Peter Thiel is one of the world’s most interesting people. He’s a billionaire who co-founded PayPal and was one of Facebook’s first investors. He’s a gay man who made a speech supporting Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention. He’s also on a quest for immortality and it was once rumored that he was injecting himself with the blood of young people to stop the aging process. This man’s vibe is so out there that people literally thought he was some kind of Silicon Valley vampire, like if Dracula moved to Palo Alto and started trying to fund startups so he could steal the youth of some Stanford computer science majors.
Anyway, the reason why I’m bringing him up is because today, we’re going to break down one of his favorite theories. Peter Thiel often talks about how there’s been a slowdown in technological innovation in the past few decades that’s affected every aspect of our society. Let’s talk about whether innovation is actually slowing down, what shows like Black Mirror tell us about how we view the world, and whether things are going to change in the future.
Is innovation slowing down?
Peter Thiel often talks about how disappointing advances in technology have been in recent decades. It might be hard to believe considering how much smartphones have changed the world, but he does have a good point.
Just think about how much innovation there was in the period from 1900- 1973. In the span of a couple of generations, you went from human beings mostly living on farms and achieving flight for the first time to actually putting a man on the moon. You saw most of the United States getting access to cars, electricity, and television. For most Americans, life went from extraordinarily shitty to pretty good (it was still pretty shitty if you were black).
Then suddenly, the pace of innovation started slowing down. In the last few decades, there’s been a lot of progress when it comes to software and the Internet. Still, it seems like we haven’t seen the kind of rapid growth that we saw in the early 20th century. After all, we went decades making very little progress when it came to space exploration.
Thiel said that one symptom of this slowdown in innovation is that Americans stop making bold bets about what the future was going to look like. Instead of actually investing in companies they believed were going to change the world, investors put money in passive index funds because “nobody can beat the market”. Having an optimistic and concrete idea of what the future was going to look like became a controversial opinion.
What science-fiction tells us
Peter Thiel also pointed out that science-fiction of the past showed that people used to have a very different vision of what the future would look like. Shows like Star Trek showed human beings exploring “The Final Frontier” of outer space and having cool adventures on different planets.
Human beings aren’t that good at predicting the future, we just kind of assume the future is going to be like what we’ve already experienced. The science-fiction of that era was a natural continuation of what was already happening. People saw how fast technology was advancing and probably thought that in a few decades, it was obvious that human beings were going to colonize Mars and venture even further into outer space.
That didn’t actually happen. Until SpaceX and Blue Origin came around, America’s space program was pretty much dead. Just like that guy from your hometown who moved to LA to be a rapper but moved back home 6 months ago to stay with his parents, our dreams were over. Except America wasn’t dreaming about getting on a song with G-Eazy. Instead, we stopped thinking about building a galactic republic and cut funding for NASA.
The change in our mindsets led to a change in our media. The most popular science-fiction show of our era is probably Black Mirror, which has a very negative view of technology. One of the show’s most well-known episodes, “Nosedive”, shows a world where people are ranked based on every social interaction that they have. If you cut someone off in traffic, they can give you a bad review and cause your overall rating to go down, which then hurts your opportunities at getting a great job and getting good housing.
The science-fiction that exists now is nothing like the science-fiction that existed back then (unless it’s a remake of a TV show or movie from that era). There’s no Captain Kirk hooking up with alien girls - instead, the future is just a natural continuation of our recent past. We didn’t get colonies on Mars, we just got Instagram and Snapchat. So it makes sense that modern science-fiction expects the technology of the future to be a stupid distraction that doesn’t actually have that much of a societal benefit.
Will the youth have a different attitude?
But hey, maybe Peter Thiel was too negative about the future of technology. People might have pessimistic in recent years, but maybe that was just old people who were sad that the pictures of their grandkids they posted on Facebook didn’t get as many likes as they thought they would. The writers for that Black Mirror episode were Michael Schur and Rashida Jones (Karen on The Office), who are both 45 years old. Maybe today’s youth have a different attitude.
Whether you think Tesla and Bitcoin are amazing innovations or just stupid, you have to admit that they’re both big ideas. Tesla isn’t just an electric vehicle company - eventually, their cars are supposed to have full self-driving capability, which might be the biggest game-changer in everyday transportation since the invention of the car itself. Bitcoin is a digital currency that makes it easier than ever for people all over the world to easily exchange goods and services with each other without the need for a central government. There’s no precedent for that in history.
While Boomer-run institutions shorted Tesla stock and laughed at Bitcoin for years, the youth have embraced both. Studies show that Tesla is Millennial’s favorite stock (it seems like Elon Musk must be aware of this to some extent, which is why he posts so many memes on Twitter). Meanwhile, a study by the financial adviser DeVere found that more than ⅔ of their Millennial clients had put their money in Bitcoin.
It’s a very different view from what older Americans have. Warren Buffett, who was for a long time the patron saint of American capitalism, has publicly said that Bitcoin is rat poison and that he wouldn’t invest in Tesla. Before we hit him with the “OK, Boomer”, we should note that it totally makes sense why he feels this way. It’s probably pretty hard for a guy who grew up in Great Depression Nebraska to comprehend how software systems can actually replace human drivers and how a digital currency can function without the backing of a central government.
On the other hand, it’s a lot easier for kids who grew up on the Internet to understand the technological potential here. It’s possible we’ve got a more optimistic view of the future because we don’t see software as something to be afraid of. The way that we invest proves it.
In conclusion
Even though it’s hard to match all the innovation that happened in the early 20th century, there’s lots of exciting stuff happening in technology right now. Tesla has released a self-driving beta to a small group of testers. In the crypto world, decentralized finance companies allow borrowers to get loans without the need for any central institution to get involved. Maybe Boomers aren’t excited about the future of tech, but I definitely am.
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