6 ms·

Peter Thiel Says Computers Haven’t Made Our Lives Significantly Better

53 points by finisterre 12y ago

api 12y ago
Another recent thread on this same topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8337460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8337460 Have to say I can't agree with him more on this specific point. Other than IT and a few other things, technology has stalled since 1970. Every counterexample I've heard is actually an application of IT to enhance some other thing (e.g. self-driving cars). The car itself hasn't changed in any fundamental way since 1950 (unless it's electric).
- myusernameranou 12y ago
  How about the heavy advancement of car safety, the improved capacity for producing materials that cars use, cars being faster, and cars being cheaper? With most technologies and processes, first you create something and then you improve it and optimize it, each further improvement of the same size has a higher marginal cost. Cars have come a very long way, you wouldn't expect a car to change more in one decade than it did in the previous decade. If you are looking for a really revolutionary fundamental change, then it probably wouldn't be a car anymore, maybe it would be a plane.
  - 001sky 12y ago
    "Cars" are constrained massively by a couple things that in fact have not really progressed much since 1970. EG, they are constrained to roads and the interstate was a far more revolutionary change than the catalytic converter, direct injection, or DOHC or whatever. You're basically arguing that fuel efficiency is greater, but fuel scarcity is another topic altogether. It remains the case that petrol is still the fuel of choice--not electric or some other source--becuase of its inherent efficency in terms of energy per unit of mass. So, betweeen the fuel constraint ant the roadway constraint, cars are a fractional better than they were a generation ago...but not a categorical or even significant leap by any stretch. If you read some history of LA and compare the changes from 1920 to 1940 you would have seen a radical shift in the impact of the automobile. Heck, even the impact of the container ship alone is far more interesting at a macro/absolute level. Car safety and fuel efficiency are simply very minor improvements on a fundamentally unchanged basic engineering platform: the two ton, four-wheel ICM constrained to a limited right of way, and a very similar feasible safe-speed constraint. Note, that one better argument here is these are as much legal/social as technological constrainst placed upon the automobile. Many people in the younger genreations would rather see the (at least the personal) automobile dis-associated with its role of primacy in western society. This is more or less feasible depending of course on technology and other elements improving the constraints on urban planning. The lack of the removal of these constrainsts (both technological and economic) is again also a sign that technology has/had plateaued in the area of civil engineering. It may have been improved, but in terms of radical improvement...not so much. Of course, shale gas and hydro-fracking may yet do more than keep the status quo in place...but fundamentally...not much has changed in Californial in the past 40-50 years in terms of day to day getting around.
- slapshot 12y ago
  > The car itself hasn't changed in any fundamental way since 1950 The form factor of cars haven't changed much since 1950. Everything else has. Seatbelts. Airbags. Hybrids. Automatic transmissions allow more people to drive, and are now faster/better than manual. We moved from carburetors to fuel injection to direct injection, dramatically increasing the ability to control combustion in each cylinder. We went from massive V8 and V12 engines (the entire 1950s Cadillac line produced about 300 horsepower from a 6 liter V8 -- a modern import sedan can produce almost the same on a 2 liter V4 e.g., the Hyundai 2.0 liter engine). Superchargers allowed greater performance, turbochargers unlocked greater efficiency. Radial tires were barely a thing in 1950, and advancements in tires have made cars dramatically safer. Catalytic converters and electronic emission controls returned LA's atmosphere to health. Etc. If there was any doubt, check out this chart: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_otfwl2zc6Qc/TIp8lXB5h2I/AAAAAAAAOW8/fmXi_SCP-jw/s1600/highway2.jpg http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_otfwl2zc6Qc/TIp8lXB5h2I/AAAAAAAAOW... Highway fatalities per mile traveled are about 80% lower than in 1950. The vast majority of that gain is from technology -- drivers sure haven't gotten any better over that period.
