In Tech We Trust? A Debate with Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen [video]

The entire video is well worth a watch, but that's it in a nutshell.

[edit: fixed typo]

The issue of measurement IS important. The problem with all of Peter Thiel's metrics is that they are inherently indicators of external activity. The triumph of the virtual curve reveals itself in the only metric that really matters: time.

All forms of technology have the same purpose: to optimize the utility obtained during a finite lifespan. Some forms of technology increase the utility per unit time, others simply increase the units of time we have left. Therefore, more and more time spent in virtual space is an indication that virtual technology is out competing the substitutes provided by physical technology. As we go higher up the virtual curve and technology becomes more advanced at fulfilling our emotional and psychological needs by moving bits instead of atoms, eventually physical progress will slow to baseline: literally life support (maybe with gamified life extension projects taking place in virtual land).

Alas, the last technology invented by man will not be the singularity, it will be near perfect virtual reality; closer to Angry Birds than Skynet.

"Mean wages have been stagnant (not median). It’s not an income an inequality issue. Mean wages went up 350% in the US after inflation from 1933 and 1973. [They] went up 22% from 1973 to 2013. Median wages were flat, so it’s become more unequal. Even if you had redistributed everything, it’s gone up only 22%."

I feel this is an overly US-centric view of humanities progress. Globalisation produces winners and losers in the short term, and even though manufacturing jobs are being destroyed in the US, millions of people are being lifted out of poverty in China and other low cost developing nations.

If you are using the argument that stagnant wages in one part of the world means human civilisation is not progressing technologically, does that argument stand up if you look at global living standards?

There was an interesting argument (unfortunately I can't recall where I heard it) that put forward the idea that World War II was like a massive subsidy from the US Air Force to the US manufacturing sector. The US Air Force destroyed many of the industrial cities of America's global manufacturing competitors (mainly Germany and Japan) and other major European nations were destroyed also and were bailed out with the Marshall Plan.

All this meant that for decades, the US manufacturing sector had it artificially good because of greatly reduced global competition, as factories and other manufacturing infrastructure had to be totally rebuilt in the other big industrial nations, which took decades. This was great news for US car companies (and other manufacturers) in the decades after the war, who could churn out (relatively) unreliable and fuel inefficient vehicles, which were bought in huge numbers as they were the best available. In the 1970s, the combination of the oil shocks and encroaching competition from Japanese car makers, who innovated with reliable, fuel efficient and affordable vehicles, meant that the good times were over.

Tl;dr using US wages from 1933-1973, and 1973-today is the wrong metric to measure human civilisations technological progress, for a variety of reasons.

I think both agreed that energy is of critical importance as well, and that the nature of the energy markets have had a big impact on shaping progress in other areas.

Also, I think Peter Thiel made a fairly interesting point about the connection between our imagination (as a culture) and Hollywood's portrayal of technology. It is a little odd that some of the most well-known and popular movies with a large technological element are the ones where the machines are coming to kill us. I'm sitting here right now trying to think up some good counter-examples, and am coming up fairly blank so far...

Something else that Peter Thiel mentioned at least twice was the phrase "risk averse". I think that's a pretty important point... as a society, have we become so risk averse that we aren't willing to gamble on the big breakthroughs anymore? Are we content to just sit back and wait and hope for a steady stream of incremental, sustaining innovations? I think he might be onto something with that.

Edit: Something that neither Thiel nor Andressen mentioned, that I think is relevant to this discussion, is the recent re-emergence of the hobbyist / DIY / amateur scientist / solo hacker/builder movement. Hackerspaces, cheap embedded / embeddable computers, Arduino, Beagleboard, rPi, 3D printing, cheap DIY CNC milling machines, etc, are enabling thousands or millions of people to take a stab at building things they never could have tried to build before. And go visit the recent HN thread on "Hardware startups" and the CDixon post... looking at what an entrepreneur can do now, in terms of having a physical product built at scale with a much smaller capital investment than in the past... that's got to encourage some new companies to form, and some people to start working on ideas and dreams they've been stewing no, no? And hardware devices aside, cheap computers, cheap Internet access, Open Source software, etc., are making it so much easier for people to explore their software and virtual ideas as well.

But, then we'd be back to Peter's point that "we got 140 chars". So, is it lack of imagination, or something else, that's keeping us from getting radical, disruptive breakthroughs? Or are they out there, on the cusp, just... about... to... happen.

I love the way these guys think and express themselves.

Charter Cities and regulatory competition get a mention around 56:00, something that I am very excited about.

Argument 1

The fact - and it is very much a fact - that, off late, technology hasn't progressed very much at all.

Argument 2

And that our scowl-faced culture, that disparages everything technological -- in favor of products of some glorious bygone era where everything that would be ever needed for human purposes has already been conceived, crafted and fabricated -- reinforces this notion in every aspect of our lives.

This is the part I hate most about our culture - the utterly stupid, moribund romanticism associated with every stupid thing ever invented -- however ill-suited it is to serve a purpose in this age -- is somehow worthy of our admiration solely because it is antediluvian.

Not that it is efficient or infinitely better than any candidate that has since come along to replace it (and there are a few examples of such nature. Very few indeed. Eg: the drinking straw or the common t-shirt).

But purely because it served our forefathers well and therefore it is somehow worthy of continued use.

Hollywood unabashedly continues to perpetuate these sickening notions to no end.

Edit: Rewritten for purposes of clarity.