Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation?
danwang.co
danwang.co
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.
The 1970s was when the Club Of Rome, The Limits to Growth, The Population Bomb and all the Malthusian overpopulation scare mongering went absolutely bonkers and the elites bought into it completely. Rich people have been fascinated with reducing the world's population growth ever since. There is no "good" future anymore among "serious" prognosticators. It's wall-to-wall eco-doom. This has led to a almost pathological derision of any new ideas in energy, food production, and transport as they just contribute more to our success as a species and more overpopulation.
The developing world, namely India and China didn't get the memo and now they've quickly caught up and there is a lot of angst coming out of the west about how they can't control the carbon emissions of the BRICs and slow down their economies. The BRICs say that the west is responsible for the majority of the carbon emissions when their economies were developing so they should pay the economic burden.
I really think revolutionary technology is poised to come out of China. They've caught up and now they are going to surpass us with the development of new nuclear reactors, alternative energy and their massive rollout of high speed rail across the country. They might even surprise us with something we weren't even expecting. Broad Corp's ultra-fast skyscraper building techniques seem like a sign of things to come.
LTG pointed out some real problems. If we were in the 50s-60s can-do mindset we'd have reacted with "well let's roll up our sleeves and fix it then!" But that wasn't the reaction at all. The reaction was doom and gloom and futility with a hefty helping of thinly veiled racism and classism. Gotta stop those poor and brown people from overrunning the country club!
I think LTG was an example of something that hit at just the right time to capture a dominant zeitgeist that was already shifting toward conservatism and pessimism. It was a lightning rod.
Another thing since 1970 is that there have been no liberals on the mainstream political landscape, just various species of "left" reactionaries and "right" reactionaries.
The 70's was when energy started getting expensive again. And we did nothing to deal with the problem, not even now.
The 50's and the 60's (and the 70's, 80's, 90's, 00's...) were marked by huge growth in govenments worldwide. Something that we simply never experienced before. It's quite possible that we reached an inflection point by the 70's, and it become almost impossible to inovate.
This guy[1] has some interesting theories about the way administration evolved at the XX century. A world dominated by corporations is a new thing, and it may be true that the natural evolution of a society dominated by them leads to a period of stagnation like we have now.
All of the above explanations have data backing them (but less backing for the third), and people on the net eager to push that data to anybody that asks. Any of them alone could explain a worldwide stagnation of a few decades (or longer for the first). All of them seem to be happening, but causation on a system as complex as humanity is hard to stablish. Maybe we need to technological revolution on system analisys...
[1] http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/
EDIT: Another possibility is that we reached a level of development where going forwad is really that hard. And we have a lot of work we need to make on tooling before we see fast widespread development again.
Well, harder. See my post at
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8338417
in this thread where I try to explain the sense in which harder is, with the traditional management hierarchy, too hard.
The one I'm less confident is that development is too hard. And I mean it in the literal sense, in that we need to create entire new thinking paradigms, and invest endless billions on tools so that we can get in another easily explited plateau. I'm not the only one expressing it on the thread, by the way.
And now that I've had time to think about it, there's another possibility - that development is too easy... The basic science developed up to the 60's left us in a place where we can create tons of wealth even with no basic improvement, and it's possible that we aren't invest on the basics just because it does not offer the hightest ROI. Once we exploit enough possibilities that further improvement gets hard again, we may revert into investing in basic science and basic development.
So, do all the pure/applied research you want, those suits won't let, or at least won't help, the results see the light of day.
We did a lot of pure research because (A) that is what the academic world most respects and, thus, for their careers, most researchers wanted to pursue, (B) US research, including workers with pasts in pure research, were a super big help in winning WWII and doing well in the Cold War, (C) the US DoD really liked and respected both pure and applied research, (D) Congress was eager to fund research as part of helping US national security. Part of the rationale for Congress funding pure research was that (A) the leading researchers told Congress that that was the research to fund and (B) the pure researchers were the profs who trained the worker bees for the more applied research -- so Congress was still happy.
What we fund now via NSF and NIH is not too shabby. If someone actually has some good work background and a really good proposal, then likely they can get funded.
But, with some exceptions, take some research results and a proposal for a product to Silicon Valley or the suits in a large company will, get either silence or laughs. Again, the suits want next to nothing to do with research results.
Or, journals will give a serious review of a submitted research paper, but the suits won't get past the title page.
