Peter Thiel on 'Anti-Anti-Anti-Anti Classical Liberalism' | Oxford Union

foreign [Music] members honored guests good evening and welcome to the first event of Hillary term 2023 and the first event of the 200th anniversary year of the Oxford Union 200 years ago a group of students met in a small room in Christchurch determined to have discussion free from the restrictions of the university and two centuries later we proudly continue this tradition by providing our members across the globe with opportunities to question their most fundamentally held beliefs and by standing up for free speech and expression it brings me great pleasure to welcome Mr Peter Thiel to give the inaugural address of the Oxford Union's bicentenary Year Mr teal is an American Technology entrepreneur and investor he co-founded PayPal and palantir made the first outside investment in Facebook and has funded companies like LinkedIn and Yelp Mr teal also founded the teal Foundation which works to advance technological progress and long-term thinking via funding non-profit Research into artificial intelligence life extension and sea setting ladies and Gentlemen please join me in welcoming Mr Peter Thiel [Applause] well Charlie thank you so much for that terrific introduction and a lot of different things to to cover I'm always reminded of a question a colleague of mine like to to ask what is the antonym of diversity what word is the single antonym of diversity and University and uh and I think uh it is such a great honor and privilege here to uh to speak here at the Oxford Union where for 200 years uh people have been uh thinking about the crisis of the university the crisis of the West the crisis of Classical liberalism there's there are elements of this that are of course Timeless and eternal and then of course there are parts of it that are always you know there's always sort of a kaleidoscopic uh newness uh and uh effervescence to to it as well you know I I uh I framed my my talk as anti-anti anti-anti-classical liberalism so you have a double negative that's kind of a positive a quadruple negative is also kind of a positive and and uh if you uh and I'm going to try to sort of outline uh as I see the uh the argument as well as the best arguments against the university the Classical liberalism um you know sort of the free western world and uh and at the end of the four negatives I will still come down um on something that I think is is quite close to uh to uh the values that uh would have animated the Oxford Union uh already 200 years ago uh now I you know I I'll start with sort of a little bit of a historical anecdote you know I was I was a student at Stanford University in the late 80s early 90s we had a lot of these uh crazy culture wars uh you know Wars about the nature of the University one of the ones where I sort of first came in some ways to sort of political awareness was an intense debate at Stanford about the Western Canon uh a course called Western cultures that required fresh freshman course in some ways was a debate about the course but of course it was also debate about the whole Western Civilization it represented there was a famous uh um protest that uh Jesse Jackson LED at Stanford uh hey hey ho ho Western cultures got to go was it sort of referendum on the course and on and on our entire civilization and and I started one of these sort of independent conservative libertarian alternative newspapers we saw we should like investigated we needed to sort of describe the new curriculum we need to figure out ways to denounce the new curriculum and uh in the the 88-89 term one of the new classes called a sort of innovative new class was Europe and the Americas which was not really a non-western but more an anti-western uh sort of polemic and you had sort of all these different authors and I thought you know I should go to the bookstore and just read through the books and find people to illustrate uh the the sort of parochiality and tendentiousness of of this uh of this new curriculum and I I I came on one book that somehow was almost too good to be true it was sort of summarized um like in onion episode everything that was you know stereotype of everything was ridiculous about the new curriculum it was a a story of I rigobert to mention she was a Guatemalan native and she's sort of been victimized by every Vector of Oppression imaginable she was you know she was a she's a poor she was a peasant she was an Indian she was an orphan and and then you have sort of all and sort of she sort of achieved some sort of revolutionary communist Consciousness in the course of this uh of this uh polemic book you know she renounces marriage and motherhood she makes plans for the May Day Parade these are sort of the chapter titles of the book um you know I wrote it up and as so many of these debates in campus it's something I was on some little very narrow issue that somehow kicked off a broader discussion you know as a 19 year old Junior at Stanford managed to uh get get the get this reprint in the Wall Street Journal uh when uh you know when uh some of the conservatives wrote books about uh about uh the insanities of the universities in the late 80s early 90s uh uh one of the uh conservative people the Stanford chapter was entitled travels with rigoberta and so sort of it I I sort of succeeded in turning her into an icon for for this thing and then uh you know then sort of four years uh four years later uh fall of 1992 