Tech progress stagnant since the 70s ?
Peter Thiel on The Joe Rogan Experience sharing some mind-blowing theories and ideas.
Thiel suggests that true technological progress has been stagnant since the 1970s.
If technological advancement has narrowed to primarily digital realms while progress in other areas has nearly halted.
Its also interesting to notice that wages -in real terms- have also stagnated since the 70s for everyone but the highest earners.
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Certainly the the story I I would generally tell for the last 50 years since the 1970s, early 70s is that we've been not absolute stagnation within an area of relative stagnation where there has been. Very limited progress in the world of atoms, the world of physical things. And there has been a lot of progress in the world of bits, information, computers, Internet, mobile Internet. You know, now, now, AI, what are you referring to when you say though the world of physical things? You know it's any. It's well, if, if we had defined technology, if we were sitting here in 1967, the year we were born, and we had a discussion about technology, what technology would have meant would It would have meant computers. It would have also meant rockets. It would mean supersonic airplanes. It would have meant new medicines. It would have meant the green revolution in agriculture may be underwater cities, you know? It, it sort of had and IT, because technology simply gets defined as that which is changing, that which is progressing. And so there's progress on all these fronts. Today. Last 20 years, when you talk about technology, you're normally just talking about information technology. Technology has been reduced to meaning computers. And that tells you that the structure of progress has been weird. There's been this narrow cone of very intense progress around the world of bits, around the world of computers and then all the other areas. Have been relatively stagnant. We're not moving any faster. You know, the Concorde got decommissioned in 2003 or whatever. And then with all the low tech airport security measures, it takes even longer to fly to get through all, all of them from, from, from one city to the next. You know, the highways have gone backwards because they're more traffic jams. We haven't figured out ways around those. So they're sort of we're literally moving slower than we were 40 or 50 years ago. And and then yeah. And that's that's sort of the that's sort of the. And then, you know, the and then of course, there's also a sense in which these, the screens and the devices, you know, have have this effect distracting us from this. So, you know. When you're, you know, writing 100 year old subway in New York City and you're looking at your iPhone. You can you can look at wow, this is this cool new gadget, but you're also being distracted from the fact that you're lived environment hasn't changed, you know, in 100 years.
