FWIW I'm from the UK and we haven't been definite optimists since the 1800s.
Reminds of me of "The General" from Asimov's Foundation and Empire (spoiler alert for an amazing book from 1952). In a time where the galactic empire is collapsing/shrinking, General Bel Riose makes it his mission to restore the empire militarily and re-conquer the lost territory. He's actually a good commander, has overwhelming force, and looks to be in the process of achieving complete victory in the style of historical military commanders that made the empire great. In light of his achievements, the Emperor sees him as a potential rival, despite the fact that he never appears to have any ambitions to the throne (he's presented as an Imperial True Believer), recalls him right on the cusp of complete victory over the Foundation, and the Foundation survives being snuffed out in its infancy.
Even trying to emulate the old greats with the best of intentions will fail if you don't account for your environment. If everyone else is more concerned about their portfolio, to some degree you have to be as well, even if it distracts from the greater goals.
Everything gets done according to process. Elon Musk is a rare iconoclast.
(sorry for bringing the pandemic into a discussion about Wright Flyer bits flying on Mars)
Successful organisations are able to adapt over time, where bureaucracies only stagnate.
Markets are orthogonal to that trade off because both bureaucracies and adaptive organisations operate within the market. It's just a tool, you can use it well or poorly.
Unfortunately it gets a bit murky in that there is another form of bureaucracy to tame markets while they are not circumvented and there's a severe lack of separation between those two forms of bureaucracies. Usually neither critics nor advocates seem to care about the distinction (which plays out much better for critics I suppose).
That's the difference; the rate of actual invention, or as Thiel puts it, going from 0 to 1, has dropped off a cliff.
You are just cherry-picking your facts to fit a narrative that you have built. It is easy to glorify the past when you did not live through it. For every Wright Brother, there were hundreds if not thousands of hucksters and shysters. If anything, a close reading of history will illuminate how little has changed regarding the human condition in the last 200 years.
> You are just cherry-picking your facts to fit a narrative that you have built.
lol
less innovation != no innovation.
the human condition may not change, but culture does. Just look to the economy and how many companies are primarily focused on rent extraction or incremental improvements to existing concepts as opposed to inventing new things. How many new inventions did we get in the 50s-60s alone?
I agree, the culture has changed. Right now, I can now apply to 100's of startup incubators to get funding for my idea or invention. Back in the day, you needed to be either very well connected or from a wealthy family. Today, I have a 3d printer sitting on my desk, and I can hack together a little self driving robot in a weekend. Back then, making prototypes involved an entire machine shop and a ton of capital.
If anything there are too many people trying to innovate. I work in the energy sector, and literally every idea with a shred of plausibility has multiple startups working in the space.
No, obviously I don't believe that. You seem to keep going back to black and white arguments, which I didn't make.
> Right now, I can now apply to 100's of startup incubators to get funding for my idea or invention
The biggest, most successful startup examples are incremental. Uber, stripe, Airbnb. Google I would probably argue was a serious innovation over the status quo, but still on an incremental subject.
> Back then, making prototypes involved an entire machine shop and a ton of capital.
I do agree that consumer access to capital, both financial and manufacturing has improved.
But my point in general is that ambition has shrunk and there's less of what Thiel calls 0 to 1 innovation and more energy is going into incremental improvement and rent extraction.
Reality is much messier. It is going 1000 different directions all at once, mostly composed of regular people each working on a small thing and most of those small things are useless, and no one knows 99.9999% of what happened or is actually happening now. In the same way that 5 years from now is going to mostly be like today and 25 years from now will be almost unrecognizable for most people, if people cherry pick bits of the past they can imagine almost no progress with current practices but they also imagine themselves to be in the 0.1% in the past who might have had access to this proto-technology but today it costs less than a days labour.
Bezos on the other hand radically transformed the entire retail sector. The logistics required to operate at that scale required healthy amounts of innovation. And AWS is a relatively original and transformative product.
And whatever you think about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, they were both instrumental in defining the shift to personal computing, among many other impacts. Billions of people have been impacted by their work.
> Bezos on the other hand radically transformed the entire retail sector
Who cares whether you're doing innovation if your goals are lame? I'd much rather we had more people trying to colonise the stars than people trying to make high availability shopping websites. That's exactly what I've been trying to say this whole time.
I suppose ambition is a better word for it than innovation.
The stars are basically the last frontier, but unfortunately, exploring those requires budgets that only big governments can afford. Well out of the realm of your garage-scale inventor.
Frontiers generally have to be invented by people willing to go out into the unknown, and I guess the willingness to try completely new things with no obvious benefit is what is missing. Startups are everywhere for those whose ambition is primarily "become wealthy", but most are funded and investors want a credible route to market.
The clearest image that portrays this for me is the 60s scifi images where people were imagining robot butlers, flying cars and cities on the moon and under the sea, all by the year 2000. It really captures what's missing nowadays, and what Elon represents to a lot of people.
Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the American private sector has moved from being led by...
DARPA is still doing impressive things though as far as I'm aware. NASA is once again doing cool things, but I can't help but suspect that interest in space was reignited by SpaceX, and Elon Musk is the archetypal definite optimist.
I don't think the social capital shifted so much in the US, certainly there are more people being administrators than there was before, but notice how much people like Elon Musk, or the flowers left outside Apple Stores when Steve Jobs died.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Proud-Tower-Portrait-Before-1890-1914...
My pocket doesn't.
Spaceflight is not compute-bound.
That is, if they can get over the geopolitical hurdles of shooting ICBMs full of people between major world powers. There's no way for an early-warning detection system to know if there's 40 rich businesspeople on board or 40 MIRV warheads. I imagine this challenge will be about on par with the difficulty of building starship in the first place.
Consider high bypass turbofans, the most important change of the last fifty years (change, not innovation, the turbofan principle had been studied since before the first turbojet took to the air). If we had airframe geometries supporting arbitrarily big fans, would we eventually see bypass ratios that could only be accurately described with the term ferris wheel? I highly doubt it. Diminishing returns, maybe even some identifiable theoretic optimum long before (just guessing, I might be wrong).
Thought experiment: imagine Star Trek engineering (recent-ish stuff, not Kirk), if they had a competition in building the best airplane without star trek energy sources and all that force field stuff. I'm not sure that the winner would look much different from what we have, if the goals are consistent with those of our designers. Some things are just mostly find. There'll still be development because in a market of a plateauing technology even the tiniest refinement can separate winners from losers, but there wouldn't be a meaningful increase in innovation of you funneled half of the world's economy into r&d. (until some day, maybe there is a sudden major jump, think of foiling in sports sailing)
The single most amazing aviation innovation by the way is the bug wiper. Amazing stuff. Unfortunately no English language Wikipedia, Google it if you never heard of it.
What changed since was a poor successor (the Space Shuttle) followed by the shift from political to economic motivations in space.
As for Concorde, that was a product of the belief in supersonic transport bring the future that was just plain wrong. Where you can use it is too limited and subsonic jets became way more efficient and reliable than anyone predicted.
You may say that not much has changed but air travel 50 years ago was massively expensive. Now air travel is ridiculously cheap. That might not be as flashy but it has massively changed how people live.