  - api 12y ago
    That's improvement, yes, but it's incremental. I'm talking about the internal combustion engine -- the core design. This reminds me a lot of the micro/macro-evolution debate in biology. There are people who think macroevolution is just a lot of microevolution, and there are people who think macroevolution is sometimes something completely different -- that discontinuous leaps occur. I am of the latter camp there too. The Cambrian explosion was a sudden non-linear leap to give one example. Going from horse to car is not the same as going from Model T to Honda Civic.
    - krschultz 12y ago
      It's not incremental, you just don't understand the depth of the difference. You're effectively saying there is no difference between a telegraph and the internet. They both send data over an electrical wire, so it must be 'incremental progress'. If that's your definition of incremental, then you will probably never see something that you consider innovative in your lifetime.
judk 12y ago
Peter Thiel is a businessman, not a historian of technology.
diminoten 12y ago
Isn't the kind of stuff he's talking about really hard? We may have wanted flying cars, but 140 characters is way easier, and that's why we have it, not because we're focusing on the wrong things.
volaski 12y ago
Yeah and human beings have stalled evolving ever since we started looking like a human. I mean, we look the same as thousands of years ago, right? What have we done? At this point we should all have evolved so much that our brain should be the size of a basketball and should be able to communicate via telepathy. What have we done? We've all failed.
foobarqux 12y ago
> For example, you probably could not restart nuclear power in the U.S. without the role of government. But because our government does not believe in complex coordination and planning, it will not restart the nuclear industry. It’s quite possible it will just not get restarted. Funny that you can call yourself an emphatic capitalist and advocate for central planning.
- jboggan 12y ago
  Capitalism is not synonymous with competition, in fact Thiel has made a point of expressing his monopolistic philosophy [0]. 0 - http://online.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536 http://online.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-fo...
  - foobarqux 12y ago
    Central planning is the antithesis of capitalism, nothing to do with competition.
    - SirensOfTitan 12y ago
      And Thiel makes it abundantly clear that competition is not the end goal as most markets are not static. So essentially Thiel isn't advocating "pure" capitalism, because using any methodology as a catch-all is bad practice.
    - maxxxxx 12y ago
      I think you are confusing capitalism with free and competitive markets. Capitalists probably prefer central planning and regulation as long as it benefits them.
  - bad_user 12y ago
    I do not agree with his opinions on the matter. His great example of a monopoly is Google, however Google doesn't have the kind of monopoly that other companies have. It's easy for people to switch search engines and if Google lets people down, it leaves room for competition, therefore they have to continually innovate, otherwise a competitor can pop up that will do to them what they did to AltaVista or Yahoo. It's easy to switch emails, especially webmail, therefore they had to produce the best webmail experience on the market and had to keep adding value add-ons. It's easy to switch phones and it's easy for phone makers to pull the rug under Google's feet, therefore they had to produce a reasonable alternative to iOS to ensure their survival. I don't really know what he refers to when he says "perfect competition", but I wouldn't describe air-lines as being in a perfect competitions. The planes I fly on are refurbished planes built 20 years ago, with no room for my feet, extremely shitty service, the airport experience is extremely shitty and to top it off the tickets are still way too expensive if you don't buy with months in advance. That's not competition, that's an oligopoly. Google hasn't showed monopolistic behavior until they started to deeply integrate their products with each other, creating their lock-in effect. And I remember other companies that did so, most notably Microsoft and it wasn't good for anybody, not even Microsoft.