I'm not clerking for for a judge and driving to work in Atlanta Georgia and uh on the radio it's uh you know we just have an announcement we have someone who's just been selected for the Nobel Peace Prize someone nobody's ever heard of it's rigoberto menshu and uh and I sort of realized at that moment that uh yeah I thought I was engaged in some kind of cosmic battle between the forces of Good and Evil and actually I had just been a two-bit actor in some left-wing drama where I had completed her victimization and uh and then you know I I was the proximate cause of her getting her Nobel Peace Prize but but I think I was I was the butt for cause but for me she would not have would not have gotten it and uh and this is sort of the odd feature of so many of these uh these super intense debates where uh you sort of Wonder you know what is what is it that is really going on what is it that is uh that is perhaps uh really at stake that that we should be uh talking about in instead and um and so if I look back you know on the debates at Stanford the time and some extent these debates I think they've been fought for you know for decades or centuries um if we took not the tendentious left wing but let's say the sort of bureaucratic University perspective or the establishment perspective uh what they what they would have said in the 1980s would I think they still in many cases would say today what they would have said in the 19th centuries yeah you have you have all these you know flaky debates in the Humanities about reading Shakespeare and reading these books but you know we're doing something much more important the university is about progress progress of knowledge and it's especially true in the Science and Technology that's where progress is happening and um and we can have these these side debates about Shakespeare rigor bear to Menchu but we're working on string theory and Science and these sort of um the relief of man's estate the Roger Bacon Francis Sir Francis Bacon that whole that whole thing that's what the university is uh is really all about and I think this this would have been the the technocratic sort of Defense Stanford have given of itself in the 80s and 90s uh that uh that that yes the the progress is continuing it's continuing uh very rapidly and this is what's What's um what is sort of uh what is going on in our society and that's that's what's fundamentally good it's the Manhattan Project it is the Apollo space program it is um it is the progress of humanity and uh and as long as we're doing that you shouldn't you know you can complain about these side shows but it doesn't really matter and so I think one of the one of the debates that I came to uh one of the perspectives I came to start to wonder about though um in the late 90s 2000s was um you know yeah we have so many of these culture wars are about these issues that everybody can understand these books or you know Shakespeare versus rigor bear to mention or something like this but um perhaps things are um just as unhealthy in The Sciences in in all these other disciplines that are after all far more narrowly the domains of experts you know um you know you have a sense that if you substitute rigor bear dementia for Shakespeare something weird is going on if only 100 people in the world understand string theory and you have this sort of narrow group of Guardians guarding themselves shouldn't the a priori assumption be that string theory is actually more corrupt than the humanities or the Sciences are in many ways more corrupt in the humanities and uh and one of the one of the early people uh who uh who drew my attentions was a professor at Stanford Bob Laughlin who uh um got a Nobel Prize in physics in the late 1990s he sort of was a somewhat difficult uh person uh a friend of mine was getting his uh doing his PhD work with with Laughlin and uh but he had the Supreme delusion that now that he had a Nobel Prize in physics he had complete academic freedom and he would be allowed to investigate and talk about anything he wanted to and there are of course a lot of controversial topics in The Sciences we could imagine you could question climate change you could talk about you know intelligence and genetics you would talk about uh you could talk about um you'd question Darwinism I mean there's all sorts of things that are quite Taboo in The Sciences but he picked an area that was far worse far more dangerous than any of those uh and he was convinced that most of the scientists even at a place like Stanford University were engaged in borderline fraudulent research they were stealing money from the taxpayers um and uh and it needed to be investigated it needed to be stopped and uh you know I I don't even sort of probably don't even need to tell you too much about how that movie ended it sort of ended quite badly uh he got defunded his graduate students couldn't get phds anymore and uh and the kind of hermeneutic Suspicion I always have is that you know I wouldn't say it's automatically the case that if something is taboo that it must be perfectly 100 accurate but uh my suspicion is that if something is this taboo this forbidden you have to at least ask some some sorts of questions and and the uh you know the general thesis that I've been articulating and different for a for close to two decades is that um there is something about science and technology that's not progressing as quickly the specialization means that it's very hard