Peter Thiel

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“The Ben Franklin Of Today Is Elon Musk”

October 30, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Walter Isaacson, who has written his second Silicon Valley book, The Innovators, just conducted an AMA at Reddit. Elon Musk will no doubt be pleased with the headline quote, though for all his accomplishments, he certainly hasn’t emulated Benjamin Franklin’s political achievements, nor will he likely. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

Hey Walter, who is the Ben Franklin of 2014?

Walter Isaacson:

The Ben Franklin of today is Elon Musk.

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Question:

I thoroughly enjoyed your biography on Steve Jobs! Thank you for your diligence!

I know you talked about how you had never done a biography on a living person before. What it easier to feel like you could get a more accurate picture of a living subject? Did you have a system in place that you felt would prevent the tainting of your perspective based on the bias of the person you were interviewing?

Walter Isaacson:

I have done living people before: Kissinger, the the Wise Men. With a living subject, you get to know (if you take time to do a lot of personal interviews and listen) a hundred times more than you can learn about a historic person. I know much more about the chamfers of the original mac than about all of Ben Franklin’s lightning rod and kite-flying experiments. I tend to be a bit soft when writing about someone alive, because I tend to like most people I get to know.

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Question:

I’m surprised to see computers have not evolved beyond silicon in nearly 30-40 years. What are your thoughts?

Walter Isaacson:

It would be interesting if we built computers not based on digital circuits using binary logic — and instead tried to replicate the human mind in a carbon-based and wetware chemical system, perhaps even an analog one, like nature did it!

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Question:

What are your thoughts on singularity? Do you think it will happen, and if so, when? 

Walter Isaacson:

The theme of my book is that human minds and computers bring different strengths to the party. The pursuit of strong Artificial Intelligence has been a bit of a mirage — starting in the 1950s, it’s always seen to be 20 years away. But the combination of humans and machines in more intimate partnership — what JCR Licklider called symbiosis and what Peter Thiel calls complementarity — has proven more fruitful. Indeed amazing. So I suspect that for the indefinite future, the combination of human minds and machine power will be more powerful than aiming for artificial intelligence and a singularity.•

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“The Company Received An ‘F’ Rating From The Better Business Bureau”

October 10, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Despite employing some innovations that markedly improve commuter convenience–using a smartphone to hail a taxi, track it and pay for the ride–Uber seems to be the ickiest of the new Sharing Economy behemoths. It not only disrupts the livelihood of traditional drivers but squeezes its own operators and employs surge pricing when consumers are most vulnerable. Peter Thiel thinks it possible that the Silicon Valley business may be reckless enough to be the new Napster, driving itself out of business by flouting laws. But even though Sean Parker’s company was silenced, online sharing was the larger wave and unstoppable. It might be the same with Uber: The concern may not go forever, but what it represents won’t be stopped and will make things better and worse. From Mike Isaac at the New York Times:

“Uber, the smartphone-based hail-a-ride service, often claims it is cheaper than a ride in a taxi. It looks as if some Uber customers do not agree.

The company received an ‘F’ rating from the Better Business Bureau on Thursday, the lowest possible rating given by the organization.

The grade is based on, among other criteria, more than 90 Uber customer complaints filed with the Better Business Bureau over the last three years, most of them centering on Uber’s so-called surge pricing.

Customers still feel misinformed about how they are charged for their rides, according to complaints at the bureau’s website, and say they are not able to receive adequate customer service when they try to complain about their fares.

With its surge pricing, Uber’s temporarily increases fare prices anywhere from one and a half to 10 times the normal cost of taking an Uber ride, based on the demand for drivers. When many people in a particular area request Uber at the same time, for example, the price of rides in that area goes up.

‘I never knew about surcharges until after the fact and was unaware, confused and uninformed,’ one customer wrote on the bureau’s site.”

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“We Live In A Financial And Capitalistic Age. We Do Not Live In A Scientific Or Technological Age.”

