Kasparov and Thiel: Our dangerous illusion of tech progress

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I think this article must come from a point of incredible ignorance about most of what science has been up to. Across the board there have been incredible advances in chemistry, physics, quantum physics (which allows us our tiny powerful processors in things like cellphones and laptops and tablets), commercial aerospace, normal aerospace (jet-set lifestyle was a term for rich in the 60s because you could afford to fly, now EVERYONE flies, we just haven't increased the speed for a bunch of well laid out elsewhere reasons[1]). Also, we're on the verge of self driving cars. Further it misunderstands progress in general. It seems to think progress in all fields must be linear so big advancements in new fields of days of yore should still be advancing at such rates today ignoring rapidly growing complexity as the field matures. Computers, the newest field, has advanced the most recently because it is still relatively new.<p>This kind of thinking is just wrong and somewhat old fashioned. Just because we didn't get the future that star trek and pulp 60's sci-fi promised us doesn't mean we collectively screwed up somehow. The refrain "where's my flying car" or "where's my jetpack" is just misguided. We are living in the future, just not one predicted. Transportation speeds stopped increasing rapidly and went from exponential back to linear to nearly stalled, but as mentioned they scaled from a few rich to all. And there are good reasons for this, not cowardice etc. Meanwhile unexpectedly computation and communication technology exploded. I can video chat with everyone I know anywhere in the world for effectively free. I carry around a better than star trek communicator.<p>This is old man thinking, stuck in one view of how the world was going to be and ignoring how the world is. It's ignorant and offensive and misguided. There is very little merit in this and it's ironic he's accusing the candidates of ignoring reality.<p>Further reference:<p><a href="http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/the_myth_of_the_starship.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/the_myth...</a><p><a href="http://warren-ellis.livejournal.com/92053.html" rel="nofollow">http://warren-ellis.livejournal.com/92053.html</a><p><a href="http://www.doktorsleepless.com/index.php/You_Will_Never_Own_a_Jetpack:_Warren_Ellis%E2%80%99_Doktor_Sleepless_by_Steven_Shaviro" rel="nofollow">http://www.doktorsleepless.com/index.php/You_Will_Never_Own_...</a>

First of all, all respect to Peter Thiel. Everyone I know who has worked with him has had nothing but good things to say about him.<p>Having said that, it is worth noting that for all his dedication to the idea of inventing disruptive technologies that has not been his own path to success. Paypal is a pretty boring financial transaction processor, he ran a hedge fund for a while (yawn!), his investment in Facebook paid off big. Where is the disruption there? Facebook is great, but it wasn't even the first social network. A quick glance at the companies in which he personally has invested reveals lots of good investments - in fairly typical incrementalist companies!<p>I know FF has invested in SpaceX which has a legitimate claim to being the kind of company he wants to see more of, but that isn't how he made his money in the first place.<p>My problem with the substance of the article is that it takes for granted that we can always invent wholly new things in every possible category or industry. Let's take transport as an example. Did people stop innovating in transportation because it wasn't profitable, because they were afraid? Nonsense.<p>First of all, they didn't stop innovating. There weren't 350 kph trains in 1940 and any car made more than 30 years ago is a comically underpowered death-trap compared to an entry level car today.<p>Second, there are physical laws that simply constrain the phase space of possible solutions. Every new discovery can change those boundaries somewhat and every now and then someone will bring new ideas together to simply invent a brand new transport modality. However, fundamentally the densities and coefficients of friction of solid surfaces, air, and water drive the kinds of transport we can can come up with.

This is unfortunately very true.<p>We don't have a stagnation of tech progress, we keep going forward- but the grow rate seems to be decreasing.<p>Some people apparently think existing innovation (ex: mindstab comment) suffice to disprove this.<p>It's not.<p>Just look at the 40 or 60 to see some real innovation - like antibiotics, nuclear bombs- i.e. paradigm changing innovation in various domains.<p>What did we got lately? Computers, internet, cellphone, social networking - ok, but it's a bit short, and it's mostly in one domain only.<p>IMHO, for any self consistent conservative, it's far more worrisome than theoretical weather change, especially because we got used to this fast pace of innovation and growth, and there have built the core of our societies on such assumptions (interest rate for money, population grow for social security, etc) - like, we are expecting technology will improve so that we get new ways problematic (orbital mirrors, tweaking the albedo, ...) to fight climate change if it is indeed man made and<p>The idea of a deceleration of progress has some merit - to me it's like multiple warnings indicators lighting up, even if I don't know any theory to explain it, except a reduction of the "will to live" in western societies (Nietzsche style)