mudil 12y ago
I really respect Mr. Thiel for what he has done in the past, but I increasingly find that people who publish a new book (like Mr. Thiel) come up with categorical, often outrageous, statements just to drum up the support for the book.
- hawkice 12y ago
  And here we are talking about it, so mission accomplished, I guess.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
benihana 12y ago
What's with the surge of Peter Thiel related soundbites lately? I have no idea where he gets the idea that technology stopped in 1970. A simple example: look at how much more efficient internal combustion engines are now than they were in 1970. You can actually drive distances that are in the double digits of miles on a single gallon of gas today. That's a simple, quick example. Saying "we were promised jetpacks and flying cars and that future wasn't delivered," is short sighted and so ridiculously uncreative. Instead we got a global communication system. The world is way smaller now than it would have been with flying cars. I can keep in touch with people across the globe for almost no cost. That is real innovation - few people could even imagine the internet - fewer predicted it and I don't think anyone foresaw the impact it's had on humanity. While Peter Thiel was watching movies with flying cars and jetpacks (which I might argue are uncreative continuations of existing technology) people were solving actual problems in new and incredible ways.
- bravo22 12y ago
  He has a book coming out I think. Publisher's PR likely.
- jboggan 12y ago
  Though not a technology that everyone uses everyday, the pace of progress in something like engine design (and in particular, motorcycles) is undeniable and at this point nigh-frightening. A machine that would have beaten $1M+ factory prototypes from 15 years ago can be purchased for $10k and ridden on the street. The amount of acceleration, top-end speed, braking power (!!!), weight reductions, advanced electronic rider aids, reliability, and composite materials in modern motorcycles is just staggering. And it shows no signs of slowing - in fact the recent advances in electronic aids are allowing the engines to be tuned to ridiculous levels that would be un-rideable (for non-champion racers). Two good examples of amazing technology on the safety front: Bosch ABS [0] that allows you to grab the front brake in a banked turn (on every motorcycle to this point this results in an instant crash) and self-deploying airbags for motorcycles [1]. 0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h9MVbkpLZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h9MVbkpLZQ 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlLDtCD7y9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlLDtCD7y9c
joshuaellinger 12y ago
You know what is damn funny about this.... In 1980, Reagan got elected and cut a ton of forward-thinking basic research. I won't go through it in detail but there was a giant shift from publicly-funded big ideas to privately-funded little ideas. All the big companies also got short-term focused and outsourced their labs to startups. Now we have this big-government-is-bad guy, who probably looks at Reagan and his gang as Saints, lamenting the lack of progress. This is what happens when you put all your best minds into either (a) building weapons or (b) advertising/marketing or (c) the legal profession. Let me know when he says that we need to raise his taxes to do stuff that collectively benefits society. Until then, he's just like a drunk complaining about a hangover.
- bicknergseng 12y ago
  d) manipulating financial markets.
  - joshuaellinger 12y ago
    Reagan (really more Phil Graham) killed a lot of the depression era regulation that made financial markets safe and boring. But the talent drain into Finance didn't really pickup until much later. Certainly a giant waste of smarts today.