You're right, a libertarian view of this is way off the mark.
There are times when your sarcasm would acutally be a valid point and not sarcasm, but this is not one.
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.
Disagree completely. I am firmly in the camp against manned space travel however I am also firmly in the camp of "moonshots" when it comes to things that have value for their stated purpose.
See the problem with manned spacetravel is that, at it's core it is not an immediately valuable end. It will always be only a means to some other end. It's not like "science" in that it is a repeatable process that covers many domains - if you are doing manned spaceflight then the goal is basically "lets drive around." Given the scale of problems we have on terra, manned spaceflight is actually pretty silly - hence why it took a pissing contest WAR to get us to go drive around on the moon.
Sometimes I actually blame Skepticism.
I'm not talking about skepticism mind you, but Skepticism-- the capital-S variety that became so popular in science starting in the 1970s as a reaction against things like the new age and the resurgence of religious fundamentalism. Rather than an attempt to keep the candle of science burning, I've started seeing Skeptics as another manifestation of the general turn toward superstition that occurred on or around this time. Theirs is the superstition of the known-- the belief that that which is not presently understood cannot possibly exist. Skepticism also usually fellow-travels with the kind of deep conservatism you're talking about. Head over to Skeptic boards and you'll see that the general opinion is anti-manned-space-flight for exactly the reasons you state-- it's not the most science for the buck, etc. It also usually fellow-travels with eco-doomerism for the simple reason that no comprehensive solutions to our current energy problems are known therefore they cannot possibly exist. (That which is not known can't possibly exist, remember?) Skepticism raised a generation of scientists whose first instinct is to tear things down and narrow the range of possibility.
My personal big overarching theory on the dark age of the 70s is that there was a broad shift toward conservatism and fundamentalism across the entire spectrum of human thought: right and left, scientific and mystical, etc. As for why I'm not sure, but I suspect that fear was a big part of it. Lovecraft said it best:
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." - H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"
That's exactly what I think happened: we fled from the deadly light into a whole grab bag of comforting, pessimistic, conservative absolutisms. Apocalyptic fiction is so popular for the same reason-- people find it comforting in a weird way. If we're all doomed then at least we know what the outcome will be... unlike more optimistic visions of the future that end with black voids like "the singularity," human genetic metamorphosis, alien contact, the birth of AI or other post-human intelligence, etc. I think there's a part of us that finds the unknown more terrifying than death and that secretly hopes that WWIII or ecological collapse will save us from the great unknown outcome of progress and exploration.
If I had to stick a marker in the ground, I'd place it at the moment everyone saw that earth rise shot:
http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/946xvariable_...
See any gods in there? See anything that cares about us? Nope. All I see is a tiny grain of sand in an endless black void of nothingness. We are basically dust mites living on that grain of sand. This photo basically proves that we know very little about where we are, where we come from, and where we are going. People looked at that picture and said it was beautiful and inspiring, but secretly somewhere deep inside I wonder if the reaction wasn't metaphysical horror...
Stare at it for a while... you'll see it.
>Stare at it for a while... you'll see it.
I'm just not seeing it. Instead, this one favorite song starts playing in my mind (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5p5OyLFQLCc). I see a species many of whom ignorantly believe that the world is only a few thousand years old, and yet who have not the slightest idea how young they truly are, and how far they have to grow up. I see sad, pessimistic depressives who grew up in darkness for so long that only the tiniest minority have any idea what light actually is or looks like.
And yet they struggle for every day and every tiniest gain! And each step of struggle, each plateau where a man falls tired, becomes the starting point where his successor begins and climbs yet higher! Every man climbs and climbs and will keep climbing until climbing through the heavens themselves!
These creatures contemplate their history and see it as either a line or a circle, but only the tiniest few have yet grasped that the path their race walks on is a spiral: turning endlessly around to recapitulate what came before, but always greater than ever before! They fight and build endlessly even though they have no coherent idea why or wherefore!
Think of where the human race comes from and consider everything they've accomplished, and think of all they will soon do. Think of the utterly insignificant timescale of it all, from the astrophysical and geological perspectives, and thus think of the unbelievable speed with which these people think and move!
Dust mites? Fear the empty black? Never! These are the finest, bravest, and wisest beings yet produced in this universe, who are forced to turn to their boundless imagination to find works exceeding their own!
(Yes, I know what the above sounds like. I still endorse it. On a good day.)
