Peter Thiel Says Computers Haven’t Made Our Lives Significantly Better

You know what is damn funny about this....<p>In 1980, Reagan got elected and cut a ton of forward-thinking basic research. I won&#x27;t go through it in detail but there was a giant shift from publicly-funded big ideas to privately-funded little ideas. All the big companies also got short-term focused and outsourced their labs to startups.<p>Now we have this big-government-is-bad guy, who probably looks at Reagan and his gang as Saints, lamenting the lack of progress.<p>This is what happens when you put all your best minds into either (a) building weapons or (b) advertising&#x2F;marketing or (c) the legal profession.<p>Let me know when he says that we need to raise his taxes to do stuff that collectively benefits society. Until then, he&#x27;s just like a drunk complaining about a hangover.

I really respect Mr. Thiel for what he has done in the past, but I increasingly find that people who publish a new book (like Mr. Thiel) come up with categorical, often outrageous, statements just to drum up the support for the book.

&gt; For example, you probably could not restart nuclear power in the U.S. without the role of government. But because our government does not believe in complex coordination and planning, it will not restart the nuclear industry. It’s quite possible it will just not get restarted.<p>Funny that you can call yourself an emphatic capitalist and advocate for central planning.

I tend to agree. Cellular wireless is really the only fundamental advance in that time. The rest is engineering and refinement, and new applications for existing things. Which is important too, of course.<p>I would posit that part of the problem is the overall decline in our belief in institutions (covered elsewhere). You need big institutions to organize people to do big things, and when trust in them erodes, our ability to coordinate to do big things is reduced.

Yeah and human beings have stalled evolving ever since we started looking like a human. I mean, we look the same as thousands of years ago, right? What have we done? At this point we should all have evolved so much that our brain should be the size of a basketball and should be able to communicate via telepathy. What have we done? We&#x27;ve all failed.

I&#x27;ve thought about this on and off, and one day I arrived at this: The only technological progress that truly matters to me are medical ones. If people could live and not get sick, and not die until they&#x27;re 90, then I would be fine living with 1970&#x27;s era tech, or whatever year&#x27;s era tech. Then all we&#x27;d need would be to have less violent, more egalitarian societies, à la Scandinavia. Flying cars, faster+cheaper computers, better internet be dammned. (or they could go on being improved, but I wouldn&#x27;t care if not)<p>P.S. I never get the flying car thing, since we have helicopters.

Peter Thiel is a businessman, not a historian of technology.

I think the realization of what global connectivity can produce is still in its infancy.<p>IoT is huge. We are on the verge of controlling our entire homes with the wallet-sized computers in our pockets. I say on the verge because it hasn&#x27;t reached mass adoption levels.<p>Information&#x2F;knowledge&#x2F;education sharing is growing by leaps and bounds. When the education bubble completely bursts, and you don&#x27;t know have be rich, know someone, or have a 4.0 to get a high-quality education, that will be considered a huge development in hindsight. (EDIT: I realize this is also currently going on but for the next decade or two the ivory towers still have the influence.)<p>People are quick to dismiss technological advances once they get used to them. It&#x27;s easy to say, &#x27;we haven&#x27;t cured <i>X</i> terrible disease&#x27; and &#x27;humans aren&#x27;t living past 100, we&#x27;re underachieving.&#x27;

What if we are just in a consolidation of technology phase? It would make sense that after so many breakthroughs until the 70&#x27;s you need some time to consolidate that technology and knowledge before moving forward.

Another recent thread on this same topic: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8337460" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8337460</a><p>Have to say I can&#x27;t agree with him more on this specific point. Other than IT and a few other things, technology has stalled since 1970.<p>Every counterexample I&#x27;ve heard is actually an application of IT to enhance some other thing (e.g. self-driving cars). The car itself hasn&#x27;t changed in any fundamental way since 1950 (unless it&#x27;s electric).

I feel like Peter Thiel is taking the Foundation series a little too literally.

Peter Thiel invested in Urbit, it is important to note.<p><a href="http://urbit.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;urbit.org</a><p><a href="https://github.com/urbit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;urbit</a>

If Thiel had spoken about something more broadly defined such as &quot;progress&quot;, then his arguments might have held water.

Isn&#x27;t the kind of stuff he&#x27;s talking about <i>really</i> hard?<p>We may have wanted flying cars, but 140 characters is <i>way</i> easier, and that&#x27;s why we have it, not because we&#x27;re focusing on the wrong things.

coming from a person who made a ton on money on the same things he says are not making our lives better.

that&#x27;s because he isn&#x27;t a developer

What&#x27;s with the surge of Peter Thiel related soundbites lately?<p>I have no idea where he gets the idea that technology stopped in 1970. A simple example: look at how much more efficient internal combustion engines are now than they were in 1970. You can actually drive distances that are in the double digits of miles on a single gallon of gas today. That&#x27;s a simple, quick example.<p>Saying &quot;we were promised jetpacks and flying cars and that future wasn&#x27;t delivered,&quot; is short sighted and so ridiculously uncreative. Instead we got a global communication system. The world is way smaller now than it would have been with flying cars. I can keep in touch with people across the globe for almost no cost. That is real innovation - few people could even imagine the internet - fewer predicted it and I don&#x27;t think anyone foresaw the impact it&#x27;s had on humanity. While Peter Thiel was watching movies with flying cars and jetpacks (which I might argue are uncreative continuations of existing technology) people were solving actual problems in new and incredible ways.