The most depressing thing is that our generation can achieve so much more. We have more scientists, more engineers and much larger economies than babyboomer generation. But most of these money ends up corruption in underdeveloped countries and in wars and busted healthcare system in developed countries. For example US spent 1 trillion dollars [1] just for stupid Iraq war alone. With same amount of money we could have vaccinated kids of entire world, could have had multiple missions to Mars, permanent bases on moon, accelerated research on all kind of diseases, funded more research on fusion and alternate power sources, and could have built sanitation facilities for all in multiple under developed countries for free - and even then we would have some money left over. Just 1 trillion dollars is more than enough to make huge progress on all of these front but we spend it out on wars and busted healthcare system.
>The most depressing thing is that our generation can achieve so much more. We have more scientists, more engineers and much larger economies than babyboomer generation.
You're proceeding from a false assumption here. The quality of your scientists matters far more than the quantity. The tail end of the curve is where you get the big breakthroughs, and those people are no more likely to be scientists than ever. Maybe less, since there's so much money to be made in Wall St.
And research was much more efficient back then. You could mix a bunch of nasty stuff together, get your results, and then dump the rest down the sink. It may not have been a good idea, but that's a whole lot cheaper than wading through the hazmat bureaucracies we have today today.
There are all kinds of ways a larger and more intrusive government "taxes" efficiency. Each regulation makes sense on its own, but add them all together and you have a big drag on progress. As the writer says, it's easier just to write software than to do anything in the physical world.
And the military spending point really favors the present. During the cold war we spent as much as 10% of GDP on the military trying to contain the Soviets. The Iraq war was nothing compared to that - we haven't spent more than 5% GDP on the military since the 90s.
The problem is easy to identify: Our various forms of government are simply obsolete. In the case of the US you have very small groups of people interested in nothing more than the survival of their respective political clans. Despite what they say, they consistently fail to represent us and always, always, always make decisions based on their own self interest (or that of their party).
Remember: Governments and politicians cause and fight wars. It's politicians, not the people, who make a mess out of society and the world. I can't think of many wars that were not the product of politicians run amuck.
I am not proposing anarchy. That helps nobody. Yet I do think we need to collectively figure out how to correct the political landscape in order to ensure that politicians understand they work for us and always towards the common good (whatever that means).
> I can't think of many wars that were not the product of politicians run amuck.
I don't think you know of many wars then.
Let's see:
- World War II (Europe)
Not caused by a politician, caused by a dictator (a different thing). Arguably caused by economic and social forces applied to Germany after WW1.
- World War II (Asia)
Not caused by a politician. Arguably caused by either nationalism which was an outgrowth of their forced modernisation; or caused by encirclement and the risk of losing their new empire.
- World War I (Europe)
Not caused by a politician. Simplistically caused by nationalism, perhaps caused by economic issues.
I'm sure there must be some examples of wars caused by politicians - but it's doing a disservice to the complexity of issues to point at a single person, and giving them too much power.
You missed my point in a grotesque way: GOVERNMENTS start wars, not people. I used the term politician because I was making a commentary about our government. Governments are the sole decision makers in all of the major wars for centuries. People, regardless of culture, do not want war. People do not wage wars. People just want to live a decent life and be left alone. I don't know many who wake up every day thiking about going to war against someone thousands of miles away.
Neither World War would have happened if a set of governments had not decided to either trigger them (after various events) or participate in them.
I remember reading the book You Will Go to the Moon in childhood, just as Virginia Postrel, the author of the essay here, did. She is right that most people in our era were not as excited about the space program as she and I were: "The reason mid-20th-century Americans were optimistic about the future wasn’t that science-fiction writers told cool stories about space travel. Science-fiction glamour in fact worked on only a small slice of the public. (Nobody else in my kindergarten was grabbing for You Will Go to the Moon.) People believed the future would be better than the present because they believed the present was better than the past. They constantly heard stories -- not speculative, futuristic stories but news stories, fashion stories, real-estate stories, medical stories -- that reinforced this belief. They remembered epidemics and rejoiced in vaccines and wonder drugs. They looked back on crowded urban walk-ups and appreciated neat suburban homes. They recalled ironing on sweaty summer days and celebrated air conditioning and wash-and-wear fabrics. They marveled at tiny transistor radios and dreamed of going on airplane trips."
The older I get, the more I like incremental progress that leads to inventions (like this Internet doohickey that lets you and me have an interesting conversation across barriers of time and place) that hardly anyone thought of in the 1960s, and which have developed from a mixture of government research projects and private investment. I don't really care if not a lot of big-deal things happen in the next thirty years, as long as plenty of little-deal things happen like a continuation of the ongoing increases in healthy life expectancy at all ages.[1]
"Optimistic science fiction does not create a belief in technological progress. It reflects it. Stephenson and Thiel are making a big mistake when they propose a vision of the good future that dismisses the everyday pleasures of ordinary people -- that, in short, leaves out consumers. This perspective is particularly odd coming from a fiction writer and a businessman whose professional work demonstrates a keen sense of what people will buy. People are justifiably wary of grandiose plans that impose major costs on those who won’t directly reap their benefits."
Hear. Hear. Let's keep working away at making our own lives better, and our children's lives better, and as everyone does that, the whole world's lives will be better.
My main concern with Peter Thiel praising monopolies is that the nuance of the message will get lost - "earning monopoly through radical innovation" - but the core message remains - monopoly = profit. People will start to pat themselves on the back for acquiring all their competitors, skewing regulations in their favor, and a variety of other sleazy business tactics. I suspect most large business CEOs already understand that monopoly = profits, so Thiel is just making it respectable to talk about by casting it in the light of innovation.