to evaluate uh you have all these different uh sub-specialists that uh propagandize about themselves the cancer researchers tell us they're going to occur cancer in five years and they've been telling us that for 50 years and the string theorists say they're the smartest people in the world they know everything about physics and we're about to have quantum computers and and on and on Down the Line and uh and yet um in in many ways we seem to have been kind of stuck uh you know the uh if you if you if I go back to when I was an undergraduate Stanford almost all the engineering fields that one could have gone into would have been mistakes it was a mistake to go into aeroaster engineering it was a mistake to go into nuclear engineering I think people already understood that by the 80s these these fields were stuck they were outlawed they weren't going to advance you weren't going to make any progress in mechanical engineering chemical engineering all these things were bad ideas the one that still held up pretty well in the in the late 80s early 90s another decade was electrical engineering semiconductors and then probably you know the one the one very silly field that actually did kind of work was computer science and I always think that the that when you have fields that include science that's always a tell that you have an inferiority complex because uh you don't need to call it physical science or chemical Sciences physics or chemistry uh but it's computer science like political science or climate science it's sort of a like a deep sense of inferiority and yet these people who were um who had like were had relatively uh bad math genes and went into this uh this sort of uh very very degenerate Fields compute called computer science this was the one thing that kind of worked the last 30 35 years and we had you know some sort of progress around this world of bits um computers internet mobile internet you know maybe I'll uh I really dislike that word uh and they're probably ways that even that progress has has somewhat um stalled out or become less utopian in the in the last decade but uh but for the last uh 40 or 50 years outside the world of bits it has been a story of General stagnation uh and then not just in the fields not just in terms of you know no big breakthroughs but of course also you know if we try to measure it economically we have this very odd situation in the UK or the U.S where for the first time in decades and centuries Beyond count the younger generation has lower economic expectations than their parents and uh this is this just very oddly doesn't fit with the sort of kurzweilian pan glossian accelerationism the singularities near and all you need to do is sit back and eat some popcorn and watch the movie The Future unfolds so so there's something about uh about the uh the the stagnation problem that uh that runs um one's quite deep seems to be quite quite multi-faceted I I sort of tend to date it back to something like the early 70s the oil shocks the inflation a time when you know money no longer grew on trees because we didn't have this incredible Tailwind of scientific and technological progress that was just advancing on its own so um so yeah to recap where we are on the argument the uh the rebuttal to the rebuttal The Classical liberalism the rebels of The Classical liberalism is just we don't need to do the humanities we don't need to ask questions about the university about the whole we can just we can just focus we can just tell people to um to organize disciplined and work on Sciences sort of like the way the New York Times wrote about the the Manhattan Project in 1945 it's sort of paraphrasing it but sort of you know there are these sort of free market uh libertarian type people who think that uh you know uh who didn't believe that science should be run by the military but um you know they've hopefully they're gonna be quiet now because the military was able to when they organized all these scientists was able to invent this device a nuclear bomb in three and a half short years which maybe if you left the prima donna scientists through their own devices would have taken 50 years or something like that um but anyway New York Times doesn't write articles op-eds like that anymore and uh and so there was yeah but there was sort of a certain non-classically liberal organization regimentation that uh you know may accelerate may have accelerated things for a while but uh that now is completely exhausted and uh and so instead of getting into this debate about rigor bear dementia Shakespeare or string theory um the rebuttal to the rebuttal is they're not doing String Theory they're not doing science it is it is all stalled out beyond belief and uh and this is as I said this is sort of the the uh the main frame of this debate that I've been I've been giving for uh argument that I've been making for something like the last uh two decades now one of the questions I always get asked in this context is well why why did it stall out what what happened what went what went wrong and then my sort of sort of slightly politically correct answer was always well you know questions that start with why are always over determined they're hard to answer it's probably determined by a whole bunch of different things and you know you can say um there's too much regulation you know the FDA regulates biotech too much so it's hard to do things in biotech you know if you have um you know if