Should empiricism be changed to allow fuzziness and uncertainty within the process? Scientific truth seems like a problem space similar to those amenable to metaheuristics. We don't know the form of the optimal / most true model. I'm not positing this for physics. Mainly systems biology and big data fields.
There is no doubt in my mind that if Einstein appeared in this environment he'd have been labelled a crackpot and it would have taken fifty years or more before anyone even began to take him seriously.
The fact we now have a global network of entities competing for funding from relatively narrow sources means that those that deviate rapidly get weeded out. There is at least the perception that prior to about 1990 different institutions could be quite divergent with their views on particular ideas, violently disagree, but both still pursue research in their unique directions. The world seems far more homogeneous today.
I see billions.
You can find a video of a talk online too.
Perhaps we are seeing the affect of an increase in difficulty of pushing the boundaries of basic science, and the difficulties of interpreting that new basic science, and thus of applying it to anything that will enhance our lives, our economies, so on.
How many people could really get to grips with Newtonian physics? I'd hazard a guess that a reasonable percentage of the world's population, given boundless resources for education, lots of time, etc, would be able to get their heads around it.
Now, how many people in the world, under the same circumstances, are capable of understanding QFT, to the point of doing something with it in the applied space? I think the percentage just dropped drastically.
You know what? I don't think so. I think that the borderline for raw intelligence necessary to understand modern physics and mathematics hasn't actually gotten much higher, but we academics like maintaining our sense of belonging to an intellectual elite so strongly that we've simply neglected to work on improving how we teach the deeper material. After all, if a student fails to understand, it's because he's stupid, inferior, and destined to change majors into Journalism, so we don't have to try.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8338417
in this thread.
I believe we are largely in agreement, and I suggest what happened near 1970 and propose an answer to the question since 1970 and to what Thiel is complaining about.
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.
On the other hand, try make that same comparison between the 1930s with the 1970s and you would fall off your chair... Or between the 1890s and the 1930s... That's what progress used to look like, sadly [4].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-lock_braking_system
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_computed_tomography
[4] http://www.cepr.org/sites/default/files/policy_insights/Poli...
Who is to say there are no technologies that are now in their infancy that won't reach widespread adoption 40 years from now? Who is to say what's in its infancy today won't be just as impressive or groundbreaking as what was in its infancy 40 years ago?
There were some computers which could communicate over modems at 300 - 9600 baud or so, at distance.
The technologies which enabled the Internet were being developed in the 1960s. As of 1977, this was the entire ARPANET, about 53 nodes by my count: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Arpanet_logical_map,_march...
The real guts started filling in during the 1980s, particularly BSD Unix (with a TCP/IP stack), Perl, and by the end of the decade, the first Web server and clients.
The difference between technological developments of the latter half of the 20th century and those from 1800 - 1950, is that the former involved new sources of energy, new means of producing and distributing it, and exceptional advances in materials. From 1950 onward most major advances have been in information processing and communications, though the Green Revolution likely also counts. Nothing to sneeze at, but limited all the same: information processing lets you change how you manage matter, but the overall impact is still restricted to the theoretical maximum efficiency of those physical processes.
Faith that technology will provide us with an unlimited future is ... wishful thinking.
Programming tools, languages and paradigms (client side v. server side, MVC v. layered, and so on) have evolved for sure, but the WWW? Nothing fundamentally new since the early 90's when CGI made its appearance. The web works today as it did then, albeit with fatter pipes and obese page payloads.
But consider: during the huge technological advances of the early industrial revolution, much of the attention we pay today to the basic needs of society was not there. No social safety net meant that people starved. No (or few) vaccinations meant that medical treatment was more necessary. But the lack of anesthesia, antiseptics, antibiotics, etc. made medical treatment painful, dangerous, and often useless.
Certainly poor people today have it bad. But in some ways the poor of the western world (at least) enjoy a quality of life that people in past centuries could only dream of.
So, putting that together with your argument, I wonder: could a slowdown in innovation today be due to the fact that society is expending its energy meeting people's needs? In the past, in contrast, needs were ignored, and that energy was expended on innovation.
This idea would seem to be supported by the fact that so much of the innovation of recent decades has come out of the U.S., which arguably has one of the least effective social safety nets in the western world.
EDIT. Just in case anyone is wondering: for goodness sake I'm not arguing that we shouldn't be concerned about people's needs. But if the above idea is how the world really works, then there is no point in denying it.