- 001sky 12y ago
  Just think about how much money was saved by ending the Cold War. That was actually driven by government spending. It was also driven by technology (and spending on technology).
  - psychometry 12y ago
    To say that Reagan "ended" the Cold War is a charitable interpretation, to say the least.
    - 001sky 12y ago
      #1 The dynamics of the cold war ended because of spending on technology--not because "technology spending" was cut. #2 The cold war ended under reagan as a point of history. Not sure how much is left to quarrel about?
rayiner 12y ago
I tend to agree. Cellular wireless is really the only fundamental advance in that time. The rest is engineering and refinement, and new applications for existing things. Which is important too, of course. I would posit that part of the problem is the overall decline in our belief in institutions (covered elsewhere). You need big institutions to organize people to do big things, and when trust in them erodes, our ability to coordinate to do big things is reduced.
- tptacek 12y ago
  Portable civilian satellite location services would be another. Consumer-feasible portable LCD displays might be another.
  - e_modad 12y ago
    I'm actually curious, why LCD displays? Was it thought to be incredibly difficult to achieve before?
nick2008 12y ago
What if we are just in a consolidation of technology phase? It would make sense that after so many breakthroughs until the 70's you need some time to consolidate that technology and knowledge before moving forward.
- maxxxxx 12y ago
  I think that's it. There haven't been that many fundamental breakthroughs in science in the last few decades.
melloclello 12y ago
Peter Thiel invested in Urbit, it is important to note. http://urbit.org http://urbit.org https://github.com/urbit https://github.com/urbit
bicknergseng 12y ago
I feel like Peter Thiel is taking the Foundation series a little too literally.
squozzer 12y ago
If Thiel had spoken about something more broadly defined such as "progress", then his arguments might have held water.
frogpelt 12y ago
I think the realization of what global connectivity can produce is still in its infancy. IoT is huge. We are on the verge of controlling our entire homes with the wallet-sized computers in our pockets. I say on the verge because it hasn't reached mass adoption levels. Information/knowledge/education sharing is growing by leaps and bounds. When the education bubble completely bursts, and you don't know have be rich, know someone, or have a 4.0 to get a high-quality education, that will be considered a huge development in hindsight. (EDIT: I realize this is also currently going on but for the next decade or two the ivory towers still have the influence.) People are quick to dismiss technological advances once they get used to them. It's easy to say, 'we haven't cured X terrible disease' and 'humans aren't living past 100, we're underachieving.'
uokyas 12y ago
that's because he isn't a developer
skynetv2 12y ago
coming from a person who made a ton on money on the same things he says are not making our lives better.
sanoli 12y ago
I've thought about this on and off, and one day I arrived at this: The only technological progress that truly matters to me are medical ones. If people could live and not get sick, and not die until they're 90, then I would be fine living with 1970's era tech, or whatever year's era tech. Then all we'd need would be to have less violent, more egalitarian societies, à la Scandinavia. Flying cars, faster+cheaper computers, better internet be dammned. (or they could go on being improved, but I wouldn't care if not) P.S. I never get the flying car thing, since we have helicopters.
- will_work4tears 12y ago
  I agree entirely, medical progress is really the only thing that really interests me, aside maybe material science and engineering breakthroughs (e.g wastewater treatment, etc). I never got the flying car thing because we can have flying cars. The technology is there, the barriers are more.. social or political, if that makes sense. I sure as hell don't want people flying anywhere near my house in a 2 ton vehicle 20+ feet above the ground at even residential speeds. A nice yard, some trees and maybe a fence keep a runway car out of my living room, not so with a flying one.