September 29, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel, who refuses to do interviews unless someone asks, just sounded off to the Wall Street Journal about the technophobia he feels is pervasive in America and Europe. More likely, people enjoy technology’s benefits but have concerns about the downsides (privacy issues, environmental concerns, unemployment, etc.), although there certainly is tension between the old Dream Factory (Hollywood) and the new one (Silicon Valley). An excerpt:

“Forget all the buzz over driverless cars; the days spent waiting in line for the latest iPhone; the drones delivering medicine. Tech investor Peter Thiel says that, fundamentally, our society hates tech.

‘We live in a financial and capitalistic age,’ he said. ‘We do not live in a scientific or technological age. We live in an age that’s dominated by hostility and unfriendliness towards all things technological.” …

Silicon Valley, he said, has people who believe in technology and scientific innovation, while much of the rest of the U.S. doesn’t.

‘The easiest way to see this is you just look at all the movies Hollywood makes,’ he said. ‘They all show technology that doesn’t work; that kills people; that’s destroying the world, and you can choose between Avatar, or The Matrix, or Terminator films.’ (Mr. Thiel has previously lashed out at Hollywood, including criticizing how Silicon Valley was portrayed in the movie, The Social Network–which documents Facebook’s creation and Mr. Thiel’s part in it.) “

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“This Kind Of Man-Machine Symbiosis Enabled PayPal To Stay In Business”

September 25, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

There are many areas where billionaire investor Peter Thiel and I disagree–he seems unconcerned about that–but we do concur that AI is more the solution than the problem. While I accept that smart machines could possibly be the ruination of humans, it seems very likely to me that we’ll become extinct without their continued development. (There are some other low-tech, out-of-the-box measures which might be useful in staving off our species’ collapse, but it’s highly improbable they’ll be implemented.) 

In his new Financial Times piece, “Robots Are Our Saviors, Not the Enemy,” Thiel examines the more mundane economic costs of silicon brain drain. He extols the value of a man-machine hybrid, saying that robots will complement rather than replace human labor in many instances, though former employees of Blockbuster, Borders and Fotomat might disagree. And if driverless cars arrive anywhere near on schedule, there will be a whole new class of unemployed that wasn’t a useful complement. An excerpt:

“Unlike fellow humans of different nationalities, computers are not substitutes for American labour. Men and machines are good at different things. People form plans and make decisions in complicated situations. We are less good at making sense of enormous amounts of data. Computers are exactly the opposite: they excel at efficient data processing but struggle to make basic judgments that would be simple for any human.

I came to understand this from my experience as chief executive of PayPal. In mid-2000 we had survived the dotcom crash and we were growing fast but we faced one huge problem: we were losing upwards of $10m a month to credit card fraud. Since we were processing hundreds or even thousands of trans­actions each minute, we could not possibly review each one. No human quality control team could work that fast.

We tried to solve the problem by writing software that would automatically identify bogus transactions and cancel them in real time. But it quickly became clear that this approach would not work: after an hour or two, the thieves would catch on and change their tactics to fool our algorithms.

Human analysts, however, were not easily fooled by criminals’ adaptive strategies. So we rewrote the software to take a hybrid approach: the computer would flag the most suspicious trans­actions, and human operators would make the final judgment.

This kind of man-machine symbiosis enabled PayPal to stay in business, which in turn enabled hundreds of thousands of small businesses to accept the payments they needed to thrive on the internet.”

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“All This Space-Age Stuff Was Seen As A Threat To Social Control”

September 22, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From a report by Jennifer Schuessler of the New York Times about the recent debate between David Graeber and Peter Thiel, two big-picture thinkers who could not be more disparate politically:

“If he and Mr. Graeber didn’t plan the future on Friday, they did agree that it needed to be radically different from the present. Mr. Graeber kicked things off with an extemporaneous summary of his essay ‘Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,’ which is included in the new Baffler anthology No Future for You. (As of this writing, the book was lagging about 297,000 spots behind Mr. Thiel’s on Amazon.)

