The End of the Computer Age

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/events/2019-wriston-lecture-end-computer-age-thiel

by aazaa • 7 years ago

92 85 7 years ago

neonate• 7 years ago

Transcript: https://www.manhattan-institute.org/events/2019-wriston-lect...

"And so, if we were to rightsize the scaling for our intellectual life, you should describe Harvard, not as one of the thousands of great universities, you should describe it as a Studio 54 nightclub" is really all you need to take away from this. Not for what it says, but for the desperate attempt of those words to make any real sense.

Although don't miss out on gems like: "But in practice, the main AI applications that people seem to talk about are using large data to sort of monitor people, know more about people than they know about themselves. And in the limit case, maybe it can solve a lot of the sort of Austrian Economics type problems where you can know enough about people that you know more about them than they know about themselves, and you can sort of enable communism to work, maybe not so much as an economic theory, but at least as a political theory. So it is definitely a Leninist thing. And then, it is literally communist because China loves AI; it hates crypto. And so that, I think, tells you something."

AI is literally communist. Thanks Peter.

jmull• 7 years ago

Thanks, I was wondering if I should read it or not and this gives me some good tidbits to help decide.

chrisco2553• 7 years ago

Maybe not so elegantly put, but there's no question that China has embraced AI as a tool for spying on its own people. For whatever reason, spying seems to be a consistent Orwellian feature of communism. It was a central feature of the Soviet Union and China just seems to be taking the franchise to new heights with its approach to AI.

I don't know what to say about the Harvard quote, but with the recent admissions scandal implicating that rich people are buying their way into premium universities and into higher SAT scores, there's some nugget of truth to criticizing the current situation.

I wonder if universities aren't suffering Goodheart's Law: "Once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a useful measure." That is to say, once we measured that a university degree lead to higher incomes, better life outcomes, etc. and then we started pressuring everyone to get a four year degree...did it cease to be a good measure for quality employees, creative thinking, problem solving skills, etc?

I think there's something to that. When everyone is obsessed with getting the degree, and they're not worried about the practical application of their knowledge, they are doing the world a disservice. And we're all suffering for it, through higher debt and inflated expectations.

Omnitaus• 7 years ago

I'm not sure America is as different from China as you seem to imply here. You don't manage to incarcerate more individuals than "an authoritarian communist dictatorship" four times your size without massively scaling the state's ability to monitor citizens.

20% of the world's prisoners are in America. Is spying a consistent Orwellian feature of American capitalism?

davidivadavid3• 7 years ago

I'm not sure what's unclear about what he's saying.

a) Harvard is a pure signaling mechanism that doesn't provide education as much as exclusionary credentials.

b) AI/Big data is a way to solve the economic calculation problem that was once seen as one of the main theoretical hurdles against communism. That a country like China favors AI and punishes crypto tells you something (that it's a communist dictatorship).

It's pretty straightforward.

bamboozled• 7 years ago

I also liked the fact that he points out he'd like to see innovation not just "in some iPhone app" but more broadly in different fields.

I think this is a good point, there isn't enough going on in other areas, like he said people ride the 100 year old subway distracted by their iPhones not realizing the world around them is unchanging mostly.

It's true in some ways, who will build or even demand the better faster subways of the future if 99% of the people don't even realize they're on the subway.

perl4ever3• 7 years ago

Well, but China doesn't use AI to centrally plan the details of its economy. Corporations, prices, and competition are undisputed features of the economy there. Whether you want to call it communist or not, the computational problem is still as intractable as ever. There's a difference between monitoring and regulating society with computers and solving the classical economic calculation problem.

And Harvard is a way for elites to network, but that's not merely arbitrary signalling - it depends on how those elites are selected.

roenxi• 7 years ago

Quoting him and restating the point isn't an argument. AI fits very neatly into China's policy goals in a way that it doesn't for liberal politics.

We don't know how the improvements in AI are going to play out - it is very easy to see how it could turn out that these are the missing technologies to make a totalitarian state the most productive equilibrium, or communism, or anything else.

taneq• 7 years ago

And then, it is literally communist because China loves AI; it hates crypto. And so that, I think, tells you something.

China also loves cheap r/c cars, does that make them communist?