That is putting the wagon in front of the horse IMHO. A monopoly doesn't drive progress imho it takes advantage of an opportunity no one else did compared to where the world is at any given time.
This idea is frankly retarded. I am not saying you have had it. This is directed at You. To say that monopolies drive progress strikes me as an anthropomorphisation of the motivations of innovators. Did AT&T Microsoft and Ford drive progress? Hardly. They existed when progress occurred but to attribute it do them is generous. Most progress is driven by the artists and scientists on the edge, they rarely see the fruits of their labor, the riches are picked up by the second and third waves of adopters.
Funny you say this. I hate monopolies as the next guy. Reading Thiel's book right now. What he says is that monopolies can have luxury of innovation while in the perfect market conditions it is all about as low margin as possible without cash flying around to spend on extravaganza like innovation.
AT&T: telecommunications company that employed Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kerninghan to figure out software to play chess. Dudes created C language and UNIX OS in the process.
Which low margin cash-strived company will do extravagant stuff like that for kicks?
Can you see any good argument against such monopolies being forced to be non-profit making entities?
The only argument that comes to mind is that it would create a disincentive against the drive towards monopoly that Theil apparently claims is beneficial. However, that seems to be something like the kind of the world we are in now.
I'm not sure there are any clear solutions to this problem - balancing incentive and the avoidance of corruption is just hard.
AT&T: telecommunications company that employed Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kerninghan to figure out software to play chess. Dudes created C language and UNIX OS in the process.
Much more than that, actually. From Wikipedia:
Researchers working at Bell Labs are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the UNIX operating system, the C programming language, S programming language and the C++ programming language. Eight Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.
Because this existed at a monopoly doesn't mean monopolies are good. Arguing from the standpoint of perfect markets makes no sense, only in a theoretical self consistent system, but it will have little bearing on reality.
An analogous argument can be made that war is good because DARPA funds research. We don't need war to have government sponsored research.
Because these occurred in one location under the umbrella of single entity doesn't make them better than if they were singular accomplishments by hundreds of organizations.
Yes, it's a classic false dichotomy. The options are not (monopoly, competition). A "the neverending competition that cannot be won" is best avoided--there is nothing redeemable about this "pure antithesis" to monoploy to make it more desirable.
...though if the labor market is at all free that should self-correct pretty quickly. Unfortunately we tend to tie things like retirement and health care directly to employment, totally distorting that market.
I really appreciate many points in this article, especially showing that people in the 60s thought that they were in just as much of a decline as we do now.
But there's also a weird anti-environmentalism threaded through the article. Toward the end, the author lists things that we now think are bad, as an example of how we've become pessimistic. Including: "New subdivisions represented a threat to the landscape rather than the promise of the good life. [...] Insecticides harmed eagles’ eggs." Those are and were legitimate concerns!
Just because we are correctly critical of some aspects of technological process doesn't mean we have become a bunch of petty pessimists who are just trying to make everyone feel bad.
-Just because we are correctly critical of some aspects of technological process doesn't mean we have become a bunch of petty pessimists who are just trying to make everyone feel bad.
maybe you stop at those things, i doubt thats the case but lets assume you do. you think these ideas are a tree with the wind of truth and reason blowing through your leaves. however its a tree in a forest of never ending complaining, negativity, and loathing on every step of progress. things like zoos are torturing animals into slavery, panning for gold is made illegal because it might disturb the fish - and they cant take it, companies like monsanato dont produce science and research into better crops to stop famine, they are an evil empire destroying the ecology and sapping humanity for all its worth. space program? forget it, why spend on wasteful things like that when we can spend more money on health and education.
the spit and the acid that people around me say towards those who choose to live in rural or suburban areas astounds me.
although i do find it amusing, they live in their concrete cities that destroyed all the ecology around them, but somehow believe they have special knowledge to tell people (who did not destroy the ecology around them) how they should live with regards to environmentalism.
If Monsanto are a paragon of virtue and want better crops, what's up with the sterile seeds and lawsuits over people selling legitimately obtained seeds?
This is a valid complaint about Monsanto and it is one that I have myself, but it is also not the complaint that was being referenced. GMOs (not necessarily Monsanto) have great potential, yet just the words "non-GMO" printed on a package are enough to convince people of one brand over another. The fact that GMOs are a political issue in the US is more proof that there is resistance to progress, at least in this particular respect.
Resistance or reluctance? In keeping with the article, it would be less about the GMO vs non-GMO debate and more about uncertainty in how we agree on whether something ought to be or if it will cause more problems than it solves. The fear of progress in this case may be rooted in sound reasoning as a reaction to past advances that have wreaked havoc in other areas. The impulse is to treat it as an ideological difference when it actually should be looked at as a breaking down of trust and an inability to discern foolishness from genius.
Perhaps you missed it when the GP made the point that "Just because we are correctly critical of some aspects of technological process doesn't mean we have become a bunch of petty pessimists who are just trying to make everyone feel bad."
I didn't read it that way. I think her point was that we have a lot of good reasons to look at the possible downsides of potential advances, rather than naively assuming they won't have side effects.
The problem is that the US has too many people who were actually better off in the past.
This is where the pessimism comes from. While a very small number of high-tech areas have gone fast-forward into the future and are way better off, the vast majority of the country has been left behind.
