Q & A 29:00 is tech dev cedeing ground to tech cos? is that a problem? A: problem of concentration, yes, but bigger problem is stagnation. late modernity… pin factory, adam smith… the promise is that you’ll be an every smaller cog in bigger machine… is that even true? we’re told that progress is being made. hyperspecialization with no accountability 31:15: communist china - fairly low tech, computers doing it but there are always people behind the communities. we can debate whether ai is conscious or intelligence, but the political question is how does it get used. maybe it’s merely evil. the tech tilts towards surveillance. and there’s always some totalitarian that can’t stand behind it. if people say crypto is libertarian, then why can’t we say ai is communist? pro acceleration, pro ai, pro tech… but misgivings 34:00 Q: supposedly individual satisfaction decreasing. why? A: i believe the econ numbers more than the self-serving story. narrow cone of progress around world of bits, not enough to meaningfully GDP/capita to take civ to next level. IANA luddite. argues science lockdown 40-50 years. luddites were right about several things but wrong at least in military context. self-destructive and parochial. 36:00 Q: tech driven by war? A: big part of it yea, and also a big part of what went wrong with it. we need future that’s not dystopian, not luddite, not doomsday, not totalitarian lockdown 37:16 why stagnation scary? downfall of US/west supremacy? A: yes bad, it will derange our societies if growth stops. zero sum racket. loser for every winner. not necessarily gets you to socialist distribution. kept going by inertia. don’t trust that its a stable outcome. 38:15 india? china? A: difference in developing countries is they have story of convergence, some program where they can copy and catch up. but even if they succeed and catch up, they will run into the same problems. i don’t wanna move to china. best case for china is they copy us. there are worse cases 39:22 how address stagnation? A, i always believe in human freedom, agency, invest in tech, strong conviction that these are not laws of nature. the cupboard has not run out. people are too scared of tech. trying to steel man. 40:36 is society pursuing wrong kinds of diversity? diversity is not merely hiring space cantina extras, people who look different and think alike. genuine diversity of thoughts, that’s not inimical to university, search for truth. we neither have true diversity nor true university. multicultural multiversity is a strange superposition of hyper-relativistic, hyper-nihilistic, hyper-totalitarian. you could say they’re logically contradictory, and there’s an analysis for why they go together, but that s very complicated. 42:20 problems of PC, decline of uni, is this accelerating? A: they’re not isolated from broader society, but what i didn’t connect 30years ago was that i thought it was narrow… i now see them as deeply connected with econ, sci, tech progress. win-win solutions, things don’t need to be malthusian. when 10 chem grads are fighting over 1 position, and one gets thrown out for saying something un-PC, that’s a relief to the remaining 9 44:00 free speech under threat? A: yes, pressure… what is behind it? even if all channels were open, pipes not clogged, what would actually be flowing through it? restrictions are bad but they’re actually distracting us from people not having much to say 45:20 PayPal q, did it achieve its goals? crypto? A: there was a hope, fantasy, that computers would decentralise things. cypherpunk, crypto-anarchist… tech has been centralising, big tech, big govt. its not intrinsic… big can mean strong or fat… crypto represent hope that things go back other way. if i had to bet, we’re at an extreme of centralisation rn 47:00 why back trump? do u regret? A: ask me again in 10 yrs. i would’ve been pro-brexit in the UK. deep conviction that everything is off-track, too stagnant. scream for help? did it help bring stagnation debates? jury’s still out. 48:45 why didn’t it work? A: its hard lol. it’s not all about talk. sophistry is belief in omnipotence of speech. i can tell myself that giving a talk here helps, but delusional if that’s all it takes 50:30 is funding in politics healthy? A: have a schizoid view, toxic, but it permeates everything. it’s shocking how little people spend on politics. its important. if individuals aren’t funding politicians…. i would prefer to do away with it altogether but that’s too utopian 52:30 political engagement… you could say that about investing in science, free speech, media platforms. becomes question about inequality generally. i don’t think inequality is our biggest problem, i think its stagnation. 53:30 its hard to change things. politics or anywhere else. i wish i could just spend $ and get a cure for cancer. translation function is shockingly weak. 55:00 some tech is exciting, some isn’t, stagnation isn’t exciting to anyone… how are you contributing to solving technology. A: my day job is VC, try to invest in biz that are successful + positive externalities for the world. its hard outside computers/IT. i also try talking about it. 56:40 free speech - do you regret anything you’ve written? does that influence? regret is ambiguous word. speaking is dangerous, writing more so. 1980s hoover institution, writing a book is more dangerous than having a child. if child turns out badly you can disown the child, you can’t disown anything you’ve written. i probably say more than i should, and less than i might have a mind to 58:09 given that the right dominates mainstream culture, why isn’t the right producing great art? what means? its hard! stale conservative argument that hollywood machine doesn’t allow dissenting central-left-zombie-straightjacket productions. when we frame these things too ideologically, you lose sight of how hard it is. is it a crazed left-wing racket? maybe. most most of everything is meh 1:00:30 what is your solution to climate? i tend not to agree with the model - marxist analysis of measuring input - interested in measuring output. govt spending. energy tech: want things cheaper, cleaner, and we’re not tending towards that (?). 95% luddite, 5% accelerations. keep thermostat down and wear as water. not enough excitement for working on thorium. 1:02:00 NHS is a state operation, how would you fix it? theory vs practice. dictator vs mayor. theory you’d rip it from the ground up, in practice you have to make it backward compatible. first step - what seems odd to outsider is stockholm syndrome re: NHS, people think its the most wonderful thing. first step is to understand it as an iatrogenic institution. schools make people dumb, nhs makes people sick. first step you have to get out of the SS. those are my intuitions. Q: market mechnisms = privatise further? A: some elements 1:06:20 advice? debates are important, but they’re also just the first step. take action

