HACKER Q&A
📣 donnie12345

Do you agree with Peter Thiel's opinion that innovation has slowed down?


1) Era of Stagnation https://rootsofprogress.org/technological-stagnation#:~:text=Thiel%2C%20along%20with%20economists%20such,round%20number%2C%20since%20about%201970

2)https://mindmatters.ai/2021/10/peter-thiel-says-forget-the-hype-big-tech-is-slowing-down/

3) Weinstein says that R&D labs and Research Universities hire mostly want cheap labour in the form of Phd and Postdocs (mostly foreigners who can be exploited based on their Visa status). https://youtu.be/nM9f0W2KD5s

I take the opinion of Peter Thiel seriously because he is the member of powerful Beilderberg group.Clearly elites are not happy.

  👤 dennis_jeeves1 Accepted Answer ✓
Yes, I fully agree with him. There is a lot of distraction from the computer/AI industry which passes off as 'progress' or 'cutting edge'. Then there are other distractions like social causes: trans, gender, pronouns and other stuff.
👤 jonahbenton
His statements are a reflection of his mental model, not of reality. By many measures, change in the world- both in the natural world and in human-managed domains- is dramatically intensifying, and non-linear outcomes are everywhere. Even the term "innovation" may be outdated, as it captures the idea of a structural change within a fixed mental model. Everywhere now we are seeing evidence that mental models themselves are failing.
👤 karlello
Tom Peters (In Search of Excellence, 1982 w/co-author R. Waterman) in his subsequent late 80s & earlist 90s books mildly complained there seemed to be no next big thing on the horizon. Computers, office networking, and home computers had become embedded in society. What was next? BOOM! We're living in it.

Another love-to-hate techie (Micro$oft founder) said in "Business at the Speed of Thought" that we tend to overplay expectations of innovations for the first couple years, but underplay their impact over the following decade.

Screechy dial-up took a long time to become giga-bit transfers of the entirety of human thought. Now augmented in "AI."

What's next? The thousands of patents long sequestered away from the world in the name of national security. Innovations that've been perfected for decades and used _against_ the greater good.

👤 shrimp_emoji
Yes duuuuuude!

Imagine your computer in 2000.

Then your computer in 2010.

(Night and day difference. Otherworldly.)

Then your computer in 2020.

(Pretty much the same, maybe with more LEDs. Hell, maybe even slower core speeds.)

As someone used to charting the passage of time and culture on the exponential curve of tech, it feels like everything's frozen as tech has plateaued. A South Park episode from 10 years ago is 1080p, the same as an episode from today. You can't even tell it's from 10 years ago! A South Park episode from 2000, though, looks like ass, so it's obvious.

Parallel compute (GPUs) and memory capacity are still getting better, unlocking the shortcut-AI that is ML. Network speeds are also getting better, allowing us to stream and not own anything and be even more value extracted by companies' products. That's all neat.

👤 Simulacra
In my opinion as a coder, since the beginning of the pandemic developers have stopped striving for the next big thing. Everyone has dialed back the energy put into projects, no telling for certain, but even at the FANGs, there's no zeal anymore just the bare minimum.
👤 muzani
Most of those were in 2021.

"Everything that can be invented has been invented." (1899)

When some important figure thinks things have slowed down, they've almost always been proven wrong.

👤 notahacker
This feels like subject matter which deserves the already-a-cliche post ChatGPT's answer...
👤 ggm
Don't like him. Doesn't mean he can't be right. It bears thinking about.