The "problem" here is the globalization of the economy. I like to think of it as an icecube in a pitcher. If you pour water in, it starts to melt the icecube, so the tip will go down a bit, before it's carried up by the water level. The US/EU is the tip of that iceberg. As economies around the world copy the Western world, they're rapidly expanding and improving the quality of life for millions around the globe, while the ones that were in the lead after WWII have seemingly stagnated.
Really we're just waiting for everyone else to catch up.
> Yet, they still have very significant endemic impoverished population clumps
China has problems, but nothing compared to the China of 20 years ago. China is the poster-child of globalization improving the living conditions of the poor.
I am personally torn which basically tells me that Thiel is neither right nor wrong but just carves out a useful perspective.
I read his book and I found several points extremely inspiring while other things I find lack introspection.
What important thing is no-one currently building still comes down to some sort of luck but at the same time I find it an inspiring way to think about problems.
However we can't all solve the things no one is building and we certainly won't all be successful if we tried so personally
I am happy that someone actually wants to create a restaurant even if it's shitty despite the fact that it doesn't return great profits and isn't anything close to the value of a Google.
Just like I am happy that someone build a little app for my phone or make an ebook even though it isn't going to do 10X.
The reality is that there isn't and never will be perfect competition just as there will never be perfect monopoly not even a state legislated one cause time changes the underlying premise for these things.
I do agree that we are too many people stepping on each others toes. Too many suppliers of the fundamentally same things. But given time that will change.
Thiel has some good points about the lack of progress. Rocketry is only slightly better than it was 45 years ago. We've hit the limit of chemical fuels, and weight reduction can only go so far. In comparison, 45 years took us from the Wright Flyer to the first jet aircraft.
Fission power isn't much further along than it was 45 years ago, either. Nor is fusion power. Nor is power transmission. At the high-power end of things, there hasn't been all that much progress. Most of the action is at the low-power end.
Biology is nowhere near hitting a wall. Commercially, though, bio isn't generating huge new businesses. Nanotechnology has devolved from micromachines to surface treatments for materials such as Rust-Oleum NeverWet.
The robot revolution may happen, but robot manipulation in unstructured situations still sucks. Watch these two videos:
Fusion power is quite a bit further along than 45 years ago. We're in the process of building ITER, with ignition expected in 2020. The main problem for fusion power is the utter lack of funding it receives:
Uh huh. Exactly what will they have accomplished by 2020? Ignition? Who cares? Based on their own timeline the earliest possible date for a commercial fusion reactor is 2050.
Do you have a more credible source than a website from someone who claims to have received letters from aliens? There seems to enough scientific consensus that ITER will work to convince people to spend quite a bit of money on it.
The definition of "will work" has been downsized over the years.
What ITER is now claimed to do is much less than it was originally supposed to do. Originally it was supposed to be able to produce 500MW more or less continuously. That goal has been downsized to 300-500 seconds. The current record for holding a fusion reaction together is about a second. If ITAR beats that by a reasonable margin, its backers can call it a victory and go home.
45 years ago the internet was in it's infancy, only available to people at selected institutions. Why not count the internet as a great piece of progress?
If you want Grand Engineering, why not get behind the Soviets? Their progress to space outclasses any other non-US country. So why is Russia a second world country, with world-class math, science, and comp-sci talent?
Further: the 'softer' half of any Tech-accelerator - consumer apps or anything ad-based - would be a non-starter for venture capital if it were based in Russia. But Russians do have the ambition and skill to execute these concepts. The reason for this disparity is worth considering if we want to make Thiel's techno-vision our first principles for economic growth.
I'd propose: it was not the big projects in rocket science but the crass day-to-day business of ordinary people to meet ordinary peoples' needs that led the US to develop into the wealthiest country.
The idea that having a bunch of users that never pay you money is a symptom of an affluent society like ours, and although it seems kind of disgusting when you thing about it, is probably more essential to our economy than whatever DARPA and NASA are cooking up right now.
Russia is a second world country because the terms "first world" and "second world" originated during the Cold War, with first world countries being aligned with the US and second world countries being aligned with Russia/the Soviet Union by definition. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_World
The common use of these terms has since shifted in meaning. To be honest, I haven't really heard people use the term "second world" in a long time.
Even back then people hardly ever said it. You used to hear "first world" and "third world" a lot, but most people said "the Soviets" in lieu of "second world".
Because the First/Second world distinction was about being aligned with (and getting financial, technical and cultural support of) respectively the US and the USSR, with the "third world" being unaligned and unsupported "battlegrounds" countries.
Why is Virginia Postrel writing an article to posture with no substance? Author of "The Substance of Style", she writes an article representing the over-inflation of stupidly half-aggressive titles filled with not much at all, and to top it all off she threw in commercials at the end.
Yes, half an article to refute not a real point Thiel has made so that "Peter Thiel Is Wrong About the Future". Does Virginia Postrel think that 'countering' points that have not been made with
"People are justifiably wary of grandiose plans that impose major costs on those who won’t directly reap their benefits. " should validate such a title?
MetaMed & MIRI do not have a chance to improve people's lives? Contracts that are not completely recursive to violence based on the blockchain(Ethereum) cannot change peoples lives?
Palantir to improve law-enforcement while having personal liberties hard-coded in do not count? In an age where surveillance has become industrial? When before the greatest protection was being locked in file cabinets?
but do not forget that all of Thiel's relatively nuanced views are countered by....