53 points by finisterre 12y ago

api 12y ago

Another recent thread on this same topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8337460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8337460 Have to say I can't agree with him more on this specific point. Other than IT and a few other things, technology has stalled since 1970. Every counterexample I've heard is actually an application of IT to enhance some other thing (e.g. self-driving cars). The car itself hasn't changed in any fundamental way since 1950 (unless it's electric).

myusernameranou 12y ago
How about the heavy advancement of car safety, the improved capacity for producing materials that cars use, cars being faster, and cars being cheaper? With most technologies and processes, first you create something and then you improve it and optimize it, each further improvement of the same size has a higher marginal cost. Cars have come a very long way, you wouldn't expect a car to change more in one decade than it did in the previous decade. If you are looking for a really revolutionary fundamental change, then it probably wouldn't be a car anymore, maybe it would be a plane.
- 001sky 12y ago
  "Cars" are constrained massively by a couple things that in fact have not really progressed much since 1970. EG, they are constrained to roads and the interstate was a far more revolutionary change than the catalytic converter, direct injection, or DOHC or whatever. You're basically arguing that fuel efficiency is greater, but fuel scarcity is another topic altogether. It remains the case that petrol is still the fuel of choice--not electric or some other source--becuase of its inherent efficency in terms of energy per unit of mass. So, betweeen the fuel constraint ant the roadway constraint, cars are a fractional better than they were a generation ago...but not a categorical or even significant leap by any stretch. If you read some history of LA and compare the changes from 1920 to 1940 you would have seen a radical shift in the impact of the automobile. Heck, even the impact of the container ship alone is far more interesting at a macro/absolute level. Car safety and fuel efficiency are simply very minor improvements on a fundamentally unchanged basic engineering platform: the two ton, four-wheel ICM constrained to a limited right of way, and a very similar feasible safe-speed constraint. Note, that one better argument here is these are as much legal/social as technological constrainst placed upon the automobile. Many people in the younger genreations would rather see the (at least the personal) automobile dis-associated with its role of primacy in western society. This is more or less feasible depending of course on technology and other elements improving the constraints on urban planning. The lack of the removal of these constrainsts (both technological and economic) is again also a sign that technology has/had plateaued in the area of civil engineering. It may have been improved, but in terms of radical improvement...not so much. Of course, shale gas and hydro-fracking may yet do more than keep the status quo in place...but fundamentally...not much has changed in Californial in the past 40-50 years in terms of day to day getting around.
slapshot 12y ago
> The car itself hasn't changed in any fundamental way since 1950 The form factor of cars haven't changed much since 1950. Everything else has. Seatbelts. Airbags. Hybrids. Automatic transmissions allow more people to drive, and are now faster/better than manual. We moved from carburetors to fuel injection to direct injection, dramatically increasing the ability to control combustion in each cylinder. We went from massive V8 and V12 engines (the entire 1950s Cadillac line produced about 300 horsepower from a 6 liter V8 -- a modern import sedan can produce almost the same on a 2 liter V4 e.g., the Hyundai 2.0 liter engine). Superchargers allowed greater performance, turbochargers unlocked greater efficiency. Radial tires were barely a thing in 1950, and advancements in tires have made cars dramatically safer. Catalytic converters and electronic emission controls returned LA's atmosphere to health. Etc. If there was any doubt, check out this chart: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_otfwl2zc6Qc/TIp8lXB5h2I/AAAAAAAAOW8/fmXi_SCP-jw/s1600/highway2.jpg http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_otfwl2zc6Qc/TIp8lXB5h2I/AAAAAAAAOW... Highway fatalities per mile traveled are about 80% lower than in 1950. The vast majority of that gain is from technology -- drivers sure haven't gotten any better over that period.
- api 12y ago
  That's improvement, yes, but it's incremental. I'm talking about the internal combustion engine -- the core design. This reminds me a lot of the micro/macro-evolution debate in biology. There are people who think macroevolution is just a lot of microevolution, and there are people who think macroevolution is sometimes something completely different -- that discontinuous leaps occur. I am of the latter camp there too. The Cambrian explosion was a sudden non-linear leap to give one example. Going from horse to car is not the same as going from Model T to Honda Civic.
  - krschultz 12y ago
    It's not incremental, you just don't understand the depth of the difference. You're effectively saying there is no difference between a telegraph and the internet. They both send data over an electrical wire, so it must be 'incremental progress'. If that's your definition of incremental, then you will probably never see something that you consider innovative in your lifetime.

judk 12y ago

Peter Thiel is a businessman, not a historian of technology.

diminoten 12y ago

Isn't the kind of stuff he's talking about really hard? We may have wanted flying cars, but 140 characters is way easier, and that's why we have it, not because we're focusing on the wrong things.

volaski 12y ago

Yeah and human beings have stalled evolving ever since we started looking like a human. I mean, we look the same as thousands of years ago, right? What have we done? At this point we should all have evolved so much that our brain should be the size of a basketball and should be able to communicate via telepathy. What have we done? We've all failed.

foobarqux 12y ago

> For example, you probably could not restart nuclear power in the U.S. without the role of government. But because our government does not believe in complex coordination and planning, it will not restart the nuclear industry. It’s quite possible it will just not get restarted. Funny that you can call yourself an emphatic capitalist and advocate for central planning.