Once upon a time, he said, when people imagined the future, they imagined flying cars, teleportation devices and robots who would free them from the need to work. But strangely, none of these things came to pass.

‘What happened to the second half of the 20th century?’ Mr. Graeber asked. His answer is that it was deliberately short-circuited by a ‘ruling-class freak-out,’ as ‘all this space-age stuff was seen as a threat to social control.’

Mr. Thiel took the microphone and made a similar argument, citing the slogan of his venture capital firm, the Founders Fund: ‘We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.’

If he didn’t blame any ruling-class freakout, he did see a loss of nerve and sclerotic bureaucracies. He cited the anarchist slogan ‘Act as if you are already free,’ and praised initiatives like SpaceX, the private space technology company started by his fellow PayPal founder, Elon Musk.

‘We’re not going to get to Mars by having endless debates,’ he said. ‘We’re going to get to Mars by trying to get to Mars.'”

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“Americans Mythologize Competition And Credit It With Saving Us From Socialist Bread Lines”

September 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a WSJ essay, Peter Thiel expands on what he said in his recent AMA, that “capitalism and competition are opposites.” Thiel, who approves of monopolies, doesn’t believe they only benefit individual businesses but broader society as well, as they have the capital to care about workers and ethics and the environment. I disagree strongly, but I’ll acknowledge that we’ve all certainly benefited from Bell Labs, the moonshot division of a government-backed monopoly. An excerpt:

To an economist, every monopoly looks the same, whether it deviously eliminates rivals, secures a license from the state or innovates its way to the top. I’m not interested in illegal bullies or government favorites: By “monopoly,” I mean the kind of company that is so good at what it does that no other firm can offer a close substitute. Google is a good example of a company that went from 0 to 1: It hasn’t competed in search since the early 2000s, when it definitively distanced itself from Microsoft and Yahoo!

Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition, all profits get competed away. The lesson for entrepreneurs is clear: If you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business.

How much of the world is actually monopolistic? How much is truly competitive? It is hard to say because our common conversation about these matters is so confused. To the outside observer, all businesses can seem reasonably alike, so it is easy to perceive only small differences between them. But the reality is much more binary than that. There is an enormous difference between perfect competition and monopoly, and most businesses are much closer to one extreme than we commonly realize.

The confusion comes from a universal bias for describing market conditions in self-serving ways: Both monopolists and competitors are incentivized to bend the truth.•

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“You Mentioned That ‘Uber Was The Most Ethically Challenged Company In Silicon Valley'”

September 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Peter Thiel, the contrarian Libertarian who would like to defeat death and taxes, just conducted one of his periodic Reddit AMAs. A few excerpts follow from his latest one, including an exchange about Uber, a company reviled by the Lyft investor.

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Question:

At Disrupt this week, you mentioned that “Uber was the most ethically challenged company in Silicon Valley.” However, if the power law holds true, isn’t it optimal strategy to do anything to win?

Peter Thiel:

Not optimal if you break the law to the point where the company gets shut down (think Napster). I’m not saying that will happen to Uber, but I think they’ve pushed the line really far.

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Question:

A lot of people on Reddit care about Net Neutrality, and also have a healthy distrust of government. The commonly proposed solution being suggested by the EFF and other pro-technology and net neutrality organizations is to classify broadband/internet service as a Title II common carrier (AKA as a ‘telecommunication service’ that can not discriminate data, instead of ‘information service’ which can). My main hesitation with this is that this would give the FCC even more control over ISPs, which may have unintended consequences on the freedom on the internet. What are your views on current net neutrality issues, and do you have any ideas on this or other solutions?

Peter Thiel:

We’ve had these debates about net neutrality for over 15 years. It hasn’t been necessary so far, and I’m not sure anything has changed to make it necessary right now.

And I don’t like government regulation: We need the US government to regulate the internet about as much as we need the EU to regulate Google — I suspect the cons greatly outweigh the pros, especially in practice.