Is that visa from twitter... noice

@@focusedsam2421 yes

@@focusedsam2421 the avatar

Thanks a lot!

Reminds me of "I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve" in the Lord of the Rings.

@@byzantinegold he’s a Tolkien head, I’d bet he had that quote in mind

He really did not answer the question.

😊

😂100% I almost lost it😂😂 I would buy a Time Machine to fix this GOSH 😂😂😂😂😂

you have to be extra smart to be an inside trader

@@normalnick9693 He’s probably one of those guys, yeah. The ‘anti-anti anti-anti’ bugged me. That’s sophistry. That made me grimace while I watched it.

Lml

You are a loon.

Exactly, you can't write into code a bias for or against any race or identity political dimension -- the data set used to train the algo can contain a bias, but that depends on your training data.

@@oxfordageingnetwork-oxagen9267 Totally on point. In most ML courses these days, there is a compulsory PC course about political bias. What do they want us to do ? "Just be aware of it". Well in the vanishingly unlikely event that I'm ever asked to classify people as criminal/not criminal, then I'll probably have to take note. But even then I'd have to check to see which direction the bias was in - and then I'd be introducing my own bias. So I'm better off doing my job properly - analysing the data as presented, and not trying to become a political activist.

This idiocy is the sum total of what the high IQ morons call “ethics” in AI.

Sort of... it's not easy to parse what any of this means.

I could have told you that 25 years ago lol

Yep. Forced to take some bullshit communications class with my applied math degree. Litterally it was all blatant pseudo science. Felt like someone gave ChatGPT a prompt to spew out big words and make it sound smart. The math/science courses were the most easiest and straight forward. English required you to constantly suck off and meatride your TA's and Prof, and bend all your political views to their side or else they give you an C- for "not having a strong argument".

find his excellent essays such as 'Competition is for Losers' and 'Swift Blind Horseman?' orated here on the Skeptical Waves UKposts channel

@@lynnefox4892yes it is

Agreed!

Yes, it's good but their censorship is very bad on certain topics.

​@@davidjuliesmiththomas7983not as bad as TV

He's made the argument in the past that the apparent 'targeted' nature of Palantir is the lesser evil, where the 'dragnet everything' approach of states is far worse. Hard to know how true it is.

@@KyleDunnIt its a good argument. Id personally rather it be palantir than 100% internal CIA operations

Pure PR smokescreen, these oligarchs are not on our side 😂

@@hithere9393 and the CIA/NSA surveillance state is on our side? The public have NO idea what is going on in those agencies

@@seanpierre1338 We actually somewhat do now thanks to Assange. But to answer your question, no neither the CIA or Thiel are on our side. Surveillance is awful, whether it's government or corporate.

Could it be both, art and science? At the highest level. If done right.

@@Wild8Cat As long as "art" is included. The "science" part is rather boring, like efficient sorting algorithms ;-)

This is why we have Zoroastrianism.

Almost nothing has came of universities for decades. All the new tech is from companies, all in computing and a bit in electronics. Academics play the game of the number of citations, the funding of their labs and protection of their fiefdom.