you if you had as little regulation as you have for video games for new uh drugs maybe we'd have more drugs there's so there are ways you can sort of blame education or government funding um but the um but this the single answer that I've I've come to believe as to why why it is stalled out um and this is and I believe this has now actually become the the the argument um on the part of the universities on the part of our zombie Central left establishment is something like science and technology are just too dangerous and so what what um what looks like it's a bug that things are no longer progressing is actually a feature and we should be really really happy that it's not progressing because um Science and Technology are this giant trap that humanity is building for itself and this is this is sort of what gets articulated in all sorts of different versions existential risks you know there's all these ways that that uh that this uh this this um these things sort of bacterium probably and again you know these timelines overlap in different ways probably the the original version of this was already involved um nuclear power of nuclear weapons thermonuclear weapons the fear of fear of nuclear war didn't probably hit people right away in 1945 but uh but by the time you get to um you know by the time you get to the late 60s early 70s you get someone like Charles Manson uh the crazed person on LSD goes around killing everybody in Los Angeles you know if you ask what did he see what did he see on his psychedelic drugs um well he figured out the world was coming to an end and therefore you could be like uh Russ kolnikov and Dostoyevsky and not everything was permitted in in this crazy world you could do anything you anything you could do to stop science to um to to slow it down because uh it was just accelerating in this in this catastrophic way and I think something like this is is true of so many of these different areas that if we really think about it they have sort of this this dangerous there is some sort of dangerous dual use component that you know that the space program was was you know had the Dual use thing of just uh delivering icbms more quickly halfway around the planet or um or or sort of the rhetorical question I'd like to ask in in an American context is you know why can't we have ticker tape parades for individuals why can't we celebrate individuals anymore and sort of a ticker tape parade in New York and um and why can't let's pick left-wing individuals individuals who fit the left-wing narrative why can't we have a ticker tape parade for the you know one or two the key scientists who developed the MRNA vaccine we're told this is this fantastic scientific technological breakthrough why can't we celebrate this and um and my sort of cultural thesis is that uh it is immediately adjacent in people's minds to this great existential fear because the MRNA vaccines somehow remind us of this thing going on in the Wuhan lab that was called I had this orwellian term gain of function research which sounds sort of like a bioweapons program in Disguise and if you can and so yes if you can um if you can manipulate DNA you can come up with these fantastic mRNA vaccines does that also mean that it's immediately adjacent to these uh to these sort of terrific terrific destructive weapons probably um you know probably the uh the area the existential risk area that's uh you know that's the most um that's the most uh um inside attack if you say when again Tech is always a strange word where it used to mean all these areas and it just came to me in I.T computers but within computers probably the the futuristic narrative is always around AI artificial intelligence artificial general intelligence all these things and 20 years ago when um I started getting involved in a lot of these things the narrative was still it was still generally a positive utopian it was it was people thought you know it's kind of a dangerous technology you know if you build uh this uh this this computer that's as smart or smarter than any human being in the world it's kind of dangerous but we're gonna have to work really hard to make sure it's friendly that it's aligned with humans and uh and and it was still sort of Circa 2003 whatever misgivings people might have had about biotech or you know or um Rockets or nuclear power they did not yet have about Ai and the AI narrative was still a generally positive utopian one and uh and there's sort of a strange way where this has completely flipped over the last um over the last decade or so I was I was involved a thing called The Singularity Institute which pushed a sort of accelerationist utopian technology we we're progressing we need to progress faster we need to of course be a little bit careful and I sort of remember thinking to myself by 2015 I reconnected so many people and it didn't feel like they were really pushing the the AI thing as fast as before and it sort of devolved into you know some kind of Escapist burning man camp um and you sort of got the sense that uh it had shifted from transhumanism to Luddite something Luddite where no actually we want to slow this down it feels kind of dangerous it's kind of it's kind of a bad it's kind of a bad thing on on net and this this finally this the suspicion I think was finally confirmed you can look this up on the Internet uh I'm gonna read this it's from April 2022 less than a year ago Eliezer udkowski who's one of the sort of