"Directed by Steven Soderbergh, the series depicts decidedly flawed characters living in an exciting but brutal period and improving surgery through clever, risky and -- by today’s standards -- often-high-handed medical procedures." OhMyGod.
Ah yes. Now I can see the point that was being made. Not really. When you are going to write articles with sleight posturing, it would be good to have direct quotes about statements that were actually made and then getting to it.
This. Worryingly enough, I confess I've read the article back-to-back several times but I still don't see the author's actual argument. Maybe there is one, but I'm just too dumb.
Did anyone else see the headline at the bottom of the page claiming that 'Amazon Workers are Today's Coal Miners'?
I haven't read the article, but given the amount of death and human suffering coal miners overcame, I can only assume it is consciously sensationalist.
It is almost as if certain villainous categories are built into our collective minds and we are looking for actors to play the parts.
It seems to me that mining was vastly more physically demanding and dangerous, to the extent that when McLelland complains about physical hardship at the fulfillment center I'm unsympathetic; and that fulfillment center work is vastly more dehumanizing, in contrast to the miners who, for all their toil, had pride in what they do.
So many ambulances responded to medical assistance calls at the warehouse during a heat wave in May, the paper said, that the retailer paid Cetronia Ambulance Corps to have paramedics and ambulances stationed outside the warehouse during several days of excess heat over the summer. About 15 people were taken to hospitals, while 20 or 30 more were treated right there, the ambulance chief told The Call.
That's from 2011. Amazon bought Kiva Systems to install robots in their warehouses. No more walking around in Amazon's newer warehouses; the pickers stand in one place as shelving units of products are brought to them by hundreds of mobile robots.
Picking from bins is still manual, but Bezos has Rethink Robotics, which he owns personally, working on that.
This is a very good crystallization of my thoughts when I first heard Thiel's argument. At the end of the day, it's always been about incremental steps, we just look back and see the leaps and bounds that they enabled.
The manhattan project wasn't incremental. Nor was the apollo program nor the hoover dam. It does seem like we (America) have moved into a mode of thinking where instead of asking, "what do we want to build?" we ask, "based on the advances at the edge of iterative academic or technical progress, what is now possible to build?"
In short, Thiel's argument that America has mostly transitioned from optimistic determinists to optimistic indeterminists seems like more than a matter of perspective bias.
Manhattan project, over half a million people working in cooperation to meet one end goal. The Apollo program, over half a million people working in cooperation to meet one end goal. How many people do Google, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle employ? Combined?
A single individual with a computer can be more productive than 100 individuals from any of those past projects. We walk around with more computer power in our pockets than the entire computer power that got mankind to walk on the moon.
But that is not the point.
The point is that a mooonshot is only a moonshot relative to its time.
In other words, we would need to imagine what a project, that could be accomplished with half-a-million (or more) people working in cooperation toward a single end goal, would look like today.
I can guarantee you that would look something along the lines of a partial terraforming of Mars.
Hacker news complains about the lack of innovation and invention, and yet continues to support a tech-world with a "solo founder" mentality, one man sitting alone in a room coding an app ... You'll never get a moonshot civilization pushing that attitude.
One of the main premises is that the impact of societies on other societies ("ruling" in the vernacular of the book, as this impact has often been military and brutal in the time scale the book covers) has a lot to do with the kind of social organization they are able to use. There's amplifiers to this of course -- you can either mobilize a huge number of people to build a pyramid, or mobilize a huge number of people to invent cranes and bulldozers and let a few people build the pyramid. But the bottom line, according to Morris, is that this kind of social goal-oriented organization is a key metric of a society's impact.
The author gave an talk to the Long Now Foundation a few years ago. Audio stream/download is at [1]. I found it interesting, and he was an engaging speaker.
You are definitely right,we have less of that spirit.
But we do have such projects that organize huge amounts of people(although the details of this organization differ - because it appears that networks of companies works better).
Curing cancer,green energy and keeping moore's law can be seen as such projects.
"In other words, we would need to imagine what a project, that could be accomplished with half-a-million (or more) people working in cooperation toward a single end goal, would look like today.
I can guarantee you that would look something along the lines of a partial terraforming of Mars."
A vastly more realistic projection of what "a half million or more people working in cooperation towards a single end goal" could accomplish, based on the AR(1) model, would be the rip roaring success the US has had in bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan, and keeping the world safe from terrorists and evil doers.
Face it; you live in a declining civilization. The moon program was the last great accomplishment of the West: the end. Enjoy looking at HN on your iphone: that's about as much future as you're likely to get any time soon.
If the West was in decline, it wouldn't still be the engine of science and innovation, which is exactly what it still is. In fact, the West dominates both categories to an extreme, despite the rise of China, India and Japan since the moon landing.
The West still possesses by far and away the best universities and school systems. The US in particular, so dominates the top college rankings, others have a hard time getting a single school into the top ten list.
There's no aspect that we can consider regarding other competitors, that outshine the West. Manufacturing? The US and Germany are both better at it, cleaner at it, and more efficient at it than China. Science? Not even a real competition. Energy? The US and Europe have led and created a huge portion of the technology around pretty much every form of energy production. Information technology? The West leads, easily, again; with countries like China always copying and running five or ten years behind. Nobel laureates? The West wins again. Space? The West dominates again, with no sign of suddenly being bested by China or Japan or India. Quality of life? The West is doing extremely well overall, with Japan and South Korea being the sole countries in the East that are competitive - and it's worth pointing out, Japan is in a 30 year stagnation, and China is the world's fastest accumulator of debt. Medical / pharma / biotech? Again not even a real competition, with the US and Europe dominating in most every regard, from the science of it to the products and drugs.