Animats4• 7 years ago

"Crypto"? The biggest Bitcoin miners are in China. That's because mining Bitcoin is "exporting", and a legit way to get yuan into dollars or euros. Buy mining hardware with yuan, mine, sell Bitcoin outside China. Not only is it legal, because it's exporting, it's encouraged and some breaks for creating an export business are available.

frickinLasers• 7 years ago

Isn't this the guy who founded Palantir?

goranb• 7 years ago

That introduction is a guillotinable offense.

classified3• 7 years ago

And this time the Scarlet Pimpernel wouldn't lift a finger to save them.

blueyes• 7 years ago

Thiel's talk starts around 10m40s, after the throat-clearing intro.

This is not his most articulate talk, fwiw. Thiel's smart and sometimes very clear, but not here. This feels off the cuff, where he's falling back on pot shots and sound bites.

josephg• 7 years ago

Its very long, but I enjoyed Thiel on The Portal (Eric Weinstein's podcast) a few months back:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1-peter-thiel/id146999...

I don't know how this compares to talks he's given, but there were a lot of small ideas in there which I thought were really interesting - like the idea that we're in a period of relative technological stagnation compared to a couple decades ago. And how obvious this observation seems to both Thiel and Weinstein.

Animats4• 7 years ago

We're in a period of relative technological stagnation compared to a couple decades ago.

Kind of. There's no new "must have" consumer electronics product. 3D TV was a flop, robot vacuums were a dud, VR goggles make 5% to 15% of the population nauseous, and everybody has a smartphone. The "lose money on every sale and make it up on volume" model (Uber, etc.) is coming apart. Self-driving cars don't work yet. Moore's Law has hit a wall. Wafer fab cost is so high that the next node may be unaffordable.

There's lots of stuff to do, though. Solar panels and batteries work pretty well, and there's a few trillion dollars of those to be deployed. But it's not a Make Money Fast business. Electric cars and charging stations work, and those need to be deployed. The battery manufacturers need to get their automation act together and start pumping those things out at high speed at very low cost.

There's also lots of room for progress in bioengineering. Editing DNA is just beginning.

captaincrowbar• 7 years ago

It’s amazing how much the output of Serious People pontificating about AI is coming to resemble that of the AIs themselves.

ehnto3• 7 years ago

Perhaps it will be revealed that he had an AI write this talk.

ggm• 7 years ago

Wait.. I thought I read a "how to recognize snake oil in AI/ML" posting just yesterday...

tus88• 7 years ago

I thought this was going to be about Stadia.

kjhughes• 7 years ago

Other than old arguments about innovation deficiencies (wanting flying cars but getting 140 characters), there was little/nothing about "The End of the Computer Age."

The talk was more about scaling (Finance, Tech, Cargo, and People) with some insights regarding which the US has a chance to compete effectively against China (only Finance and Tech) and some (related?) advice to the left and the right in the US:

Left: Move beyond identity politics.

Right: Rethink the doctrine of American exceptionalism.

Thought provoking commentary, but mistitled as "The End of the Computer Age".

fadisaleh• 7 years ago

"...the iPhones that distract us from our environment also distract us from how strangely old and unchanging our environment is, how you're riding a subway that's 100 years old. And I think sort of a healthier sort of progress would happen on many different fronts."

This quote stood out to me. It seems like we silently concluded that the physical world has evolved enough, developed enough, even though there's a ton of inefficiencies to fix.

I often lament that the built environment of the average American city looks stuck in the 80s, and this quote made me think of that.

_bxg1• 7 years ago

I think the market is what silently concluded that the physical world has evolved enough; software isn't more important, just more profitable. And because the United States is allergic to public spending, that's all that matters.

mcphage• 7 years ago

And because the United States is allergic to public spending, that's all that matters.

I don't think it's the spending that the US is allergic to, it's the collecting the money to spend.

sologoub2• 7 years ago

NYC seems to be just fine at redeveloping. So the problem is regional (though very widespread).

buboard7• 7 years ago

silently concluded that the physical world has evolved enough

the main culprit is regulation. There are other markets which build modern cities at breakneck pace

the same thing is going to happen to tech now that regulation is kicking in

Cougher• 7 years ago

"And because the United States is allergic to public spending, that's all that matters."

The United States wouldn't be so allergic to public spending if we weren't so complacent about foreign spending, namely the military and foreign aid/manipulation.

sologoub2• 7 years ago

In California (can’t speak for other states), much of that “stuck in <x time period>” is largely driven by NIMBYs and at what point the place became more or less affluent.

SV seems to have figured out that some land can be redeveloped into apartments relatively recently, but otherwise it looks like 60s was a pretty active development era and most of that stuff is still here. By contrast, in LA much of 50s - 60s sprawl has been replaced by 70-80, or even 90s sprawl.

