No. I'd say he's quite wrong. AI breakthroughs, for instance, have come along so rapidly that the scientific establishment and society has been caught off guard. Notice they basically gloss over AI in this interview - it probably blindsided Thiel too.

What benefits did AI give you? Self-driving cars? Not yet. Ask the weather with Siri? Enjoying your ads on Facebook? Nothing really changed.

valar He was 100% right. 3D printing has died down. AI is in the same hype phase as 3D was

Chris Ducat that's nonsense. He's a realist. And he hates fake hype. And that's the bulk of what tech is today. 3D printing hype died soon after this video

joseph melton in the other video Thiel said that small companies pretend to be monopolies and monopolies pretend to be small. Innovation is either crushed by monopolies or shot dead by over-regulation.

yeah Kessler was right. Everybody I know uses 3D printing for everything nowadays....

Thiel is taking a very narrow and extremely rigid approach to technological advancement here, demanding innovation on a scale that is much harder than what we accomplished when we picked all the low-hanging fruit during the Industrial Revolution. I was recently the beneficiary of a mental health procedure that does not involve drugs and produced lasting changes in my well-being. It was only possible because we have finally attained the ability to map and model the human brain quite well via computing power. But developing the necessary computing power - and there were NO social or political impediments to this development - took decades. I'll take my much-improved outlook on life over a fucking 3-D printer any day.

Those are all good points and I was thinking of some of them myself during the interview. We have picked all the low-hanging fruit when it comes to healthcare, energy, transportation, etc. Thiel is not an engineer or a biologist (or a historian) and maybe doesn't understand the technical difficulties involved in further developments. Take computing vs. medicine for example. We built computers from the ground up, we know their ins and outs, we know everything about them. We did not build biological systems. The human body and especially the human brain have revealed themselves to be much more complex than we thought. The brain is a mass of 86 billion neurons with 100 trillion connections. The intractability of many mental health problems is a reflection of our difficulty in penetrating this complexity. Pharmaceutical industries are leaving mental health because their drugs are failing, not because the FDA is blocking them. It also meant that developing AI was going to turn out to be harder than we thought as well. IMO we have spent the last forty years building the foundation for understanding biology, and that has not translated into practical results yet - at least of the kind Thiel wants to see. I don't believe overzealous regulation was the reason we did not see the progress promised in Star Trek. Yet we are starting to see innovation that is a direct result of cracking the code of biological systems. The big news this week in medicine illustrates my point. It was about the first victim of paralysis to have regained function due to regenerated nerve tissue in his spine, transplanted from olfactory cells, the only part of the CNS that regenerates. It's the realization of a decades-long dream and was only possible because we spent those decades building a massive framework of computing power, 20 years of fMRIs to assemble a complex picture of the brain, and developing delicate microsurgical techniques. It was also a multinational collaboration between Poland and Britain. These same imaging techniques are enabling groundbreaking work on mental disorders involving such devices as 'brain caps', which are exactly what they sound like. The collaboration with Poland contributes to my point that Thiel is not a historian. The collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in at least a decade of lost innovation in the former Eastern Bloc as their universities were thrown into chaos and budgets vanished. Basic infrastructure even broke down in some places. All that brainpower went to waste or fled. Government regulation certainly didn't get in the way there! But we didn't have the nuclear war that everyone predicted would come if the USSR went down, which would have stifled innovation somewhat... Now that at least the former satellite states have recovered, we see their universities innovating again. Regarding universities, yes, I agree they are a mess. But one reason that reform is lagging is historical. For 800 years, until about 1980, a degree of ANY kind was an automatic ticket to a job. You got a degree, you were set for life, and for the first 700 years you were probably going to be wealthy for life too. In historical terms, the liberal arts have become a bad investment in the blink of an eye. Your other points like globalization and the power of OPEC are also well put. Global incomes have risen massively, even while local incomes in the First World have not. Doesn't that matter? OPEC *is* artificially controlling the price of oil. This is not a secret.

Nice to see there are others who are well read and understand the history of the actual events that have led to technological advances. Yes, the low hanging fruit has been picked, and much of the next level as well, which Theil seems not to notice, such as the blue led (which is also the white led). That was a major breakthrough. And while the 'puter is not, technically, new, the current crop of 'puters and marriage of 'puter and cell are dazzling. And what about the surge in online shopping...this is now huge in India via Flipkart. In fact I would say the computing-tech revolution in India is something new. there's really so much new happening I find this video totally out of step and the interviewer is out of step also - didn't know what questions to ask, what new tech to point out.

rh001YT Try fixing one.

321Collapse Fixing what?

liyah623 why is it that these men cannot simply say clearly that this country is being run by power hungry regulatory folks that feel satisfied with the power and money (wealth) that they simply made through laws that were crookitized in their favor so that they could simply hang on to it until it was time to pass it down to their off spring. Who in turn will seek more ways of crookitizing the system so God forbid, they would not need to work or think of the USA's we'll being. Or even use the ill gotten wealth to, at least invest in the progress of this country.

No one in this interview saw the very recent advances in AI coming, which I would say basically destroys Thiel's thesis. But he's probably already shifted the goalposts and is wondering why we all aren't immortal superhans on the Mars colony yet.

valar we would have alot more without government over reach