I'd struggle to come up with any positive categories the West isn't still leading in. Your claim appears to have zero basis in reality.
You know, Rome around 300AD was top notch in science, technology, military achievements, art, political power and philosophy. It was also very obviously in decline. Just as we are. It's as obvious as a wart on a bald head.
For that matter, the Soviet Union was considered unstoppable by most people in the 1980; Samuelson predicted we'd soon be speaking Russian in that very year. Ever look at the ruins of the Soviet Union? The ones I looked at in Sevastopol look a lot like Detroit.
Read some history: it's good for you. You can start with the Kenneth Clark documentary on Western Civilization I linked above if you like.
It's not a great argument. The Manhattan Project wasn't incremental but it was a reaction to scientific advance. It started after Einstein's letter to Roosevelt warning that an atomic bomb was possible [1], not someone saying "hey, let's build a really big bomb because optimism."
The Apollo program was built on incremental advances in rocketry going back to von Braun (at least), mostly funded due to military competition.
The Hoover Dam was a high point in a long history of dam construction that was very much incremental.
But the incremental advances in rocketry all started with the dream of going to the stars. The Verein für Raumfahrt, the society for space flight, which von Braun joined when he was 28, was founded after Oberth's book on space travel using rockets. Oberth himself was inspired by Verne.
We just got lucky because the military thought of another use for rockets and provided the insane amounts of funding necessary for the development. We very nearly would have had space ships powered by nuclear bombs that would have been able to reach Jupiter in months, but unfortunately the military's interest in space waned and the test ban treaty precluded nuclear pulse propulsion for the foreseeable future.
One doesn't exclude the other. It's perfectly reasonable to claim that the world mostly move in incremental steps while there are some who take quantum leaps. In fact that seems fairly reasonable to be the case. PayPal was in many ways a quantum leap but only really after they merged with Elon. So even Thiel wasn't the only one building what no one else where.
All of those were government projects. And two were either completely or largely secret at that, because they were intended to address an "existential threat" on the horizon.
Good luck getting the government behind anything like that anymore. Unless we have some otherworldly threat or something that MIGHT challenge US dominance in short order I don't see any big projects coming out of the U.S. government.
The 21st century Manhattan project is pervasive surveillance. And just like the Manhattan project or Apollo, we'll all be getting something out of that for many years to come.
Nevertheless this Bloomberg article makes a good concrete counterpoint to Thiel and Stephenson. Part of the problem is that these things are horribly difficult to quantify. How do you measure "fundamental advance?" I'm not aware of any good metric for that.
I wonder though if the real problem isn't the decline in wage parity since ~1970. It's not that innovation's stopped, but the rate at which people can afford new innovation has slowed since more and more people can't afford anything but basic necessities.
> I wonder though if the real problem isn't the decline in wage parity since ~1970. It's not that innovation's stopped, but the rate at which people can afford new innovation has slowed since more and more people can't afford anything but basic necessities.
Parity is not purchasing power. Inflation adjusted wages for the bottom quintile are up 20% from 1970. The poor/middle-class getting poorer has only happened since 1999-2000 so I don't think that is responsible for a lack of innovation.
Do you have a source? It's true that household income has been flat since the 1970's, but the nature of households has changed, there are a lot more single parents where there used to be two income earners.
If you look at income on a per person basis, we're much higher (in inflation adjusted terms) than we were in the 1970s.
Of course, if you make enough incremental steps, the result is revolutionary. See for example, the series of small incremental steps from the the first transistor to the current 2 billion transistor integrated circuits.
TL;DR on the blog article I posted: in any complex fitness landscape there are points unreachable by simple gradient ascent. Innovation simply cannot be 100% incremental. Leaps must occur, and these are qualitatively different from hill climbing.
Thiel builds one future, Musk - another. I root for Musk, yet realistically expect to end my days in Thiel's, while some minor portion of our species will go on to live the Musk's.
I think Peter Thiel's Zero to one does not specifically lament that the hoi polloi do not dream of space elevators. To me the core concern was a general risk averseness among investors, who prefer to diversify their portfolio among established investment products rather than figure out things from first principles and start up on new and better things. I read it as a critique of establishments where economists run things just by the accounting books instead of engineers who start from first principles and want to get things actually done.
You all might find my book and online course about the future relevant: http://www.possiblefutureworlds.com. I referenced Peter Thiel's book and actually met him at his book launch in New York at Columbia. He's impressive and thoughtful, to say the least. I've also exchanged some emails with people involved with Project Hieroglyph.
I think that the Bloomberg article gets both books wrong, simplifying each authors' notions of the future. They both attempt to stimulate us into thinking about possible futures that no one else is thinking about, either because we are biased against the fanciful, we are too consumed with making money rather than creating value, or that we no longer dare to dream big. It is not that incremental improvements in technologies add no value in Thiel's case or that space elevators themselves should be the goal of humanity in Stephenson's case. However, a large number of copycat competitors will not steer us into a fundamentally different and better path, and not daring to be audacious will prevent us from achieving something extraordinary. In short, people today are letting the good be the enemy of the great.
Of course there are two valid visions of the future that we could hope for. One that takes what we value presently and improves upon those values. Or one that creates new values and expectations that hopefully fulfill our old values. Both are attempts to expand the frontiers of humanity. So it makes little sense to me to say that one is wrong or the other is right. The future will be whichever we want it to be.
