Our technology started favoring really large companies again, ending the era of innovation that was the late 19th and most of the 20th centuries. People just can't start from nothing and create something on the real world.
My naive theory is that we're well into the diminishing return stages of the S-curves of many of our technologies. We need major breakthroughs that can start new S-curves.
This feels intuitively correct to me, but I’d have trouble clearly explaining why. I’m interested to see where bio-tech goes in the next ten years though.
Growth as some kind of synonym for quantified (how?) technological progress: I'm unqualified to answer but I suspect it has something to do with reconciling macroeconomics and the ecological concept of net primary production.
Growth in terms of $ equivalent, adjusted for inflation: even for the mere world of atoms, this is untrue. Global GDP roughly dectupled from 1950 to 2008 and there's no way that's solely attributable to digital services.
Regulatory regimentation by centralized authorities. Just one of many examples: 5 percent of occupations required a license in 1950. Today, around 30 percent.
In every sector, professional and industry groups have become adept at locking down the market by manufacturing consent for regulatory restrictions. See what the Hotel Lobby did to stem the disruptive potential of Airbnb:
In the housing market, the effect of mounting regulatory regimentation resulted in the US having an estimated 36 percent less GDP growth between 1964 and 2009:
Bytes are just much more tractable, that's the root of the opportunity/problem.
And nothing happened in the world of atoms, it's just that the first somewhat useful things spawned by the world of bytes appeared in the mid-70s or so and, bytes being so much more tractable, capital and intellectual energy started flowing to that world in massive amounts.
This is Peter Thiel's thesis, and his answer is basically overregulation born of a cultural fear and pessimism of science bringing doom rather than progress that crept in slowly after WW2.
Not to be semantic, but you meant that this is his answer as to what the cause is? Or that’s his recommendation? I don’t really follow his stuff much but I’m guessing the first.
Btw, I have to be skeptical of the thesis here. Certainly the tech world is not full of “overregulation”. And I think it’s quite a stretch to say “cultural fear and pessimism of science bringing doom” given the broad glowing admiration of whatever the industry hype flavor of the month is. Not to mention the cult-like levels of belief and worship among the singularity peeps et al. While back down here on earth, many of us are scratching our heads about what we can possibly do in the face of climate change, a polarizing and surveillance enabled internet, millions of lines of technical debt that have little chance of keeping a persistent cyber threat at bay, and various other second order networks effects that we never seem to foresee in our first order money opportunities. Heck, I’ll throw in one more that certainly has been a cultural trope for a while but prob isn’t given enough airtime these days. If you take the recent advancements in drones (swarms especially), autonomous vehicles, near realtime satellite imagery and internet communications… and link that up with a current global geopolitical trendline that’s clearly not looking overly rosy… you’re racing directly at the Skynet-ish scenario cliche of autonomous machines that kill. I don’t think that swarms of cheap drones will allow us to keep the man-in-the-loop control given a global race to the bottom. And I say these things as an MBA and former army officer who would prob have laughed at these claims even 10 years ago.
Heck, I’ll go ad hominem here. Given that I have libertarian leanings myself, Thiel does seem to come across as someone who has made his money
in an industry gone south, but now simply doesn’t want to pay his taxes.
Apologies… that escalated kinda quickly. I actually started this diatribe intending to ask for clarification. And perhaps you were merely stating Thiel’s thesis and my ire is completely unjustified.
But apparently these days I have little patience for the weak sauce party lines that have been parroted for decades.
I apologize for not being clear enough. Thiel means that the IT world is unregulated, so that's where most of the progress has been. Various government agencies have saddled traditional tech (energy, medicine, electrical engineering, etc.) with intense regulation that has made it toxic for investment at all but the highest levels which is itself risk averse in the way that scientific breakthrough often needs, squeezes out scrappy tiny companies, and discourages people with revolutionary ideas from wanting to enter them, because safety and compliance concerns have run amok. And this is all borne of a cultural shift toward a fear that traditional scientific progress will kill us sooner that help us, maybe due to the Bomb and Cold War, but I forgot whether he precisely named an event.
What does that even mean? And what statistics or other evidence do you have for that view?
To take one perhaps naive interpretation:
For example, encyclopedias used to be sold as a collection of dozens of heavy volumes. Producing them was a lively business.
Nowadays, everyone gets free access to Wikipedia, which has more content than your shelf of Encyclopedia Britannica could ever hold and gets updated all the time.
When you bought Encyclopedia Britannica that showed up in gdp statistics. Wikipedia doesn't.
I'm a little curious, but haven't heard a word of what you're referring to. A quick search for 'atoms stalled' didn't result in anything that felt helpful.
I assume they mean "atoms" as in physical material. I think they're saying physical sciences are stalling out and computer science is responsible for most growth now. I'm not familiar with this term though, and disagree with the sentiment.
If that's true, why? What happened in the world of atoms?