California is basically screwed as long as prop 13 applies to businesses and apartment buildings - what incentive do you have as the owner to raise your tax base, especially with rent control where you can’t charge more.

chrisco2553• 7 years ago

I don't know why you're getting downvoted, because it's absolutely true that much of CA is stuck in the mid 20th century in terms of real estate development. The zoning laws and NIMBY-ism are very important to call out for restricting progress. Somebody above tried to blame the market. It isn't the market when you own a piece of property but you are restricted to building a single-family home that meets 200 different regulations and restrictions so tight that you only end up with cookie cutter homes in a neighborhood of cul-de-sacs. It's not just CA that suffers from this but it's certainly the most extreme case. Zoning laws are among the key reasons why city design has stagnated. There's little wiggle room for innovation. And if you look at attempts to build high speed rail, for example, and the debacle that is with the amount of money spent and the never-ending construction and you compare that to the achievements of the early 20th century and it looks like a sad situation.

droithomme• 7 years ago

you're riding a subway that's 100 years old ... a healthier sort of progress would happen on many different fronts

Is he saying there is something wrong with electric subways? It seems an excellent solution to transport in a dense urban area. And metros have kept up with technology fairly well. What is the better solution to the subway for the problem it solves in the places it solves them?

Yes, we've had subways for over 100 years. And trains in general. Freight trains are very efficient ways of moving things. How old is the hammer or the shovel? Pretty old. And both work well.

He mentions also that some extension of a NYC subway cost $3.8 billion a mile. Yeah that's expensive. No doubt they ran into horrific problems drilling the tunnel. B-1 bomber program spent $40 billion and delivered 20 aircraft at a program cost of $2 billion each (much more than the claimed cost, but this is the actual cost). Likewise the B-2 ran $1 billion each. Was this mile of subway worth more than two B-1 bombers? I'd say yes but others may say no.

buboard7• 7 years ago

the i486 was an excellent processor, too

Miraste• 7 years ago

I think he's referring to the horrifically unmaintained and archaic state of the world's older subways, like NYC and the London Underground. Besides the expense, NYC is absurdly behind on modern train timing systems, which causes very loose scheduling and frequent delays. There's also the general squalor and lack of maintenance of the platforms. London's tunnels are so full of iron dust and other particulates that a half hour in them literally turns your mucus black, and the lack of a cooling system has caused the ambient temperature to rise ~30 degrees since their construction with no sign of stopping. They also screech loudly enough to cause permanent hearing damage.

These systems could be modern and effective, but instead they're disintegrating in place. That's the problem.

buboard7• 7 years ago

As long as prices keep going up there s no motive. And if people want to see modern tower architecture they catch a flight to asia

scoutt• 7 years ago

inefficiencies

Think that while this person is looking at the iPhone on the subway, it's also probably unaware that there is (in this very moment, in the world) people starving to dead or dying from deceases that already have a cure, or that there is people beheading others with machetes in tribal-like wars.

The paradigm of progress is relative.

growlist• 7 years ago

there is people beheading others with machetes in tribal-like wars

I prefer the society that does not end up with machetes, but there are maniacs out there that would argue that even expressing such a preference is 'problematic'

gioele• 7 years ago

"...the iPhones that distract us from our environment also distract us from how strangely old and unchanging our environment is, how you're riding a subway that's 100 years old."

We need a smartphone-age/post-TV update to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panem_et_circenses and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

Animats4• 7 years ago

It reads like a long rant on Reddit. I'm a lot less impressed with Thiel now.

His fascination with "scale" is interesting. Some of the problems we have today come from the conquest of scale. It used to be that big companies couldn't get out of their own way. This limited how big a company could get before smaller competitors were more efficient. With computers and networks, businesses can now be scaled to national, if not planetary, scale. And we get a very small, and shrinking, number of big players. One Google. One Amazon. One Facebook. One Alibaba. One Tencent. Three big US telcos. Three big US banks.

chrisco2553• 7 years ago

Scale in tech has been solved, because it's trivial to reproduce a software program. It's not like manufacturing. We've got a dozen or so large automobile manufacturers that are all thriving. There's five big tech companies: Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. And three big telcos is an improvement over the early 20th century that Thiel is idealizing when AT&T was the only game in town. But Thiel himself is a supporter of monopolies and wrote a whole book on the virtues of them in "Zero To One".