I read Thiel’s book and he claims that the rise of human level computing intelligence is a problem for the 22nd century. Does anyone know why he thinks that it is so far off?
>We thus designed a brief questionnaire and distributed it to four groups of experts in 2012/2013. The median estimate of respondents was for a one in two chance that high-level machine intelligence will be developed around 2040-2050, rising to a nine in ten chance by 2075. Experts expect that systems will move on to superintelligence in less than 30 years thereafter. They estimate the chance is about one in three that this development turns out to be ‘bad’ or ‘extremely bad’ for humanity.
Thanks for this. Not that a gaggle of experts is always right, but this is a lot sooner than 2100. I am surprised that for someone that is so interested in technology that Thiel would push off AGI into distant future.
Really? I thought the people like Moravec and Kurzweil were predicting 2030 to 2040? I have not seen any analysis from anyone that would push it off past 2100.
You might as well say that we gona create a Warp drive by 2100. Jump necessary for AI advancement makes settlement on Mars an easy problem. We are so far from that we really have no idea how far it is. Human level AI when it happens and it probably will will most likely be at a stage where current tech would seem something out of Ancient Greeks time if not Stone age.
We are moving fast, we are even accelerating fast and we have an incredibly far ways to go. In a situation like this even the most reasonable, well informed estimate could be off by an order of magnitude.
"The funny thing about AI is that it’s a moving target. In the seventies, someone might ask “what are the goals of AI?” And you might say, “Oh, we want a computer who can beat a chess master, or who can understand actual language speech, or who can search a whole database very quickly.” We do all that now, like face recognition. All these things that we thought were AI, we can do them. But once you do them, you don’t think of them as AI. It has this connotation of some mysterious magical component to it, but when you actually solve one of these problems, you don’t solve it using magic, you solve it using clever mathematics. It’s no longer magical. It becomes science, and then you don’t think of it as AI anymore. It’s amazing how you can speak into your phone and ask for the nearest Thai restaurant, and it will find it. This would have been called AI, but we don’t think about it like that anymore. So I think, almost by definition, we will never have AI because we’ll never achieve the goals of AI or cease to be caught up with it."
If you want to feel happy again read “Robot” or "Mind Children” by Hans Moravec. He has some pretty good arguments based on human vision that support a AGI around 2030 to 2040 assuming Moore’s Law (the general not specific law) hold.
Here it is in seven quick minutes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uIzS1uCOcE
(Note: I think he's wrong in how he thinks it will unfold, but right in thinking the doubling every year of technology, in general, will contribute to bringing it about.)
I don’t care what people think about when (or if) we achieve AGI, I want to know why they think a particular date. What analysis have they done to reach their conclusion?
This may well be true, but what analysis has he done to support this. The only detailed analysis I have seen from anyone is from Moravec. I have been through his analysis and I can’t find any flaw with it.
He is in the "all we need is fast enough computers" camp. This claim is far from obvious: We can't even simulate the simplest organisms today despite the fact that we have extraordinary computing power relative to the capacity of these organisms.
This is true, but the evidence so far with AI is that as soon as we have sufficient computational power the tasks that were thought to require human intelligence were then solved by computers.
I don’t think anyone serious thinks that sufficient computational power alone will result in AGI, but we know that we aren’t going to have it until we get to the human level computational.
The interesting question is once we have human level computational power is how long will it take to develop AGI. The evidence from problems that require more limited intelligence (say chess) is that the problem is solved soon after the required computational resources are available.
The environmental movement was an important course correction. But now we have gone too far to one side to the point where society doesn't recognize the value of progress or humanity itself. We need to incorporate those environmentally conscious attitudes into a more subtle, balanced, and fair assessment of our place in the universe and our ability to grow.
> “There’s an automatic perception ... that everything’s dangerous,” Stephenson mused at a recent event in Los Angeles, citing the Stonehenge example, “and that there’s some cosmic balance at work--that if there’s an advance somewhere it must have a terrible cost.
Am I the only one who thinks this is a good thing? We should be worrying about trade-offs. There are myriad examples from the past (DDT, Thalidomide, Chernobyl) of humans racing ahead to use new technologies without taking sufficient time to consider the consequences.
The author is saying that people living today are overly concerned about the environmental effects of experimenting with new technologies when compared with people in the recent past.
You, being a person living today, have just expressed that you are overly concerned about the environmental effects of experimenting with new technologies. That's not a criticism, we are all a product of the time we live in.
That's not to say that people in the past had no concern about the environment, it's just that they weighted the costs and benefits differently to modern people when comparing anticipated benefits for humanity against potential environmental effects.
The author correlates this different weighting with increased technological progress in the past. I think that is very hard to measure as it really depends on what you value.
I agree that you can list examples of people racing ahead to use new technologies and there being negative consequences. But what about all the times that humans raced ahead with new technologies and there were positive consequences? If we didn't race ahead would we be better off or worse off overall? When you delay implementing a technology due to concern about the potential side effects you make people worse off in the interim than what they would have been if you went ahead. We can never really know what all the consequences of our actions will be until we act.
>have just expressed that you are overly concerned
The "overly" in that sentence is a value judgement. It may or may not be 'overly' to have a number of concerns over certain advances.
The difference between the 60's and current day is that they had fewer examples of the disastrous negative consequences that can accompany new inventions.
"We cannot know the consequences of our actions until we act" is not entirely true - we can infer and put in reasonable risk management processes.
>The "overly" in that sentence is a value judgement. It may or may not be 'overly' to have a number of concerns over certain advances.
