, and I am not important and have a sort of intrusive technology not leaving room for a life out of work. I would gladly trade it for my parent's generation condition of life, all included. Our societies priorities are really not well adjusted at my opinion. But I need to feed my loved one and myself, so I shut my mouth, and work in this mad system, like everyone...but it piss me off to be still young enough to love life with her, and can only tell her we can hope we will be able to do it later ... eventually. I care not about iphone, because I am more likely than you to become poor. I want cheap food, cheap energy, and healthy time to enjoy life with the ones I care for. My only wealth are my friends (and family) and my friends especially are being crushed by the exaggerated amount of work we push in industry like banking, advertisement, distraction industry and the media. What do we do to save the world? We code awesome softwares to have the feeling we help humanity. Yeah. We improve humanity for the better good. Pushing a rock hard because you are scared, does not make it go in the right direction if you never put an eye on the road.

jqm 12y ago

Well, we couldn't bomb people with drones remotely from half way around the world 3 decades ago.... But seriously, I blame the growth of the bureaucracy. Bureaucracy not only takes resources needed for innovation, it flat out stifles it. This happens at many levels... the government, the employers... lots of people going to work and not only not productively working, but actively keeping others from doing so while loudly proclaiming their right to a share of the pie.

tim333 12y ago

>“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” The flying car thing is actually getting closer with the likes of the Terrafugia, and the advances with self driving cars give me hope that they may progress with self piloting aircraft. At the moment piloting planes is a bit tricky for everyday use. I did a private pilot's licence and it's hard work as is flying a small aircraft in terms of radioing the various air traffic controllers and similar tasks. (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/automobiles/terrafugia-transition.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/automobiles/terrafugia-tra...)

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