No no, I get your point. No need to worry.
I would add a counter-argument here though that there was definitely more time to think in the past. There was more peace of mind because people had a less hurried lifestyle. Also, things had always been bad and were getting much better relative to the past. For example, for new parents today, think of all the various concerns that are constantly hitting them from all sides. This wasn't the case 150 years ago and I think that allowed for people to devote a least some portion of their mental energy towards innovation. And if not innovation, at least towards being socially engaged in the discussion about innovation.
This is an issue that I don't see being addressed at all in the U.S. On the contrary, we see articles (rather often on HN) on how to squeeze more productivity out of those silly little bits of free time in our days.
This is the important bit, and it matters a lot more than some of the anecdata the original post mentioned. Commercial airliners haven't got faster than Concorde, they've got slower. They've also got smaller wingspans and less buoyancy than Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose. As impressive as the engineering accomplishments were, they optimized for the wrong goals; today's airliners might not be as interesting but they are fuel efficient, reliable and don't need to float. And regular people fly on them, regularly.
The billions that gets spent on making aero engines 1% more efficient every year might not be as glamorous as Concorde, but cheaper tickets for the general public (and satellite internet in BA1 for those senior executives rich enough to have previously considered Concorde on that route) actually delivered better outcomes.
If instead of looking at progression in maximum speeds one looks at how much people fly, we're in a phase of acceleration.
And anyway what's wong with incremental improvements across the board? Just look at medicine, and life expectancy!
The automobile has changed as much in the last 20 years as in the previous 100. Ubiquitous embedded computing has transformed essentially everything, especially manufacturing. Hell, there's even a new flurry of innovation in spaceflight, with a very high chance that we'll see Martian colonies in the next few decades. That alone is nothing to sneeze at.
But let me take a moment to drill down on one specific thing: pollution. In the mid-20th century pollution and abuse of the environment in the developed world was becoming a very serious, even existential problem. Ocean dumping was ubiquitous. Millions of deaths per year were occurring due to the sad state of air quality in major cities like LA, Pittsburgh, London, etc. There were disastrous individual events like the great smog of London in 1952. Many people aren't aware that that event killed more people than 9/11, that's how serious it was. It also made over 100k people seriously ill, aside from the impact it had on quality of life for people living in London in general. Since then there has been a massive uptick in the population of Los Angeles, there has been a massive increase in car ownership and total vehicle-miles driven, a massive increase in freight volumes on railroads and trucks. And yet, despite all that there has been an even more massive improvement in air quality, enabled by technological innovation.
There are many, many more amazing stories along the same lines, with the cornerstone in every case being technology developed in the late 20th century as an enabling factor.
One of the downsides of technology that works so well and so smoothly (which late 20th/early 21st century automobiles would fall in the category of) is that it can be difficult to garner the attention it deserves. Smooth functioning is the absence of problems, so it becomes too easy to simply set the baseline at the point where the technology is working (taking it for granted). But these amazing technologies (automobiles, the internet, etc.) are the product of herculean amounts of effort from an enormous number of incredibly skilled people. It should be amazing that we have handheld computers with wireless internet connectivity at broadband speeds, yet this is just the normal state of being in the developed world these days.
I have often wondered what made the West so great during its golden age of innovation (and to answer what we're missing today) and think it can be attributed to a single-mindedness in our culture and leadership towards a common goal.
The Industrial Revolution (and American Revolution) would not have been possible without the overwhelmingly popular Age of Enlightenment (a cultural movement of intellectual reform that emphasized reason over tradition). Such multi-national cooperation and exchange of ideas had been previously unprecedented. The intellectuals of each country banded together because they had a common enemy (entrenched tradition, religion, and monarchy).
Similar patterns (large-scale cooperation towards a common goal) can be found in the Second Industrial Revolution, the Atomic Age, and the Space Race.
So the question remains: what singular goal(s) do we have today?
The Internet has a great deal of potential to be used as a vehicle for a new intellectual revolution that may drive a new age of progress. I've seen a few hints of this in the OSS community and Silicon Valley but so far neither have found a common goal that resonates strongly enough.
tl;dr : The want of progress is not specific enough to inspire. We need a new, overarching goal to drive the next age of progress.