I agree, it is a value judgement. I agree it is possible that people today may or may not be overly concerned. But outside of maths, we only have value judgements to know what is a good decision and what is a bad decision. It all depends on what we want. What the author is pointing out is that you can't have your cake and eat it too - if we are so concerned about the environment to the point that it limits technological progress, then we'll have less technological progress than we would otherwise have had. I'm not sure you can argue with that. Maybe that's a good thing from some people's point of view, but for other people (including probably many people living several decades ago) the current level of concern that we have for the environment today would be unduly high compared with their perceived benefits from technological progress. But maybe we have our level of concern exactly right? Who knows?
>The difference between the 60's and current day is that they had fewer examples of the disastrous negative consequences that can accompany new inventions.
In absolute terms this is correct. Of course the present has more examples of something happening than the past. But you are forgetting that we have more examples of positive consequences in that have accompanied new inventions too. Why should the negative consequences be weighted more heavily than the positive consequences?
In relative terms, I have to disagree with you though. People living in the 60's had either lived through 1 or 2 world wars or had relatives and friends that recently lived through 2 world wars. Both of these wars exploited technological advances that meant more people could suffer the brutality of war than at any previous time in history.
>"We cannot know the consequences of our actions until we act" is not entirely true - we can infer and put in reasonable risk management processes.
You changed what I wrote, which isn't very polite. I said we cannot know "all" the consequences. I think when the word "all" is included it's hard to argue with. You are right though that we can try to manage risks, but the point I was making in the context of the article is that there is a risk when not acting too, which is difficult to measure but isn't 0.
I think this discussion has made me think more about what the author was trying to say - that people living today focus on the negatives of technological advances. I actually wonder if the language of "risk" has made that worse. I talk about risks myself all the time in my day job... something to think about :)
How can a society that places by far the biggest emphasis on getting as rich as possible as fast as possible, no matter how, achieve anything else than barbarism? In the 60s we were still bent on showing that we're better than that. Not any more, now it's just everyone for themselves. We grab what we can and call anyone who opposes our way of life a Terrorist®.
This is Comte's Positivim, we need to turn that page, cause the phylosophical roots of this come from two centuries ago(not that the age matters but in the sense we are "stuck" here); While it was essencial to science and progress in the XX century; We need to see we also did a lot of harm in our frenetic pursue for progress; So we need to see thats not always for the better, also bad things can come with it and we need to be more clever, giving we have more educational resources than past humans, and figure out how to avoid advance without the destructive side effects
In summary, ecology is eating our heads, raising fears and superstitions, and needs to be superseded with a viable meta ecology compatible with science and progress.
No, the point is that we focus too much on the downside.
We should be happy that there's lower demand for blood transfusions due to improved medical techniques, but we're just lamenting the lost jobs in the industry.
Just like we should be happy that self-driving cars are going to mean more leisure time, safer streets, and lower transportation costs, but we spent a lot of time worrying about people who currently drive cars for a living. Obviously, we should care about those people, but we shouldn't let a minor loss overshadow a major gain.
I also think that there will be more political will for a stronger safety net as technology displaces more jobs. And there'll be more wealth to support it.
It'll be rough for a while, but things will turn out ok.
She's right, Thiel & Co. are entirely wrong. And not just subtly, but extremely wrong.
Here are some problems I have with Peter Thiel and other people that claim we're not making progress or pulling off 'moon shots':
The Large Hadron Collider
The International Space Station
Tesla and the advances coming to the auto market
The human genome
Mapping the human brain
Understanding stem cells, and the incredibly fast rate at which we're learning to grow new organs. Organ growing will be vastly more important than the Manhattan Project or the Hoover Dam, it's not even going to be a close comparison. In fact, it's a sick joke that anybody would be so confused as to think there's a comparison to be made.
Virtual reality, which is going to be an extraordinary accomplishment and lead to entirely new visualized space that will be so large, it's nearly impossible to comprehend for people today; it'll enable exploration and experiences for the visual and auditory on a scale that would be otherwise impossible for a person in the real physical space. It has begun, and will accelerate very quickly from here. Thiel & Co. either pretend this isn't coming, or are ignorant of just how immense it's going to be. VR is as much an accomplishment of the physical space, as it is the digital - the infrastructure that had/has to be put in place to make it possible at the scale it's about to be, tallies in the trillions of dollars cost wise. People are sitting around wondering what we're going to use all of our storage capabilities for - in less than 30 years VR space will consume more storage than the entire Internet combined today.
Digital currencies will generate (are generating) a once-per-century rebuild of the global economy when it comes to how we use / regard / store / secure money and wealth. This is a big deal, even if it's going to take decades to be fully realized. This breakthrough is only made possible by breakthroughs in the atomic space, nano scale manufacturing that is extraordinary all by itself.
Robotics, and the extremely fast pace at which it's gathering steam. This alone proves the progress worriers entirely wrong, it's going to be that big of a deal over the next two decades. The breakthroughs in this field have been astounding, even if they always seem incremental; measured in 10 year spans, it's remarkable frankly.
Solar power has gone from being so weak as to be a joke even just 20 years ago, to being powerful and cheap enough to be practical for many purposes. And it's only going to get cheaper and more powerful by the year forward. Efficiently harnessing the sun for energy, then building a huge global industry around it and deploying it, is an extraordinary accomplishment, every bit on par with The Manhattan Project; I'd argue it's a greater accomplishment in fact.