jboggan 12y ago
Capitalism is not synonymous with competition, in fact Thiel has made a point of expressing his monopolistic philosophy [0]. 0 - http://online.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536 http://online.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-fo...
- foobarqux 12y ago
  Central planning is the antithesis of capitalism, nothing to do with competition.
  - SirensOfTitan 12y ago
    And Thiel makes it abundantly clear that competition is not the end goal as most markets are not static. So essentially Thiel isn't advocating "pure" capitalism, because using any methodology as a catch-all is bad practice.
  - maxxxxx 12y ago
    I think you are confusing capitalism with free and competitive markets. Capitalists probably prefer central planning and regulation as long as it benefits them.
- bad_user 12y ago
  I do not agree with his opinions on the matter. His great example of a monopoly is Google, however Google doesn't have the kind of monopoly that other companies have. It's easy for people to switch search engines and if Google lets people down, it leaves room for competition, therefore they have to continually innovate, otherwise a competitor can pop up that will do to them what they did to AltaVista or Yahoo. It's easy to switch emails, especially webmail, therefore they had to produce the best webmail experience on the market and had to keep adding value add-ons. It's easy to switch phones and it's easy for phone makers to pull the rug under Google's feet, therefore they had to produce a reasonable alternative to iOS to ensure their survival. I don't really know what he refers to when he says "perfect competition", but I wouldn't describe air-lines as being in a perfect competitions. The planes I fly on are refurbished planes built 20 years ago, with no room for my feet, extremely shitty service, the airport experience is extremely shitty and to top it off the tickets are still way too expensive if you don't buy with months in advance. That's not competition, that's an oligopoly. Google hasn't showed monopolistic behavior until they started to deeply integrate their products with each other, creating their lock-in effect. And I remember other companies that did so, most notably Microsoft and it wasn't good for anybody, not even Microsoft.

mudil 12y ago

I really respect Mr. Thiel for what he has done in the past, but I increasingly find that people who publish a new book (like Mr. Thiel) come up with categorical, often outrageous, statements just to drum up the support for the book.

hawkice 12y ago
And here we are talking about it, so mission accomplished, I guess.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

benihana 12y ago

What's with the surge of Peter Thiel related soundbites lately? I have no idea where he gets the idea that technology stopped in 1970. A simple example: look at how much more efficient internal combustion engines are now than they were in 1970. You can actually drive distances that are in the double digits of miles on a single gallon of gas today. That's a simple, quick example. Saying "we were promised jetpacks and flying cars and that future wasn't delivered," is short sighted and so ridiculously uncreative. Instead we got a global communication system. The world is way smaller now than it would have been with flying cars. I can keep in touch with people across the globe for almost no cost. That is real innovation - few people could even imagine the internet - fewer predicted it and I don't think anyone foresaw the impact it's had on humanity. While Peter Thiel was watching movies with flying cars and jetpacks (which I might argue are uncreative continuations of existing technology) people were solving actual problems in new and incredible ways.

bravo22 12y ago
He has a book coming out I think. Publisher's PR likely.
jboggan 12y ago
Though not a technology that everyone uses everyday, the pace of progress in something like engine design (and in particular, motorcycles) is undeniable and at this point nigh-frightening. A machine that would have beaten $1M+ factory prototypes from 15 years ago can be purchased for $10k and ridden on the street. The amount of acceleration, top-end speed, braking power (!!!), weight reductions, advanced electronic rider aids, reliability, and composite materials in modern motorcycles is just staggering. And it shows no signs of slowing - in fact the recent advances in electronic aids are allowing the engines to be tuned to ridiculous levels that would be un-rideable (for non-champion racers). Two good examples of amazing technology on the safety front: Bosch ABS [0] that allows you to grab the front brake in a banked turn (on every motorcycle to this point this results in an instant crash) and self-deploying airbags for motorcycles [1]. 0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h9MVbkpLZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h9MVbkpLZQ 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlLDtCD7y9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlLDtCD7y9c

joshuaellinger 12y ago

You know what is damn funny about this.... In 1980, Reagan got elected and cut a ton of forward-thinking basic research. I won't go through it in detail but there was a giant shift from publicly-funded big ideas to privately-funded little ideas. All the big companies also got short-term focused and outsourced their labs to startups. Now we have this big-government-is-bad guy, who probably looks at Reagan and his gang as Saints, lamenting the lack of progress. This is what happens when you put all your best minds into either (a) building weapons or (b) advertising/marketing or (c) the legal profession. Let me know when he says that we need to raise his taxes to do stuff that collectively benefits society. Until then, he's just like a drunk complaining about a hangover.