Though I call into question whether or not that responsibility (to coordinate action towards the advancement of human civilization) should be left solely with our heroes. I believe this narrative will never truly change until every individual takes some share in that responsibility.
So, where is the Elon Musk of high-energy physics? Where is the Elon Musk of terraforming, both off-planet and on Earth to reverse climate change? What of cancer, antibiotics, longevity treatment, machine intelligence? Et cetera. These are equally important problems we face, and if we rely on 'heroes' to take them on, we might be waiting for a long time. And again, by 'heroes' I don't mean people with the ability and the intelligence and the desire to solve these problems - we have plenty of those - rather people with those qualities and the resources to truly take them on. Those are rare, indeed. Contrast Elon Musk with Notch, who are of comparable means now, yet Notch has quite clearly stated that if anything he does starts to have an impact again, he will shitcan it immediately. What a profoundly awful attitude to have. Sadly, I think you'll find more like him in that caste than Elon.
As I say, it seems like an enormous waste. Capital markets alone are not up to the task. For what it's worth, I'm not trying to subtly advocate for socialism or something either. I don't know what the solution to the problem is, but it is a problem.
Excellent points regarding the exceptional breadth of requirements necessary to effect change.
I don't think this precludes my earlier belief concerning individual responsibility for our collective progress. This is a conversation that everyone needs to participate in precisely because there is such a rare chance any one individual will have the necessary pre-requisites to take action.
Even the most plebian among us may one day find themselves flush with cash, and when they do, they could wield those resources responsibly. The concept of "noblesse oblige" (or, the more modern Spider-Man variant: "with great power comes great responsibility") comes into mind here. Interestingly, Elon made a veiled reference to this shared outlook in his "sinking ship" metaphor recently on Colbert.
I too was deeply troubled by Notch's attitude toward unwanted success (and more importantly, the worrying precedent it sets for others). It's disappointing that he has no apparent desire to utilize his position in a useful manner but I wonder how much of that mindset is a product of our current environment.
So, where is the Elon Musk of high-energy physics? Where is the Elon Musk of terraforming, both off-planet and on Earth to reverse climate change? What of cancer, antibiotics, longevity treatment, machine intelligence? Et cetera
At the risk of sounding rather trite: the next Elon Musk might be reading this page right now.
Elon is not an island. He had to have gotten his attitudes from somewhere. Teaching kids about our shared responsibility and to dream big about real problems is an act that every adult can (and should) participate in. Those who are in a position to mentor or inspire another (even if it's a boss to an employee, VC to a founder, or friend to friend) should also take part.
Who knows what he may use his position for in the future? He seems to me an intelligent, honest, passionate person. Maybe he will enjoy a quiet retirement. Maybe he will go on to do incredibe things in other arenas after taking some time to step back. A little empathy is in order, in my opinion.
Rose colored glasses of history, but I would hazard to say that the average knowledge + ambition + creativity of a person today is far lower than in the various retrospective golden ages.
... you can't find a genius and then teach him or her. You teach everyone, then genius blooms.
I actually see plenty of ambition in the valley and elsewhere— ambition to be the next billion-dollar success story.
What I don't see is a lot of purpose-consciousness + ambition. It's been offered that the purpose of all for-profit companies is to make money; any venture intending to create value for anything but its shareholders is therefore a non-profit.
I think this is wrong. For-profit companies can work toward a clear, common goal without sacrificing profit. I think the modern web (which was built by contributions from hundreds of companies) is a great example of this. SpaceX and Boeing (funded jointly by NASA) working in tandem to enable private space travel is another.
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.
Solar panels piece does not matter much until batteries are much better, if you want power at night or when the sun isn't full strength.
There's a difference between inventing the internal combustion engine, and making that engine consume 10% less fuel. Even if the latter ends up being a more challenging feat, at the end of the day it is making an improvement to something that already exists. It's a "1+n" technology, as opposed to a "0 to 1" technology.
A lot of these were actually invented/designed in the 70s or earlier, or are iterations of breakthrough ideas from those years. He's talking about actual breakthrough innovations.
Of course, since we don't know which of those technologies will be viable, we mentally don't count them.
The oil, natgas, and coal are rapidly running out. The shale/fracking thing is an accounting fraud on the verge of blowing up, if you happen to think that's a real answer. None of the outfits involved actually turn a real profit on energy production. Renewables are largely a scam based on government subsidy. Existing nuclear technologies are also a scam based on government liability indemnities. Also, the fissile material situation is pretty dicey going forward.