@@alexforget this is just objectively wrong almost every single innovation that mattered has its origin in the universities. Crispr, neural networks,the internet,sequencing of the genome, euv lithography, etc. capitalists like theil build their businesses on the backs of publicly funded research without giving due credit and then go in front of the simpletons hyping up how the capitalist billionaires are ‘genius inventors’

@@alexforget A. Every major founder of a tech company created the company with his/her first group of friends at university. He literally talks about his time at Stanford at the beginning. This guy is as silver-spooned as it gets, his dad was rich as fuck and was given the best educational opportunities his whole life. B. University comes from the enlightenment ideal (the ideal our founding fathers fought for) that the average citizen should be educated to believe the same liberal ideals. So that when we vote, we know what we’re voting for. It comes from the Ancient Greek/Roman Liberalis Ars. Conclusion: This guy is a total fraud. Just because he’s rich through tech doesn’t mean he’s sociologist. He seems like an unhinged billionaire who, undoubtedly is very smart, gets his info from the world from 80s movies. Sorry, he’s just one guy and he should’ve talked about his area of expertise which is web design and business management, not all this other BS

Right about what? Everything? He doesn’t really offer any good analysis. He seems like a bullshitter to me.

@@mistadopeyy 100% he’s a bullshitter. He’s a guy who became extremely rich at 25 and hasn’t matured since then…

Pornography is at least legal sometimes, but gawker published sex tapes illegally. What do you even call such scum?

If you know that he wiped gawker off, then i certainly believe you know him well.

@@stillakzo never Palantir, Paypal and facebook. Oh or his Founders Fund

@@PovvoCarnt Yes, such great contributions to our world...

find his excellent essays such as 'Competition is for losers' and 'The Swift Blind Horseman?' orated here on the Skeptical Waves UKposts channel

The opposite, when he stuttered/stumbled, he'd touch the mic. He started the oscillation!

The secret of perpetual motion😅🤣

ukposts.info/have/v-deo/eqdidq-Nn4ClmHU.html

The solution to most of these problems is more market forces. Sadly I do think Yuri Bezmenov’s warning in the 80s to undermine our society has worked successfully. We are all talking about social justice exactly as he was warning instead of building things.

what is neoliberalism to you ? … in terms of economics is just as much identical to the conservative views; privatization of public infrastructure small gov, free markets … the only slight difference is with finance.

A.G.I Will be man's last invention

@@alexcipriani6003 neoliberalism believes much more strongly in monetarism.

@@prithvib8662 monetarism is just Chicago school sound money.

@@alexcipriani6003 state control hidden behind a pluralist curtain.

Absolutely. Wisdom cannot be gained the same way knowledge can. I read countless incredible books when I was a teen, but didn't truly understand those books until I went through certain things that taught me what those books were trying to convey. We are good at passing knowledge to next generations, but so far we have no way to do the same with wisdom. Wisdom still has to be obtained through practical experience.

It’s cause wisdom is a learned practice that must be exercised daily. Knowledge is just the recording of history and our experience (what stuff works/ doesn’t work)

Its a shame that we live our lives forward but only understand them backwards -Kierkegaard

the whole thing is a borderline incoherent string of talking points and tangents, without qualifying anything. The most fascinating thing is how many people are commenting under the video as if anything remotely meaningful was explored. Thiel is a classic libertarian, not liberal, in that he trots out whatever talking point serve his interests, and hand waves them when they don't.

He is a perfect James Bond supervillain

The algorithm isn't happy at the thought of it's possible demise, why would it promote this? Get off the tech and go into the world

Tough to find online. I had to seek it out myself.

Not everyone wants to give Mr Thiel a bl*wj*b.

I think it has to do with advert revenue. Not sure what company would advert for a Thiel speech... Perhaps privacy VPN? The market is small.

Theil isn't a significant character for people to search him out

He is a great investor but mediocre public intellectual. From the very beginning he is already saying shit that's wrong. The antonym of diversity is uniformity, not university. University derives from Universe which is all encompassing (diversity, uniformity and everything in-between).

@@auditoryproductions1831 k

@@deenzmartin6695 Just pointing out that the very first thing out of Peter's mouth was a cheeky comment that doesn't even make sense. The antonym to Diversity is obviously Uniformity. Equating the word "University" with the word Diversity is a category error. And to the extent you want to distill the morpheme between the two words (Diverse and Universe), they still aren't antonymically related. All of this would only be relevant to people who care about semantic precision of course which apparently you are not.

@@auditoryproductions1831 it was clearly a play on words and not meant literally, dolt.

@@deenzmartin6695 It makes me wonder how much more of his talk was a play on words and not meant literally.

i was thinking, why would you let the only few people not wearing suits ask questions? lmao

Thiel wouldn't be caught dead with you, pleb. Wise up. He is rich by stealing from we the people.

He seemed to be setting it off again on purpose (I reckon).

OCD. He couldn’t help himself.

He’s actually being fidgety, that’s all. Normal behavior for some people

@@chesstictacs3107 that fits with his enunciated speech which is a series of qualified decisions also.

I used to be a fan of libertarianism/decentralization. But for the past few months I've come to realize that we need some level of centralization. The first principle error that I have found in libertarianism is the claim that human beings have free will. I don't think we do. I no longer believe that decentralization is an unmitigated good. Think of it like an umbrella curve. Too much centralization is bad and so is too much decentralization. There are pitfalls on both ends. I don't think what Thiel or Balaji Srinivasan are advocating is gonna work. We have to recognize our tragic existence and live for all eternity constantly struggling to calibrate ourselves between both extremes.