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Question:

What is one thing you believe to be true that most do not?

Peter Thiel:

Most people believe that capitalism and competition are synonyms, and I think they are opposites. A capitalist accumulates capital, and in a world of perfect competition all the capital gets competed away: The restaurant industry in SF is very competitive and very non-capitalistic (e.g., very hard way to make money), whereas Google is very capitalistic and has had no serious competition since 2002.

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Question:

Why do you think more wealthy people don’t fund anti-aging research? What do you think could be done to encourage them to do more?

Peter Thiel:

Most people deal with aging by some strange combination of acceptance and denial. I think the psychological blocks to thinking about aging run very deep, and we need to think about it in order to really fight it.

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Question:

What did you think when you first met Elon Musk?

Peter Thiel:

Very smart, very charismatic, and incredibly driven — a very rare combination, since most people who have one of these traits learn to coast on the other two.

It was kind of scary to be competing against his startup in Palo Alto in Dec 1999-Mar 2000.

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Question:

What was your reaction to The Social Network movie?

Peter Thiel:

The zero-sum world it portrayed has nothing in common with the Silicon Valley I know, but I suspect it’s a pretty accurate portrayal of the dysfunctional relationships that dominate Hollywood.•

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“Instability Will Lead To Global Conflict, And That In Turn May Lead To What He Referred To As ‘Secular Apocalypse'”

September 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Just because you’ve made a lot of money, that doesn’t mean you have all the answers. In fact, when buffeted by wealth, you’re unlikely to even identify the right questions. Case in point: libertarian technologist Peter Thiel, who thinks a lack of innovation will doom humankind. We’re certainly at risk from climate change and those melting icebergs, but I don’t think we’ll perish from want of ambition. Such big-idea projects may currently be too out of balance in favor of the private sector, but moonshots abound. From Roger Parloff at Fortune:

“When people look into the future, Thiel explains to me, the consensus is that globalization will take its course, with the developing world coming to look like the developed world. But people don’t focus on the dark, Malthusian reality of what that will mean, absent major technological breakthroughs not currently in any pipeline.

‘If everyone in China has a gas-guzzling car, we’ll have oil at $10 per gallon and enormous pollution,’ he observes.

But that’s just the start, because without growth there will also be increasing political instability. Instability will lead to global conflict, and that in turn may lead to what in a 2007 essay he referred to as ‘secular apocalypse’—total extinction of the human race through either thermonuclear war, biological contagion, unchecked climate change, or an array of competing Armageddon scenarios.

‘That’s why,’ he says, with characteristic understatement and aplomb, ‘I think the stakes in this are not just, ‘Are we going to have some new gadgets?’”

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“We’re Looking For Wholesale Reinvention Of This Crazy, Perverse Food System”

August 25, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In vitro foods are happening now and will become a staple of our diets in the future, as a growing global population and environmental concerns demand it. Meat, of course, is the hardest to approximate, but that will also happen. Considering the processed crap we eat now, the so-called Frankenfoods may be significantly healthier. From Katie Murphy at the New York Times:

“Whether for moral reasons or because of a Jobsian belief in the superiority of their vision, high-tech food entrepreneurs are focusing primarily on providing alternatives to animal protein. The demand is certainly there. Worldwide consumption of pork, beef, poultry and other livestock products is expected to double by 2020. Animal protein is also the most vulnerable and resource-intensive part of the food supply. In addition to livestock production’s immense use of land and water, runoff pollution and antibiotic abuse, it is responsible for 14.5 percent of greenhouse gases, according to the United Nations.

Venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Closed Loop Capital, Khosla Ventures and Collaborative Fund have poured money into Food 2.0 projects. Backing has also come from a hit parade of tech-world notables including Sergey Brin of Google, Biz Stone of Twitter, Peter Thiel of PayPal and Bill Gates of Microsoft, as well as Li Ka-shing, Asia’s wealthiest man, who bought early stakes in Facebook and Spotify.