The techno fantasy future is going to fade away in the coming decades and we're going to confront real resource and energy limits that change our way of life to something more resembling that of our ancestors.
EDIT:
Luckily, weapons systems are much more effective than they were in the 1970s, so I guess we will be able to fend off the poor.
EDIT2:
Look, downvote all you want...the elephant in the room is that the rewards and advances in technology are not and can not be distributed evenly. Even in a first-world nation such as the US, so many of the products listed in my parent post are out-of-reach of anyone without significant financial means. CT scans, for example--what does imaging matter if you can't afford it?
You think that the starving huddled masses are just going to sit outside the walls and go "Man, sure wish I could live there?". That's never how history has worked out, you nitwits.
This is a reason to be optimistic. w00t for humanity! Also b000 to your fearful and unfounded outlook on humanity.
What he says is true, and innovation seems to affect fewer and fewer people - the rest can only dream of it.
Good drugs are being banned, electric cars are being laughed at by people who can't fathom that an electric motor can put out the same performance as a V6, smartphones can be used as full digital assistants yet they're used for phone calls/Skype and alarms, SpaceX - what's that, etc.
Not to mention that "over 3B (billion) people are below the poverty line..." as angersock said.
Those who are lucky enough to be touched by innovation surround themselves in a bubble and dismiss everyone else.
Those who are lucky enough to be touched by innovation
surround themselves in a bubble and dismiss everyone else.
Despite of (political correct) statistics made by the world bank, the inequality is rising in the world. Only look at the US. Once the US had a broad middle class. Today, the middle class is shrinking more and more and is replaced by quarters for the poor and others for the rich. The only reason, that it is not seen by most people is, that they stick in their own peer-group -- and do not look to much into the lives of others. Also, there is no country in the world that has that many people in prisons ...
Your example of a CT scan got me to think that way. I don't think it's practical to assume that such a device would be widely distributed; heck, I'm not even sure it's possible to fuel them all with liquid He if we tried to proliferate it. But I would bet anything the tech matures and branches such that the cost incrementally drops and the quality incrementally goes up. Or it leads to a breakthrough tech that supplants it (prolly more likely).
So I'm optimistic that the incremental improvements will compound faster than unrest; I think that's what's historically different now than times past - the compound improvements are taking less than a generation. We've made the jumps in tech, now to refine it to be available to all. (Cell phones are a pretty good example of this happening, I think.)
But I suppose there's no telling other than time passing. I prefer optimism, as the alternative is heartbreaking, as you note.
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.
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.
Did we mention lasers?! Lasers!
The publish or perish model is certainly a thing, but the peer review system as it exists does in fact notice if all you publish is crappy review papers. This depends a lot more on the community of researchers in that field. The more recent argument in many labs is "Can't it be both?". A longer term project run in parallel with smaller discoveries or even reviews of things in the field. Don't underestimate the utility of a good review paper either. Many people don't understand how science at the bench is done, and it gets reduced to these sorts of apocalyptic cliches. Fields come and go, that's how the sausage gets made.
Which begs the question: why is all that research not resulting in equal exponential innovation in our society?
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.
Hey look, validation of my outlook on basic income.
Links the go-to source: 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.
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!"
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.
Earlier new technologies used to be priced sky-high. Now cost benefit analysis is the only thing that matters.
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.
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.
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!).
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.
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.
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.smithsonianmag.com/videos/category/innovation/the...
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.
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-i...
Look at the nuke plants we're building. They are still overgrown 1950s submarine reactors that only make use if about 3% of the useful energy in fissile fuel. The rest is "waste," and reprocessing that waste is expensive and cumbersome. They're also still vulnerable to a whole host of nasty failure modes. The probability of those failure modes has been reduced through incremental improvement, but there has been no revolutionary progress.
An analogy: It's as if we invented the piston steam engine and that's it. No turbines, no internal combustion engines, no combined cycle plants, and certainly no fuel cells or thermovolaics or photovolaics or anything like that. That's the situation with nuclear power. We're still building big versions of the Chicago Pile.
I would argue this. The human genome project was the turning point where we moved from biology as alchemy to biology as science.
There are still tenured biology professors who hang onto ideas that have been completely disproven by genetic sequencing.
We're just starting to see the benefits of genetic engineering now.