thought leaders of the sort of futurist um AI [Music] um um and the it's a a post from the machine intelligence Research Institute and it's announcing a new death With Dignity strategy and so uh and so uh the the short version of this it's obvious at this point that Humanity isn't going to solve the alignment problem how to get the AI aligned with humans or even try very hard or even go out with much of a fight since Revival is unattainable we should shift the focus our efforts to helping Humanity die with slightly more dignity uh again I want to underscore you don't deserve to die with a lot of dignity because you're not going to try very hard or even go out with much of a fight um but uh but it is it is it is an extraordinary it's an extraordinary way that the uh the context is shifted um you know I I'm probably and of course you know we can come up with other ones probably the uh the sort of the most uh mass-market version of the sort of catastrophic existential risk is the uh the climate change um the climate change one where um you know I I can just uh you know reference uh probably reference Greta and the sort of autistic Children's Crusade and um and uh and is again this is uh this is how how the world is is going to end this sort of runaway technology and of course you know um all these things I don't want to minimize don't want to say they're they're not real but it's striking how none of the solutions involve more technology so the solution to climate change is not you know Fusion reactors the solution to you know nuclear um nuclear um weapons is not better anti-ballistic missile systems this you know the solution um the solution to AI you know uh the solution to biotech is not accelerating the research even faster it is just somehow somehow stopping it all together and uh and and you know one is tempted to say that if anything most of these people are are insufficiently apocalyptic you know you want you want to you want to get Greta and try to actually want to talk to her but but you want to get someone like Rada and tell her you know wow you are a very complacent non apocalyptic person because you're only worried about this climate change thing and we also have this nuclear weapons thing that has made people go crazy for 70 years already and we have we have the AGI that's going to kill everybody at the singularity and we have you know and we have uh we have the Wuhan lab which you don't seem to be worried about at all and the bio weapons and uh we have we have this happening on on so many so many different dimensions and this is roughly where I think the Zeitgeist is in in 2020 to 2023 um the sort of central left zombie Zeitgeist as articulated by by the universities it is it is we're not doing science we're proud that we're not doing science we're proud that we're stopping science we're proud that it um it is um it has been slowed down as much as possible um and you know maybe maybe a little bit unfair to pick pick on him but I I um I I'm reference an Oxford Professor Nick Bostrom who um is is at least smart enough to know that all these things add up and that these are all problems and um that's not just sort of one or the other and um and I think of him as sort of a mouthpiece of the Zeitgeist um and he sort of wrote this paper back in 2019 so this is pre-covered before everyone went totally insane with covet so it doesn't have that excuse but cult the vulnerable World hypothesis sort of and it outlines all these different existential risks climate change nuclear weapons um runaway nanotechnology the robots killing everybody the AI killing everybody runaway bio weapons etc etc and and there are four things that must be done to stabilize the world um uh again it's written in the most boring language possible it's just channeling Zeitgeist I'm out number one restrict technological development number two ensure that there does not exist a large population of actors representing a wide and recognizably human distribution of motives I believe that's diversity but um um but then he goes on to say that one and two sort of don't quite happen on their own and therefore you need number three establish a extremely effective preventive policing and number four you need to establish effective Global governance and and I he does not quite use the word totalitarian but it is basically um you know the um the solution the solution to the sort of um existential uh risks in our vulnerable world is to have a is to have a one world totalitarian state and um and this gets me to my uh my concluding point the um the anti-anti anti-anti classical liberal argument is that uh if we are going to enumerate all these existential risks and we have to talk about them we have to discuss them we have to think about them we should not hide under the Rock and pretend these things are not real but we have to make the list complete and I would I would include as a very very serious existential risk um you know the risk if you end up with a one world totalitarian state that also counts as an existential risk and it seems to me that we shouldn't um we shouldn't uh we shouldn't short be too short-sighted about that one we uh we should we should always fight that that's something that always needs to be stopped you know um you know I I should I should uh not need to remind you that in the uh you know in the sort of quasi-methological New Testament account the the slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety