I'm wondering what people think about Peter Thiel's view that we've been stagnant for decades now in terms of meaningful technological innovations outside of computers and the internet.
Here's another quote of his on the same theme.
| You have as much computing power in your iPhone as was available at the time of the Apollo missions. But what is it being used for? It’s being used to throw angry birds at pigs; it’s being used to send pictures of your cat to people halfway around the world; it’s being used to check in as the virtual mayor of a virtual nowhere while you’re riding a subway from the nineteenth century.” |
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New Window )
--Massive increases in the use of the genome to improve health care, in ways such as cures for cancer;
--Ways to deal with chronic diseases like diabetes that are only in their early stages;
--Massively cheaper energy sources
--Crowd-sourced technological innovation that can put hundreds of thousands of brains to work on a single idea;
--Super-cheap on-line education available to virtually everyone through low-cost cell phones;
And on and on.
I use "The Second Machine Age" as my go-to source, but there are, many, many others. The entire book is now on-line, free. (linked)
The ignorance among supposedly smart people about how accelerating technological change is changing the world, and will continue to do so, is kind of mind-boggling. There was a major paper at Jackson Hole this year from an economist at MIT of all places, that seemed to think that Moore's Law is entirely about being able to do arithmetic more quickly. He apparently never heard of the massive pockets of technological ingenuity at his own University.
His paper is here:
http://www.kc.frb.org/publicat/sympos/2014/2014.0818.autor.handout.pdf
There are major downsides to all this change, in terms of hard competition between humans and increasingly sophisticated robots and computers, and real problems for income disparity that the technologists seem to think will magically go away. They are wrong, imo. But, in the meantime, the amount of new, cheap "stuff" that will be generated by technology is pretty mindboggling.
Ray Kurzweil is one of the great futurists. One of his better pieces is here:
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/425818/kurzweil-responds-dont-underestimate-the-singularity/
There is so much changing, so fast, that Thiel's thesis is just silly. Surprisingly so.
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This
Innovations occur so fast that they are not news or noted anymore.
I thought that myself!!
Imagine the wreaks. The carnage would be unbelievable.
I think I might have to wear two ties to work on October 21, 2015.
2. Autos - My first car, 40 years ago, got about 16 MPG highway. My current car, about the same size, gets about 38. You can argue it should be better, but a 238% improvement ain't nothing.
3. 140 characters might have helped the Arab Spring, but it also led to loads of misinformation after the Boston Marathon bombing. It's a technology that provides benefits if used properly, but negative results if used improperly. And given the tendency on the part of some to claim in depth knowledge of a subject based on reading 140 characters, I'd say the jury is still out.
4. Clearly there have been advances in medical technology. The system, however, is still screwed up.
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So I would suggest to Mr. Thiel that at current markets, more people wanted 140 characters than flying cars.
I think price and safety concerns have held back flying cars.
Forget flying, lets get a new viable power source to run our transportation first