The 20th Century was the century of the computer, the 21st will be the century of the gene sequencer.
We are surrounded by a cornucopia of time tested solutions to problems and we now have the processing power to really start to understand them.
We can now sequence in days on hardware costing less than a family care things that used to take 3 billion dollars and take a decade, to say progress has stopped is asinine in the extreme.
(For starters, roundup ready field corn and soy).
You truly lack imagination if think that roundup resistant crops represent the pinnacle of Genetic Engineering.
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!
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.
The real issue with incentivizing long-term investment is one of distributing risk and reward over both participants and time. The great advantage of the web startup space is the quick time to expand the market - even if working fusion were here today, it would not have the growth curve typical of successful web companies. Add this to the long and risky development time for things like fusion (or AI, or space launchers, etc.), and what you say seems obvious.
So, why did I choose to follow the risky route rather than the more assured Big R&D route? Well, competition is the main answer. Big R&D projects often start with the idea that developing something is expensive, and since you can't afford to build more than one, this idea morphs into the One True Design (e.g. ITER/Tokomak in fusion). Then big R&D turns its back on other, possibly cheaper development paths. Taking the VC route may put the risk on to the participants, but at least it is open to new, cheap ideas which may be able to bypass the big R&D route.
I would be willing to accept the end of those times if the alternative (VC funded startups) was superior. Alas, when it comes to large problems, I fear it may be a massive step back.
The oncoming wave of labor automation should spark a new debate about how we want to reorganize our societies to adapt to such drastic changes. I'm hoping that at this point, we can begin to emphasize the importance of research as a fundamental human endeavor.
Health care and social benefits get politicians a lot of votes. Heavy government-sponsored research wouldn't, I imagine. To get this kind of support for research, you'd have to sell it to the voters (it was easier to sell during the Cold War, I think it's harder now, especially during a recession).
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.
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.
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.
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_...
[2] http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_crd_crpdn_adc_mbbl_a.htm
I think the U.S. pulled out of these two wars because they were stupid in the first place and became fiscally unstrategic at a straggering scale... Like we could have paid for Kyoto worldwide with that kind of money. Just washed down the drain, and we're not done dealing with the geopolitical costs, not to mention the human costs.
Also, Afghanistan is in Central Asia.
I agree with the rest of your point on oil innovation, even if it's just driving us faster towards the next anoxic event...
Moreover, the US will try to gain control over energy resources in the Middle East long after US energy independence: They remain valuable as a means of influence against countries that rely on externally sourced energy.
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.
Electric Vehicles = Tesla Motors
SpaceX you mentioned by name
Energy = SolarCity
It would be interesting to contrast Peter Thiel's views on modern innovation with Elon Musk's.
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.
That falls under vehicle maintenance and does not play into the cost of fuel.
> it only means the cost of energy for a vehicle is equal to the cost of the same energy on the electric grid
Yes, I was exaggerating but it is already pretty cheap. If memory serves, it is about $0.08/kWh in the US or $6.80 to charge Tesla's largest battery pack which is way cheaper than $40-60 per gasoline tank. And if you extrapolate a little, that cost is going to go down by the time electric vehicles are mature because the literal energy cost should be less and electric vehicles should be more efficient. But maybe I am wrong about that, only time will tell.
> That falls under vehicle maintenance and does not play into the cost of fuel.
Whenever you talk about "fuel" with an electric vehicle, you are doing so by loose analogy; the battery electrolytes are the closest thing to "fuel" in an electric vehicle. I suppose one could quibble over the degree to which the battery is analogous to the "fuel tank" vs. part of the "fuel", the main point, in any case, is that even the electricity isn't even approximately zero cost.
> Yes, I was exaggerating but it is already pretty cheap. If memory serves, it is about $0.08/kWh
Which is equivalent (by GGE [1]) to $2.67/gallon of gasoline, which, while lower than current gasoline prices, is so by less than factor of 2, so its an incremental improvement improvement, not the kind of orders-of-magnitude implied by "essentially zero", even allowing for a bit of artistic exaggeration.
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.
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"
IT just has to get on a level that it's full power can be used by everyone.
Also, self driving cars certainly exist in the corporeal world.
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=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.
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-tra...)
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.
The premise of the book, on the higher value of inventing totally new things rather than copying, sounded good to me.
http://fora.tv/program_landing_frameview?id=16152&type=clip&...
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.
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.
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.