and um and uh and that there is there is you know we're we're told that um there's nothing worse than Armageddon but perhaps there is perhaps we should fear the Antichrist perhaps we should fear the One World totalitarian state uh more than Armageddon and uh perhaps we should uh we should stick with uh some of the tried and true um ideas of classicalism this this organization and this institution has been supporting for 200 years and keep going for another another 200. thank you very much [Applause] um before I hand over to questions from our audience I'll talk about a few questions for you about the content of your speech you'll start where you've ended your speech on the threat of authoritarian government uh as a as a challenge or solution to the problems of Technology um but you also enumerated the problems of specialized technological progress which is something that has impacted public ability to engage in technology for decades like 40 years ago most people would have been able to understand why their car was broken and potentially fix it themselves whereas now if a car breaks it's most likely due to a software or electrical problem that no one will be able to deal with is technological development rather than handing over power to an authoritarian State Lord instead ever seeding ground to authoritarian technological companies well there are all sorts of um dimensions of this um I I tend to I still uh tend to think the problem of the state is much bigger than the problem of big tech companies or if there is a problem with big tech companies it is just that they are very efficient vehicles for state power and that they will you know very um very effectively uh be used uh be used by the state um and uh yes there's there's a problem with um you know there's probably a problem with you know some kind of specialization there's a problem with um you know uh with the problems with concentration um but I I I keep coming back to I think the bigger problem is one of just stagnation itself and uh and you know the um you know certainly stagnation specialization is this very deep problem of late modernity it's like the pin Factory in Adam Smith where you're 100 different people working on different parts of the pen and this doesn't sound um it doesn't sound very charismatic it might be efficient but but sort of if you tell people you're a small Cog in a big machine and the future is going to become an Ever smaller Cog in an Ever bigger machine that's uh that's profoundly uncharismatic and there are problems with that but uh but the question I just keep coming back to is is that even true and you know we're told the story of specialization we're told that all these narrow experts are making breathtaking progress and uh I I worry that uh the problem of hyper specialization is just there's no accountability and it all just has become a crazed rocket leading on from this question about the influence and Authority that can be held by companies a result of this very interested in fund lots of research to do with article artificial intelligence coding and algorithms all algorithms aren't naturally written by individuals who have biases and beliefs of their own disproportionately they are white men from the Northern Hemisphere as these algorithms continue to play more and more of an influence in our lives looking forward 50 or 100 years do you think that these biases and beliefs will entrench themselves in the very fabric of our society well it's uh man the the AI topic is obviously a super a super a super broad one the um what I what I would um what I would say is I I don't know if we actually need to get to the a super futuristic versions of AI for it to be um for it to be problematic where it's um this super intelligent computer or or or something like that uh the the the the version of it that I think is the most real and the most problematic is something like what you see in in communist China where it's it's um it's fairly low-tech but it is just this pervasive surveillance um you know it's we can say it's the computers that are doing it but it's always some people behind the computers there's always a a political question of sorts and uh and the you know the the rhetorical frame that I've come up with is you know you could um we'd have we have all sorts of debates whether AI is conscious or whether it's intelligent or super intelligent um but uh but if we avoid the political question of how it gets used in in places like China um you know maybe it's merely evil and maybe something can be merely evil it's not conscious it's not even intelligent it's merely evil and that's but I I would say yeah the the problem is is is China far more than in the West so the evilness is the individuals behind it or the technology itself it's it's the technology tilts it tilts towards surveillance um and then it's always uh yeah there's always some totalitarian uh in a set of um a Class party that can that can stand behind it um you know I don't think there's it's I don't think it's absolutely intrinsic to the technology but the the line I've used is that you know if people say that uh crypto is libertarian which I might not even fully believe anymore but if you were to say that crypto is libertarian then why can't we say that AI is is communist it's not completely inherent in it but it's a it's a certain tendency in it and uh and while I am I am pro-acceleration I'm Pro-Tech I'm even Pro AI um it is probably