A Contrarian View on Technological Progress
....Peter Thiel is a venture capitalist, entrepreneur and co-founder of PayPal. He hit the jackpot again when he gave Mark Zuckerberg the money to launch Facebook.
Thiel's half-million dollar Facebook investment is now worth more than $1 billion. His success and his smarts have made him a virtual rock star in Silicon Valley.
A Contrarian View
On a recent day at Stanford University, the lecture hall is full long before Thiel saunters in — light blue business suit, open collar, a Diet Coke in his hand, his eyes shifting nervously as he scans the crowd of mostly adoring undergraduates. He's come to argue a contrarian view: that technological progress is decelerating.
"Whether we look at transportation, energy, commodity production, food production, agro-tech, nanotechnology — that with the exception of computers, we've had tremendous slowdown," he says.
Thiel acknowledges that computers are getting faster, cheaper and better. But he says that's the virtual world of bits and bytes. In the real world of stuff, Thiel insists, there's been a slowdown.
"I believe we are in a world where innovation in stuff was outlawed. It was basically outlawed in the last 40 years — part of it was environmentalism, part of it was risk aversion," he says. "And all the engineering disciplines that had to do with stuff have basically been outlawed one by one."
In other words, he says government regulation stifles innovation and, without innovation, there is no economic growth.
Encouraging Entrepreneurs
In technology circles, Thiel's libertarian views are well known.
As a law student in the 1980s, Thiel co-founded the conservative Stanford Review, and he co-wrote a book critical of political correctness and multiculturalism on that campus.
In more recent years, he's argued that higher education is failing America and that some of the brightest students are probably better off not going to college at all.
That's why he created the 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowships — a program that gives promising young entrepreneurs $100,000 to skip college for two years and create their own business, as he explained on All Things Considered last year.
"I think anything that requires real global breakthroughs requires a degree of intensity and sustained effort that cannot be done part time, so it's something you have to do around the clock, and that doesn't compute with our existing educational system," Thiel said. "Had the people who started Facebook decided to stay at Harvard, they would not have been able to build the company, and by the time they graduated in 2006, that window probably would have come and gone."....
Source: npr.org |