The smart phone is more important than the Hoover Dam. The technology, the people, the science, and the industry that it required as a whole is a moon shot. Extreme improvements in communication and knowledge acquisition - what the smart phone represents - are at least as important as energy or going to the moon; I'd argue more important.
People arguing about the low value of Twitter / WhatsApp / Instagram / Facebook, may have a problem in social thinking or social understanding. I think they make the mistake of failing to understand just how important communication and expression is for human beings, and it likely derives from an engineering brain bias.
I dont't want to be politically judged by HN audience. But, I will tell you this: don't you see that start-ups and innovation happen around things that are the least regulated by the Government. Things with the least amount of required bureaucracy and compliance to the state regulations?
Peter Schiff - opened hedge fund from his bedroom. He got lucky, worked had, whatever, his investment company is doing pretty good nowadays. But he will tell you one thing - if he wanted to open a brokerage firm from his bedroom today, it would be impossible due to all the regulation imposed on the financial markets. Putting aside that this way the regulation protects established big financial institutions from new competition, this also kills innovation.
What isn't regulated by the Government? Internet start-ups. I can work in my bedroom on a new search engine (currently). Or on mobile app. But try to open brokerage firm.
There is a reason for which still more innovation happens in the USA than in much more heavily regulated EU. Spoke to fashion designer from Paris in New York the other day. He lives in New York. Why? Because to open a fashion shop in Paris requires fee to the government to the tune of 15,000 Euros. Nobody in New York ask him to pay 20,000 usd to the city for the privilege of opening business.
The moment they will start regulating web - the party will be over! What about 10,000 usd fee to open a commercial website? Would you be surprised there is innovation in the web ?
Yes, if you look at something from one angle and don't consider the others you will come to this conclusion. But there is a reason there is regulation in things like finance and health care. It is to protect people. Unfortunately there are people who lack the correct knowledge in certain areas to make smart decisions so we collectively help them through regulation. It also prevents companies from causing harm to people by cutting corners.
I'm not sure what 'fee to the government' for opening a shop in Paris was for but I'm guessing it's a tax. And in many European countries taxes pay for things like free health care and education. Both of these are things which I'm sure that fashion designer took advantage of but now that it's time to pay towards them through taxes he isn't happy?
'The web' doesn't need regulated. But startups in certain industries do. I want to be sure that a health care startup is providing me with safe equipment/drugs/advice and regulation is the only way to do this. Unfortunately the world is full of shitty people who would take advantage of others and ruin lives without it.
Now. I'm not saying loads of regulation is good but your idea that it is all bad isn't correct imo. It's necessary in certain areas. Maybe not in an ideal world, but we don't live in one.
> Nobody in New York ask him to pay 20,000 usd to the city for the privilege of opening business.
Nobody ask for that in Europe either, unless you're interested in heavily regulated industries like energy or banking (and they ask for more than $20,000). But we're talking about small businesses, right?
I don't know if fashion industry is heavily regulated in Paris, but a 15,000-euro fee to the government sounds like a big stretch. They used to require 7,500 euro of starting capital for SARL (a private limited liability company), but it was still your money, not the government's. But it's irrelevant, because the minimum amount changed and it's 1 euro now.
There's still an issue of paying various legal and professional fees before you can start your company. It depends on your needs and type of the company, but according to Doing Business report by the World Bank [1] this cost (represented as a percentage of the country's income per capita; not ideal but good enough) is lower in France and dozen of other European countries than in the United States.
Incorporating e.g Delaware in US is below $1k. In Germany starting a GmbH in Germany requires a $25k Euro capital
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stammkapital
There is still a lot more regulation in Europe when it comes to operating a business. It is also one of the reasons why I see so many European start-ups here in San Francisco trying to establish early on.
> In Germany starting a GmbH in Germany requires a $25k Euro capital
Since 2008 you can start a derivative called Unternehmergesellschaft which waives the minimum capital. You need to keep 25% of yearly earnings, but it can be rebranded later as GmbH if you raise 25,000 euro capital in said savings. It says right there in the article you've linked:
> Um die deutsche GmbH im internationalen Wettbewerb zu stärken und Neugründungen von Unternehmen zu erleichtern,ist seit dem 1. November 2008 die Gründung von Unternehmergesellschaften (UG) möglich, deren Mindeststammkapital nur mehr 1 € betragen muss. Die UG muss – solange das Stammkapital unter 25.000 € liegt – 25 % des Jahresüberschusses (Gewinn) in eine Rücklage einstellen.
And while it might technically cost less than a thousand dollars to incorporate in Delaware, in practice I'd need much more than that - especially if we consider costs of obtaining visa and housing, traveling and living expenses. It's difficult to get money for all of that, especially if you start from nothing. On the other hand I can travel to another country within the EU with favorable regulations (low taxes, low cost of starting a business) without the need for a visa.
What is a good procedure for determining whether someone has good judgment? Is it never making an investment in a person or company that turns out wrong? Then those who never invest at all have the best judgment. But that can't be right.
I think good judgment is shown by those whose investments (of money, time, trust, reputation, or anything) turn out to be better than those in their class. By this measure, Thiel has shown good judgment - his investments of money, time and trust have turned out unusually positively overall. It's been...colorful, at times, but unusually positive overall.
To show someone has poor judgment, one would need to point to a pattern of poor decisions, preferably some hard metric (like investment returns). A single instance of misplaced trust seems inadequate. Does Thiel trusting Elon Musk cancel out his (probably delegated) trust in that Thiel Fellow? I think it does and much more.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War