the one technology that I have the most misgivings about I'll have a few questions about cryptocurrency and currency in general later but an argument perhaps in favor of this rejection of Technology the Luddite case you presented is that repeated studies across the United Kingdom uh America Canada Western countries have shown that levels of individual satisfaction have not really increased and in some cases decreased since the 1960s despite huge increases in um ability or satisfaction of living supposedly technological advances why do you think this is and if technological advances do not improve individual satisfaction why they're worth pursuing well you at least in your question at least had the adverbs supposedly and I always I always think adverbs are very important because they're always a tell like in poker that the exact opposite is going on so yes we've been told supposedly if there is a lot of progress I I would want to question it I I believe um I believe the econ numbers more than the self-serving stories of the of the um university presidents and the bureaucrats and the the scientists and even the Silicon Valley Silicon Valley tech company so yes there's been a narrow cone of progress around the world of bits and the Internet it's not been enough to um to meaningfully increase the GDP per capita to meaningfully take our civilization the next level and that's that's that's why we submit things things feel that stuck now I I I'm not a lot I don't think we should embrace the stuckness I don't think we should embrace the stagnation I think the stagnation itself is you know ultimately unstable that you know we ultimately you know if we have a zero-sum society that will ultimately push us towards um you know the kind of lockdowns that we've seen the last two three years and then that I would argue in some ways we've had with respect to science and technology for uh for 40 or 50 years and that it's it's it's deeply unhealthy at the end of the day you know the luddites look uh they even if they were right about a lot of things they ultimately are wrong and you're ultimately you are you're going to lose if nothing else than in the military context you know it's as even even if the light's are right about everything you will you will always you know um you will you will lose to China on hypersonic weapons or space weapons or weapons in CIS lunar space or robots armed with AI and so uh so that probably there's something about the Luddite answer that's uh that's uh uh sort of self-destructive and uh and parochial at the same time giving your comments about the Manhattan Project and your Investments and engagement with palantir to what extent do you think that technological development is necessarily driven by war or a security dilemma well it's been a it's been a it's been a uh it's been a big big big part of it it's it's it's obviously it's obviously also been a big part of what what went wrong with it you know if if uh you know if we had enough nuclear weapons to destroy that world 20 times over you know I'm not saying what Charles Manson did where he just went insane started killing people was you know uh the the only reasonable thing to do but uh but there was there was a way that there was there was a way that it uh it drove a lot of progress and then it also deranged a lot of things and uh and we have to yeah I think we have to find some way to get back to the future where it's you know not dystopian not Luddite um you know not not accelerating simply towards Armageddon but also certainly not just the totalitarian lockdown is this partly why the stagnation you talked about scares you because you feel like stagnation and technological advancement in universities in the west will directly lead to the downfall of American and Western Supremacy um I I think I think I think it's bad for the west but I think I think even if there was no immediate external thing I think I think it will I think it will derange our societies you know if you have if you have no growth um uh then um then um then everything becomes a zero-sum rocket uh where you know there has to be a loser for every winner and uh and I'm not sure that necessarily gets you to socialist redistribution but it probably gets you to um to um something very different from the kind of society we've had the last few years so we've had this we've had this General stagnation and somehow you know we've we've been kept going by some kind of inertia but uh if if if it just stops uh yeah I think you end up with something much worse so I I don't trust that it's a stable outcome do you think this stagnation exists to the same extent in China and India and other growing parts of the world um there's uh I always think there's a difference between the developing and the developed worlds where the developing countries at least have or had some story of of um of convergence with with the developing world uh there's some program where they can copy things and uh and can catch up um um but I think even if they succeeded at doing that um which is probably the best case scenario I think they they will just run at the same problems we have so you know certainly um the way I I score I would still much rather consider myself fortunate to be in the Western World in the United States and uh we have this very deep problem of stagnation um I don't particularly want to move to China um you know the best case the absolute almost utopian best case for China