‘We’re looking for wholesale reinvention of this crazy, perverse food system that makes people do the wrong thing,’ said Josh Tetrick, the vegan chief executive of San Francisco-based Hampton Creek. His company has created an egg substitute using protein extracted from the Canadian yellow pea, incorporating it into Just Scramble, Just Mayo and Just Cookie Dough, which are starting to find their way onto grocery store shelves nationwide.”

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“Most Of The Greatest Ideas Are Usually Denounced By Most Of Us As Crazy In The Beginning”

June 2, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I don’t always agree with Malcolm Gladwell, but I always enjoy reading him for his ideas and because he’s a miraculously lucid writer. He just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

What was your experience on Glenn Beck’s program like?

Malcolm Gladwell:

A lot of people wondered why I went on Glenn Beck’s show. I don’t agree with a lot of what he says. But i was curious to meet him. And my basic position in the world is that the most interesting thing you can do is to talk to someone who you think is different from you and try and find common ground. And what happened! We did. We actually had a great conversation. Unlike most of the people who interviewed me for David and Goliath, he had read the whole book and thought about it a lot. My lesson from the experience: If you never leave the small comfortable ideological circle that you belong to, you’ll never develop as a human being.

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Question:

What do you think is the most bat-shit crazy common human characteristic?

Malcolm Gladwell:

There are so many to choose from! How’s this. I do not understand the impulse that many people have of looking first for what they DISAGREE with in another person or idea, instead of looking first for what they might learn from. My second is that I don’t understand why we are so scared of changing our minds. What’s wrong with contradicting yourself? Why is it a bad thing to amend your previous opinions, when new facts are available? If a politician hasn’t flip-flopped at some point in his career, doesn’t that mean he’s brain dead?

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Question:

You write about Steve Jobs a lot and overall I would sum up your opinion of Jobs as rather quite negative. Is this wholly true and what sort of response have you received from people over this?

Malcolm Gladwell:

I have complicated thoughts about Steve Jobs. He fits very clearly into the idea I write about in David and Goliath about how entrepreneurs need to be “disagreeable”–that is, that in order to make something new and innovative in the world you need to be the kind of person who doesn’t care about what your peers think. Why? Because most of the greatest ideas are usually denounced by most of us as crazy in the beginning. Steve Jobs was a classic disagreeable entrepreneur. That makes him a difficult human being to be around. But were he not difficult, he would never have accomplished an iota of what he did!

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Question:

Your books have a really interesting critical thinking aspect to them. Do you have any idea what your next book/piece will be about?

Malcolm Gladwell:

I’m writing a bunch of pieces for the New Yorker right now. One is about crime–which has been a recurring theme in many of my books. It asks the question: is crime a means of economic mobility? That is–is it a way for outsiders to join the middle class? It clearly was once. The children and grandchildren of Mafia dons ended up going to law school and becoming doctors. But is that still the case? It’s kind of weird question, but it gets at something that we rarely consider, which is that there might be a downside to cracking down too successfully on organized criminal activity. The New Yorker is a great place to explore complicated questions like this. Plus, when my ideas are simply crazy, the editors there are smart enough to step in and save me from embarrassing myself!

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Question:

Sorry, I haven’t yet read your new book so you may already cover this, but I do have a question about college choice. Thirty years ago, I went to a snooty liberal arts college, paid lot of money, and in those 30 years, literally no one has cared about or even really asked where I went to college. Seems like I wasted my parents money and should have gone to the University of Minnesota for a lot less. Am I wrong?

Malcolm Gladwell:

You aren’t wrong. I have an entire chapter on college choice in David and Goliath. My point in that chapter is that prestige schools have costs: that the greater competition at a “better” school causes many capable people to think they aren’t good at what they love. But your point is equally valid. People going to college and in college vastly over-estimate the brand value of their educational institution. When I hire assistants, I don’t even ask them where they went to school. Who cares? By the time you’re twenty-five or thirty, does it matter anymore?