<i>On the campuses of Google and Apple, high-design bathrooms or espresso bars might look very different from the average non-tech company but their balance sheets show the same vast piles of idle cash you’ll find at Pfizer or Chevron. If we were living in an era of accelerating technological progress, Apple could reinvest its returns in new projects instead of fighting patent battles over old ones while moonlighting as the world’s biggest hedge fund.</i><p>-- Insiders with idle cash: The sound of silence speaking a thousand words.

"FT.com articles are only available to registered users and subscribers"<p>....Thankyou to the google cache for providing the article.<p><a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/8adeca00-2996-11e2-a5ca-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2BgXphivT" rel="nofollow">http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/8adeca00-2996-11e2-a5ca-00144...</a>

Everyone tends to respect Kasparov because of his amazing chess prowess. He is also a very active and involved person in the world - just look at his activities in Russian politics.<p>Unfortunately when you get outside his area of expertise, he often combines confidence and ignorance. The best example is <a href="http://www.revisedhistory.org/view-garry-kasparov.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.revisedhistory.org/view-garry-kasparov.php</a> where he tries to argue that about a thousand years of history did not happen.<p>His arguments are, of course, all bunk. As will be obvious to anyone who has passing familiarity with the serious famines due to climate change in the 1300s, the impact of the British agricultural revolution on food production in the 1700s, and the widespread use of abacuses for calculation until the introduction of Arabic notation.<p>This article is superficially reasonable, but similarly bad. Major tech advances in the recent past - many of which we'll see changing our future - include gigantic magnetoresistance, practical genome mapping, memresisters, continued improvements in battery technology and practical analysis of large data sets. (Enabling technologies like facial recognition, automated translation, and the like.)<p>The more you look, the more there is to be amazed at. Did you know that there is a serious effort to create a handheld device that can take a small tissue sample and identify any species on Earth? We've done DNA analysis on a t-rex, and there are people trying to get funding to bring mammoths back to life.<p>Experiencing it day by day we take it for granted. But looking back from the perspective of 50 years from now, the list of changes will be major.

It's weird for a libertarian to be praising the progress made in the 50s and 60s, a lot of which was the result of huge defense-related government investments.<p>His economic history doesn't make sense either, implying that there were no bubbles and busts before 1970.<p>And, as others have said, he is minimizing huge gains in a bunch of other fields.<p>Weird article.

This echoes TGS and such. OK. You've convinced me. But the article concludes without giving any constructive suggestion, other than some vague notion that youngsters today should really innovate.<p>Give me some more concrete advice. What do?

I think that they're making a very valid point. While there is a lot of innovation and really interesting research taking place in labs, I don't know how much of it is being translated into the marketplace. Most of the investments being made in tech these days seem to be in web 2.0 companies claiming to be 'Uber for ballroom dancers' or 'Instagram for nurses' or something of the sort. Not that such investments are a bad thing, they produce a lot of cool products.<p>But barring a few companies like General Fusion and SpaceX, I haven't heard much about startups trying to tackle truly crazy and massive problems - most companies you read about in the tech press tend to be much more 'cool idea' than 'grand idea'. If anybody has more examples of startups trying to tackle paradigm-changing problems, can you share them here?

The fundamental point around "incrementalism" makes a lot of sense.<p>Even government is largely incremental these days... the margin of winning the presidency seemed so small that it probably boiled downed to a series of micro-optimizations. If you buy that... why would a great micro-optimizer run the country any differently?<p>And even with technological progress poster-child Apple... the big outstanding question is whether Tim Cook will end up turning the company in to a micro-optimization that converges toward it's current local maxima?<p>But maybe it's all just cyclical... once all the low hanging fruit is picked over 1000 of times, the world at large will naturally be forced to be less incremental.

So, does that mean singularity won't happen anytime soon ? :-(

<i>HERE BE DRAGONS</i><p>* Paywall<p>* Forced registration<p>* Advertisements galore<p>* Popups<p>It's laughable anyone would consider an organisation willing to produce this abomination of a website an authority on technical progress.<p>I'm tremendously disappointed this had made the front page.