This video is oddly pessimistic, but to me, Thiel is overlooking where the greatest advances are yet to come.
The advances in computers are advances in processing power and connectivity. Every industry uses both of these elements to succeed. Now that computers are reaching a sort of peak development, there is going to be a dispensing of the capabilities that computers offer into other industries.
Its hard for me to put it into words, but I think that computers are simply a stepping stone for real achievements to come.
The car has basically reached peak performance years ago, but we aren't disappointed in the fact that there was a lot of focus improving the car and a giant vehicle industry for many many years. Instead we moved on to building things that can use a car, such as the highway system. Or the mail delivery system, or the thousands of industries that completely rely on highways or mail.
In the same way with computers, we are now going to see industries and technologies appear that rely on having computers that have reached this advanced level of processing power we have today. Once this mighty computer is passed on to the common man, innovation begins to move in different paths again. Like a tree.
I dont know, this may have delved into a bit of a rant but that video made me extremely optimistic :)
He's said before that he's not particularly worried about advancements in computers continuing to unfold and the potential for the Net to become ever more like a planet wide nervous system with many more use cases coming into existence.
His complaint is that if progress does not occur in fields outside of computation there will be stagnation. No amount of computational intelligence can mine asteroids or convert the Sahara to arable land without doing something with the material world.
You can have rapid improvements in specific technologies in the midst of a general decline or a stagnation.
For example; surely there a great deal of improvement in weapons systems during the middle ages. The stirrup, the crossbow, the gun, the cannon. Most of the advantages of those technologies didn't really help the average person's situation.
This is not a hypothetical. While there was enormous increases in computational power in the past three - four decades median wages have not budged. People were able to consume more primarily due to debt.
We ought to question whether computers will be enough to raise living standards in the developed world in the short to medium term (his main contention I think).
I don't think that computers are anywhere near a stall-point as far as new advances go. I expect to see computers that use very much less energy, more memory but still get much smaller, and CPUs with more special instructions that enable faster neural networks, data structure manipulation a that might enable symbolic AI, etc.
The advances in computers are advances in processing power and connectivity. Every industry uses both of these elements to succeed. Now that computers are reaching a sort of peak development, there is going to be a dispensing of the capabilities that computers offer into other industries.
Its hard for me to put it into words, but I think that computers are simply a stepping stone for real achievements to come.
The car has basically reached peak performance years ago, but we aren't disappointed in the fact that there was a lot of focus improving the car and a giant vehicle industry for many many years. Instead we moved on to building things that can use a car, such as the highway system. Or the mail delivery system, or the thousands of industries that completely rely on highways or mail.
In the same way with computers, we are now going to see industries and technologies appear that rely on having computers that have reached this advanced level of processing power we have today. Once this mighty computer is passed on to the common man, innovation begins to move in different paths again. Like a tree.
I dont know, this may have delved into a bit of a rant but that video made me extremely optimistic :)