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Question:

There’s a lot of discussion here about college choices based off your book. What’s your opinion on the Thiel Fellowship over at MIT where Peter Thiel is giving away $200K to a student to leave school and start their own start-up? Do you think it’s wise for these students to take an investment in their future at the cost of a potentially valuable education?

Malcolm Gladwell:

Thiel’s idea is really interesting. But let’s be clear. He’s not saying that it is a good idea for MOST people not to go to college. He’s saying that if you are really really driven and ambitious and smart and already have a great business idea at the age of 18 or 19, college probably isn’t going to do you much good. And he’s right! But that really only applies to those students in the 99th percentile. This fits into one of my pet peeves, by the way. We spent an awful lot of time as a society fretting over the quality of educational opportunity at the top: gifted programs, elite universities. People actually freely give money to Harvard, which has an endowment of 50 billion! But surely if you are smart enough to get into Harvard, you are the person least in need of the benefits of a 50 billion dollar endowment. We need to spend a lot more attention on the 50 percentile. That’s where money can make a real difference.

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Question:

Has anyone ever told you that you remind them of Sideshow Bob?

Malcolm Gladwell:

Yes. I take it as a compliment!•

 

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“I’ve Always Been Very Interested In Ideas And Trying To Figure Things Out”

December 22, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel is an interesting guy, though I don’t agree with most of what he says. I’d love, for instance, to see him apply some of his know-how to coming up with solutions for poverty. Like a lot of people in Silicon Valley, he seems to exist on an island where such messy problems don’t register.

From a new Financial Times profile of Thiel by Richard Waters, in which the subject rails against government regulation, some of which might have come in handy on Wall Street during the aughts:

“He sounds equally uncomfortable discussing himself. The ‘ums’ multiply as he tries to explain why he threw in law and banking and came to Silicon Valley to pursue something far more world-changing. ‘There was this decision to move back to California and try something new and different,’ he says as though it were something that happened to someone else.

He is similarly vague when talking about the origins of his personal philosophy. ‘I’ve always been very interested in ideas and trying to figure things out.’ His undergraduate degree, from Stanford University, was in philosophy but his stance against the dominant political philosophy on many issues seems more visceral than intellectual. ‘I think that one of the most contrarian things one can do in our society is try to think for oneself,’ he says.

He only really regains his stride when talking about how technological ambition has gone from the world, leaving what he calls an ‘age of diminished expectations that has slowly seeped into the culture.’ Predictably, given his libertarian bent, much of this is traced back to regulation.

This is his explanation for why the computer industry (which inhabits ‘the world of bits’) has thrived while so many others (‘the world of atoms’) have not. ‘The world of bits has not been regulated and that’s where we’ve seen a lot of progress in the past 40 years, and the world of atoms has been regulated, and that’s why it’s been hard to get progress in areas like biotechnology and aviation and all sorts of material science areas.'”

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“We Wanted Flying Cars, Instead We Got 140 Characters”

January 22, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s arrogant for any particular group of humans at any moment to think that they are the beginning, that what came before them was merely prelude. But the same type of hubris may attend the thought that we’ve exhausted all intellectual possibility, that we are at the end. I accept that output and incomes have stagnated in America for most of the last four decades and that transformational technologies are hard to come by, but I don’t think we’ve reached an endgame of ingenuity. From the recent Economist cover story about the seeming diminishing returns of human effort:

“To those fortunate enough to benefit from the best that the world has to offer, the fact that it offers no more can disappoint. As Mr [Peter] Thiel and his colleagues at the Founders Fund, a venture-capital company, put it: ‘We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.’ A world where all can use Twitter but hardly any can commute by air is less impressive than the futures dreamed of in the past.

The first thing to point out about this appeal to experience and expectation is that the science fiction of the mid-20th century, important as it may have been to people who became entrepreneurs or economists with a taste for the big picture, constituted neither serious technological forecasting nor a binding commitment. It was a celebration through extrapolation of then current progress in speed, power and distance. For cars read flying cars; for battlecruisers read space cruisers.