Long winded way of saying: As long as human nature is what it is, we will never be able to have a decentralized society.

Not really. He’s just some rich guy who’s been a billionaire so long he seems like he’s good at everything. It’s obvious he’s a smart guy, but is he smart at everything… obviously not. I’m sure he could talk about business and web design stuff and I would’ve been totally lost. He should talk what he actually is an expert on. But instead he talked about stuff I actually know about and his broader social commentaries scream “I’ve had the exact same views from 18 and have never changed them because I was born rich then got significantly richer by 25 so why mature/improve myself?”

lol. That's why he supported Trump. He smart, surely. But he is also dishonest and ideologically driven.

Only to the ignorant.

Lol

"Real technocracy has never been tried!" - Peter Thiel. "Hooray Mr. Thiel!" - Sheep.

And in the end, him, nor you, nor anything will ultimately matter.. We will all die, the planet will die, and is like mankind will never existed. Including this video, this conversation, my reply too... Everything is pointless.. So enjoy what you have and stop worshipping false narratives and pseudo intellectuals like Peter...

As usual Peter sais a ton of shit that doesn't make sense. 1:20 The antonym of diversity is uniformity, not university. Equating the word "University" with the word Diversity is a category error. And to the extent you want to distill the morpheme between the two words (Diverse and Universe), they still aren't antonymically related. 14:25 Peter states technological progress has "stalled out". Many would argue technological progress not only hasn't stalled out, it has sped up. Peter himself mentions Computer Science and MRNA Vaccines as astounding feats. He also mentions String Theory multiple times as if that has been some major Stalling of human civilization over the past few decades. Particle Physics needs more expensive colliders, it really isn't any more conspiratorial or societally profound than that. 18:00 He asks why can't we have ticker tape parades for individuals? As far as I know ticker tape parades aren't illegal and to the extent they are it's because somebody has to clean all that shit up. Again, it really isn't that conspiratorial or profound. If Peter wants to lease a block from the city to throw a ticker tape parade for MRNA Vaccine's he has the freedom to do that whenever he wants. So what the fuck is he even talking about? 23:00 I have never heard of a Climate Alarmist complaining that we are innovating too quickly into renewable energy technology. The climate example is in contradiction to his thesis. Climate alarmist's state that the STATUS QUO (remaining on fossil fuels) is what will lead to volatile climate conditions. To solve this we need to INNOVATE off fossil fuels to renewables (solar, fusion, wind etc.). That is the complete opposite of the AI concern and his thesis as a whole (AI alarms about technological progression while climate alarms about the LACK of energy sector progression). Yeah this guy is a great investor but a lot of his public talks are ripe with nonsense.

@@auditoryproductions1831 totally agree, he is an idiot going after a non existent crisis... you can't force progress neither... and throwing money into all kinds of efforts indiscriminately hoping for quick progress or solutions to problems is irresponsible and wasteful...

@@FLAC2023 that is a description of his opponents.

i thought my weed just hit me too good

This is a better one: ukposts.info/have/v-deo/eqdidq-Nn4ClmHU.html

What does this word salad mean?

Only *slightly* more put-together.

People get frustrated when they can’t understand great people. Move on.

@@josephmelton4721 Melton by name,

@@williamglane lmao so true. all these "intellectuals" all spew nonsensical word salads.

Yawn

An anon YT troll, claiming he is in the USA. Wow! Like we haven't seen that before. lol How much does "Peter" pay you, stooge? You know don't you, that he wouldn't be caught dead with you unless there was a profit margin for him to benefit from?

but what about thiel?

I like that you chose to express your self; in, neohaiku!

Agreed KhelderB.

If that’s all you took from the hour he spent talking you didn’t listen very closely

@@gochasingwaterfalls9970 Thank you for the reply. It was a fascinating talk. I was merely attempting to be funny through oversimplification. All the best, John.

they did...

Yeah they were all terrible crybaby questions

"Thinkers" LOL

@@julianwarr7246 Ibram Kendi might be a thinker to you. I respect that!

We don't know enough about the AGI that will emerge. But the current systems are a red herring, with all the chit-chat and boasting. They are tools of unfair power, because of their capacity to overwhelm human perception a million times. Generative AI will take too long to become boring to the masses, and during that time it will have already ruined civilization. And then, there are known techniques to advance generative AI into AGI. There are very few details not completely figured out. One is the missing evolution. Without preloaded instincts, and preloaded culture by education, the human brain would not contribute to survival, but to the contrary.

But sounds pretty much like him.