One thing I feel as though we lack is more visionary entrepreneurs in some of these other fields (or if we don't, they're not very visible). In the early 20th century, you had breakthrough after breakthrough. You had Edison, Tesla, Einstein, Ford, Disney, Eastman (Kodak), Sarnoff (radio), Fisher (washing machine), the Wright Bros, and on and on...so many breakthrough entrepreneurs, scientists and technologists in such a small window of time.

If we tried to point to people alive today who have the same impact as the ones mentioned above, we'd probably name Musk. In the early 20th century, we had hundreds of Elon Musks.

ehnto3• 7 years ago

I think most industries have become continuously more specialized. We've likely had fantastic innovations year over year, but they are in parts of the greater product, and by someone who was hired to do exactly that so they were really just doing their job. That doesn't make for a very good story, so we don't hear about the many innovations that continue to improve all of our lives.

incognition3• 7 years ago

I don't agree with your summary of the greats, you're lumping in scientists with entrepreneurs.

If you want revolutionary entrepreneurs in our era, this list is a fairly good summary: http://startupsusa.org/fortune500/ 2017 Fortune 500 "Companies Founded by Immigrants or the Children of Immigrants, by Company, Founder" . Jobs, Brin, Yang, Huang, Bezos and more

rasengan0• 7 years ago

Centuries old subways? I'm typing this on a QWERTY keyboard layout. Innovate people!

mertnesvat• 7 years ago

Hold tight because soon there will be Brain Computer connections with enough bandwidth to allow us type, read, write at the same time.

arunpuri• 7 years ago

I am not 100% sure but I think this fits here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDpZ7w9uNuc (Newsroom opening scene). I am not American but I believe this can apply so much in a lot of places.

wrs• 7 years ago

This mostly just reads like stream of consciousness gibberish to me. Is there an actual coherent argument in here somewhere?

classified3• 7 years ago

This is the top 1% celebrating themselves. If they had any coherent arguments, we would have been convinced long since. As it is, they're just laughing their asses off while taking candy from a baby (i.e. getting even more rich and powerful).

incognition3• 7 years ago

Is it me or has his thinking got more sloppy?

A couple examples, his indictment of the Obamas is that they sent their kids to Harvard but his indictment of America is that we don't focus on the things we do well... such as universities?

The assault on science now without any prescriptive solutions. Is he arguing for more populous interpretation of science? Has he had any first hand experience and investigation into the mechanisms of double blind peer review? (In my experience, still prone to gaming but often rigorous and the best method we've got).

Re: The indictment of the SV elite. I don't move in the same circles as he does but it's obvious that he's still smarting from the SV elite's rejection of him.

His hypocrisy from being owner of Palantir and yet seeming indictment of AI software for governments? Another layer of hypocrisy of espousing libertarian values when he's come to embody the system as much as anyone (in the administration, numerous govt military contracts with Palantir). And yet he's even more shifty than that, embracing NZ citizenship for possible tax evasion avenues.

His indictment of Twitter yet entrepreneurs have made material progress in traditional sectors (his old buddy Elon making headway with Tesla).

Our indictment of him should be that he's turned his back on values he's formerly espoused, content to rankle in a 'get off my front lawn style' on his large pile of capital while often committing the same hypocrisies of which he feigns disgust.

groby_b• 7 years ago

Wait - he helped elect a cryptofascist that plunders the public coffers for personal gain, and then he's got the chutzpah to complain about the state of public infrastructure?

At the Manhattan Institute? The place that loudly complains that tax payer financed efforts are really just exploitation?

classified3• 7 years ago

...tax payer financed efforts are really just exploitation

Right, and the super rich cannot wait to relieve us tax payers from our plight and pay all those bills for us. Otherwise, what would be the point in never paying any taxes?

buboard7• 7 years ago

This talk mostly reiterates his basic talking points so it feels a lot like rambling. And the title is not justified by the argument.

There is, however, a case to be made that the computer tech age has reached an end. Tech companies turning to investing in banking and real estate is not a good sign.

icebraining• 7 years ago

Tech companies are still doing tech. It's more that the "tech" label is being applied to other companies incorrectly.

buboard7• 7 years ago

apple is investing in payments, credit cards and real estate. so does facebook (and google)

helen___keller• 7 years ago

Train companies are still doing trains, but the era of railway mania (and its associated venture capital bubble) have long since evaporated.

We'll see the same with tech, maybe in a few years maybe in a few decades.

The End of the Computer Age

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