Technological progress does not require all technologies to move forward in lock step, merely that some important technologies are always moving forward. Passenger aeroplanes have not improved much over the past 40 years in terms of their speed. Computers have sped up immeasurably. Unless you can show that planes matter more, to stress the stasis over the progress is simply a matter of taste.”

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“In Reality The Move Was Caused By A Bug”

December 10, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Blake Masters’ blog has ideas about and notes from Peter Thiel’s recent Stanford address, “The Future of Legal Technology.” From an exchange during the audience Q&A, which points out, among other things, that we can sometimes mistake error for genius:

“Question: 

What is your take on building machines that work just like the human brain?

Peter Thiel: 

If you could model the human brain perfectly, you can probably build a machine version of it. There are all sorts of questions about whether this is possible.

The alternative path, especially in the short term, is smart but not AI-smart computers, like chess computers. We didn’t model the human brain to create these systems. They crunch moves. They play differently and better than humans. But they use the same processes. So most AI that we’ll see, at least first, is likely to be soft AI that’s decidedly non-human.

Question: 

But chess computers aren’t even soft AI, right? They are all programmed. If we could just have enough time to crunch the moves and look at the code, we’d know what/s going on, right? So their moves are perfectly predictable. 

Peter Thiel: 

Theoretically, chess computers are predictable. In practice, they aren’t. Arguably it’s the same with humans. We’re all made of atoms. Per quantum mechanics and physics, all our behavior is theoretically predictable. That doesn’t mean you could ever really do it. 

Question: 

There’s the anecdote of Kasparov resigning when Deep Blue made a bizarre move that he fatalistically interpreted as a sign that the computer had worked dozens of moves ahead. In reality the move was caused by a bug. 

Peter Thiel: 

Well… I know Kasparov pretty well. There are a lot of things that he’d say happened there…” (Thanks Browser.)

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“The First Person To Live To 150 Years Has Probably Already Been Born”

December 2, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The Financial Times published its “Best Books of 2012“ list today. The contrarian libertarian Peter Thiel chose Sonia Arrison’s 100 Plus, a volume about the longevity boom that’s likely in our near future. The book asserts that “the first person to live to 150 years has probably already been born.” Thiel’s blurb:

“As our parents and grandparents live longer lives, they also contend with diseases and indignities. Many question whether we should want to live longer, to say nothing of for ever. In 100 Plus (Basic Books), Sonia Arrison answers definitively: longer lives and healthier lives are the same goal. The greatest threat to our quality of life in old age comes from complacent acceptance of the inevitability of decay; if you think something will break down anyway, why bother fixing it? Arrison demolishes every argument for fatalism.”

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“It’s Very Odd That It Hasn’t Translated Into Economic Well Being”

August 28, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

During a sparring match with Google’s Eric Schmidt, libertarian Peter Thiel restates his belief that technological progress has largely stalled during the last four decades:

“But I think that when you look at this question of how much technological progress has been happening, we get into all these complicated measurement issues. The one that I cite as the big data point is that if you look at the U.S. say in the last 40 years, 1973 to today, median wages have been stagnant. Maybe the mean wages have gone up maybe a small amount, not very much.  The 40 years before that, 1932 to 1972, they went up by a factor of 6.

So, if you looked at how people did from ’32 to ’72, you had a six-fold improvement, and it was matched by incredible technological progress. Cars got better. You had the aeronautics industry got started. You went from no planes to supersonic jets. You had the computers invented. You had all sorts of incredibly important dimensions in which progress took place.

And so I agree we’ve had certain narrow areas where there’s been significant progress, but it’s very odd that it hasn’t translated into economic well being. And this is not just a problem with capitalist countries, like the U.S.”

