Peter Thiel
- Technology - critical factor to take civilization to the next level
- People think tech is not a good think: Hollywood movies
- Wages have been staggering for 40 years in US
- Challenge: how to measure acceleration and deceleration
- Number of employees working in computer industry
- Market cap of companies
- Intuition
- Any area outside computing, there has been deceleration since 1970
- Energy, biotechnology (number of patents decreased), cleantech, transportation, food
- Computer revolution, hope computers save us all
- Number of people employed in IT decelerated since 2000 (up 17%) compared to 1990s (up 100%)
- Market cap of tech companies from 2000 are less than Google+Amazon
- Computer era is at risk of decelerating in the next decade
- Computer 'rust belt' Dell, IBM, Cisco, HP, Oracle:: Microsoft, Apple are close to belt
- Thiel is optimist and Andreessen is pessimist
- Internet was initially underestimated, in late 90s it was overestimated
- Right now: there is not much hype as in the 90s, there is not much reality either based on market caps of companies from 2000s
- Low tech airport security which take transportation speeds back to 1960s
- 1750-1970 - tech acceleration; 1970-2010 tech deceleration
- In 1970 we were promised cure cancer
- Flying cars are not realistic
- Flying cars would not get off the ground today
- lack of innovation in energy
- What sector really matters - energy
- Energy input to the economy is very close proxy to GDP growth
- Twitter is good company, great job security
- California - center of innovation, the best state
- World of stuff is regulated and world of bits is not
- Mean wages have gone up 350% after inflation since 1943 to 1973, and 22% 1973-2013
- Median wages were flat
- 92 people 10B or more, 11 made in tech, in computers, 25 made in natural resources - technological failures
- What evidence would convince you that you are wrong?
- life expectancy
- cultural component
- number of scientists - not a good indicator of innovation
- scientific papers - turn out to be inaccurate
- imagination is important
- scientific movies in Hollywood should produce movies to show technology is good
- Star Trek movies
- Emerging markets should copy the technology from the developed world
- The best technology mostly comes from Silicon Valley
- We like to invest in first and best technologies
- Something of somewhere is nothing of nowhere
- 10-20 years, there will be innovations
- Room for innovation Israel, Canada, Scandinavia, Germany
- Japan copied but never overtook
Marc Andreessen
- Agrees exactly 50% with Thiel
- Usually disagrees with Bill Gates but agrees on flying cars which are energy inefficient
- Thiel - transportation decelerated - we are not going faster
- Three categories in changes in transportation
- Advancements in IT that make transportation less necessary
- Twitter - instant public global messaging for free
- Compared to telegraph era people this is a big deal
- Big deal for business, news, politics, cultural discovery
- Kids from early age get to interact with kids from other countries
- The whole basis of our civilization is communication
- Communication will be the catalyst to innovation in a lot of industries
- Communication is a platform of all innovations - let innovators communicate to each other
- New York Times had a reporter on internet - Peter Lewis who was hired to write negative things about internet
- Massive technical innovation in energy but as long as we substitute oil
- The price of solar energy prices dropped like a rock
- The cleantech has to have 2X price/performance to replace oil&gas and then they stall out because of the subsidy imbalance and people say "aha, it didn't work"
- Energy is 100% political problem not innovation problem
- Transportation
- vehicles themselves
- including Tesla, did not get to price/performance curves
- self-driving cars: Google and Mercedes Benz
- optimization
- generally smartphone based to optimize traffic - waze
- What evidence would convince you that you are wrong?
- number of scientists and engineers in the world - raw material of innovation
- 2.1 million natural science degrees in US in 2000
- 2.1 to 3.7 by 2008 worldwide
- number of researchers grew from 3.7-5.9 million in 1995-2007
- per capita GDP
- since 1871 grew from 300 to 45,000 in current dollars
- imagination
- number of scientific papers
- patents become anti indicator
- Number of public tech companies 8800-4100 in 1977-Present
- Regulatory competition - countries can compete in industries that are highly regulated or not allowed in US