bicknergseng 12y ago
d) manipulating financial markets.
- joshuaellinger 12y ago
  Reagan (really more Phil Graham) killed a lot of the depression era regulation that made financial markets safe and boring. But the talent drain into Finance didn't really pickup until much later. Certainly a giant waste of smarts today.
001sky 12y ago
Just think about how much money was saved by ending the Cold War. That was actually driven by government spending. It was also driven by technology (and spending on technology).
- psychometry 12y ago
  To say that Reagan "ended" the Cold War is a charitable interpretation, to say the least.
  - 001sky 12y ago
    #1 The dynamics of the cold war ended because of spending on technology--not because "technology spending" was cut. #2 The cold war ended under reagan as a point of history. Not sure how much is left to quarrel about?

rayiner 12y ago

I tend to agree. Cellular wireless is really the only fundamental advance in that time. The rest is engineering and refinement, and new applications for existing things. Which is important too, of course. I would posit that part of the problem is the overall decline in our belief in institutions (covered elsewhere). You need big institutions to organize people to do big things, and when trust in them erodes, our ability to coordinate to do big things is reduced.

tptacek 12y ago
Portable civilian satellite location services would be another. Consumer-feasible portable LCD displays might be another.
- e_modad 12y ago
  I'm actually curious, why LCD displays? Was it thought to be incredibly difficult to achieve before?

nick2008 12y ago

What if we are just in a consolidation of technology phase? It would make sense that after so many breakthroughs until the 70's you need some time to consolidate that technology and knowledge before moving forward.

maxxxxx 12y ago
I think that's it. There haven't been that many fundamental breakthroughs in science in the last few decades.

melloclello 12y ago

Peter Thiel invested in Urbit, it is important to note. http://urbit.org http://urbit.org https://github.com/urbit https://github.com/urbit

bicknergseng 12y ago

I feel like Peter Thiel is taking the Foundation series a little too literally.

squozzer 12y ago

If Thiel had spoken about something more broadly defined such as "progress", then his arguments might have held water.

frogpelt 12y ago

I think the realization of what global connectivity can produce is still in its infancy. IoT is huge. We are on the verge of controlling our entire homes with the wallet-sized computers in our pockets. I say on the verge because it hasn't reached mass adoption levels. Information/knowledge/education sharing is growing by leaps and bounds. When the education bubble completely bursts, and you don't know have be rich, know someone, or have a 4.0 to get a high-quality education, that will be considered a huge development in hindsight. (EDIT: I realize this is also currently going on but for the next decade or two the ivory towers still have the influence.) People are quick to dismiss technological advances once they get used to them. It's easy to say, 'we haven't cured X terrible disease' and 'humans aren't living past 100, we're underachieving.'

uokyas 12y ago

that's because he isn't a developer

skynetv2 12y ago

coming from a person who made a ton on money on the same things he says are not making our lives better.

sanoli 12y ago

I've thought about this on and off, and one day I arrived at this: The only technological progress that truly matters to me are medical ones. If people could live and not get sick, and not die until they're 90, then I would be fine living with 1970's era tech, or whatever year's era tech. Then all we'd need would be to have less violent, more egalitarian societies, à la Scandinavia. Flying cars, faster+cheaper computers, better internet be dammned. (or they could go on being improved, but I wouldn't care if not) P.S. I never get the flying car thing, since we have helicopters.

will_work4tears 12y ago
I agree entirely, medical progress is really the only thing that really interests me, aside maybe material science and engineering breakthroughs (e.g wastewater treatment, etc). I never got the flying car thing because we can have flying cars. The technology is there, the barriers are more.. social or political, if that makes sense. I sure as hell don't want people flying anywhere near my house in a 2 ton vehicle 20+ feet above the ground at even residential speeds. A nice yard, some trees and maybe a fence keep a runway car out of my living room, not so with a flying one.