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“Billionaire Peter Thiel Would Like To Introduce You To The Other, Other White Meat”

August 16, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Peter Thiel, Libertarian and contrarian, has invested in research for 3-D printed meat. I’m a vegetarian, but I hope it works out (despite thinking it’s not so close to happening). Most studies estimate that meat production is responsible for close to 20% of our carbon footprint. From Clay Dillow at Popsci:

“Billionaire Peter Thiel would like to introduce you to the other, other white meat. The investor’s philanthropic Thiel Foundation’s Breakout Labs is offering up a six-figure grant (between $250,00 and $350,000, though representatives wouldn’t say exactly) to a Missouri-based startup called Modern Meadow that is flipping 3-D bio-printing technology originally aimed at the regenerative medicine market into a means to produce 3-D printed meat.”

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“Inequality Has Only Been Ended Through Communist Revolution, War Or Deflationary Economic Collapse”

February 14, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From an American Interest interview with Libertarian thinker Peter Thiel (who was also profiled by George Packer in the New Yorker last year):

“Francis Fukuyama: I’d like to begin by asking you about a point you made about there being certain liberal and conservative blind spots about America. What did you mean by that?

Peter Thiel: On the surface, one of the debates we have is that people on the Left, especially the Occupy Wall Street movement, focus on income and wealth inequality issues—the 99 percent versus the 1 percent. It’s evident that both forms of inequality have escalated at a very high rate. Probably from 1973 to today, they have gone up faster than they did in the 19th century. The rapid rise in inequality has been an issue that the Right has not been willing to engage. It tends either to say it’s not true or that it doesn’t matter. That’s a very strange blind spot. Obviously if you extrapolate an exponential function it can go a lot further. We’re now at an extreme comparable to 1913 or 1928; on a worldwide basis we’ve probably surpassed the 1913 highs and are closer to 1789 levels.

In the history of the modern world, inequality has only been ended through communist revolution, war or deflationary economic collapse. It’s a disturbing question which of these three is going to happen today, or if there’s a fourth way out. On the Right, the Tea Party argument has been about government corruption—not ethical violations necessarily, but inefficiency, that government can’t do anything right and wastes money. I believe that is true, and that this problem has gotten dramatically worse. There are ways that the government is working far less well than it used to. Just outside my office is the Golden Gate Bridge. It was built under FDR’s Administration in the 1930s in about three and a half years. They’re currently building an access highway on one of the tunnels that feeds into the bridge, and it will take at least six years to complete.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“Progress Is Neither Automatic Nor Mechanistic; It Is Rare”

October 6, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In “The End of the Future” at the National Review, Peter Thiel argues that technological progress is starting to run aground. The opening:

“Modern Western civilization stands on the twin plinths of science and technology. Taken together, these two interrelated domains reassure us that the 19th-century story of never-ending progress remains intact. Without them, the arguments that we are undergoing cultural decay — ranging from the collapse of art and literature after 1945 to the soft totalitarianism of political correctness in media and academia to the sordid worlds of reality television and popular entertainment — would gather far more force. Liberals often assert that science and technology remain essentially healthy; conservatives sometimes counter that these are false utopias; but the two sides of the culture wars silently agree that the accelerating development and application of the natural sciences continues apace.

Yet during the Great Recession, which began in 2008 and has no end in sight, these great expectations have been supplemented by a desperate necessity. We need high-paying jobs to avoid thinking about how to compete with China and India for low-paying jobs. We need rapid growth to meet the wishful expectations of our retirement plans and our runaway welfare states. We need science and technology to dig us out of our deep economic and financial hole, even though most of us cannot separate science from superstition or technology from magic. In our hearts and minds, we know that desperate optimism will not save us. Progress is neither automatic nor mechanistic; it is rare. Indeed, the unique history of the West proves the exception to the rule that most human beings through the millennia have existed in a naturally brutal, unchanging, and impoverished state. But there is no law that the exceptional rise of the West must continue. So we could do worse than to inquire into the widely held opinion that America is on the wrong track (and has been for some time), to wonder whether Progress is not doing as well as advertised, and perhaps to take exceptional measures to arrest and reverse any decline.” (Thanks Browser.)

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