is that they just copy the US and they end up where we are and uh and and I I tend to think my my mid case scenarios for them are much worse than that are there any areas that you think Buck the trend at any technological Fields That You Don't See stagnation and that you see hope for that you're interested in well look I I I think there is there is a lot that can be done on a you know in some ways I was giving a big picture of History talk and then what's always somewhat intention is I always believe in human Freedom um human agency I I believe that a lot more can be done you know I I invest in Technologies they're across many many different fields and uh and so I have the strong conviction that these are not it's not a law of nature that we've uh slowed down and uh it's not that the cupboard has run out or the cupboard is bare you know the the argument I articulated was was at its core cultural argument it was the people are too scared they've gotten too scared of Technology we could be doing a lot more people are scared I'm not I'm not I'm trying to steal man them I'm trying to say I understand why they're scared but um it is it is it is not a law of nature it's just a cultural artifact of where we are returning to the very start of your speech he said that he spoke about diversity in University being antonymical um do you think this is necessarily the case uh or not practical rather than etymological level and do you think that it's a result of society pursuing the wrong sorts of diversity and if so why so many uh polemical things uh one one could one could say about it uh probably um you know I I always like to say that you know you don't you know diversity is not merely um hiring the extras from the space Cantina scene in Star Wars you want you know you don't want just a group of people who look different and think alike um and then and then if you had you know if you had you know a genuine diversity of thought of ideas of viewpoints um I don't think that's inimical to I don't know a classic idea of a university as some sort of integrated holistic search for truth and uh and my intuition is that somehow you know if these things worked as they did in some bygone golden age or might in some future Golden Age it would somehow be involve genuine diversity on the level of the individuals and the professors and the researchers and um and uh and and some genuine uh Unity towards towards the truth and uh and the thing to underscore is that we probably have neither you know we neither have true true diversity nor true University and the sort of you know the the sort of Multicultural multiversity it's a it's a strange superposition of um you know hyper relativistic hyper nihilistic hyper totalitarian and you you will point out that those three things are all logically contradictory and uh and I can probably come up with some psychological analysis of why they go together but that's again very complicated given that when Europe University a couple of decades ago you wrote about the problems of political correctness and now you talk about decline in the academy and universities do you think there is a point where they seem to accelerate or do you think it's all relative to the world around it well it um you know they're not these plates are not completely isolated from from the broader Society but uh the um the the piece that I did not connect when I when I was involved in these debates 30 years ago was I I thought of these debates as um sort of narrow ideological debates about the curriculum or about um you know even broader historical debates about Western Civilization or things like that and um and I I now think of them as as some of very very deeply connected to uh this question of um economic scientific and technological progress and in a society where um you know there is a lot of progress happening where things are getting better uh you can figure out some kind of a way that uh you have win-win Solutions things don't need to be this malthusian this uh this adversarial if you have you know 10 postgraduate students in a chemistry lab or there's only a job for one of them and you have people having fights over beakers and Bunsen burners or whatever they have to do in a malthusian world then obviously if somebody says one Politically Incorrect thing and they get thrown off that overcrowded bus that's a relief to the other nine people so uh so yeah I I I I've come to think that at least large elements of it are linked to the sort of um stagnation malthusian economics things like that which uh which have a tendency to bring out the very worst in people last question before we move on from the academy do you think free speech is under threat a University's more than ever before or do you think that the threat is not there or is abating yeah it's you know I I think it's under I think it's under I will not tell you anything that yeah you haven't heard many times before that I I think it's under under a great deal of threat under a great deal of pressure uh I I always do Wonder though what what is it behind it so even if we you know even if you had perfect Free Speech even if the even if uh the channels were all open uh the pipes were not on not clogged what would actually be flowing through it and uh and I worry that the that the um these very uh ridiculous restrictions on free speech that we have are um are you know they're bad we shouldn't have them but they're also distracting us from uh the fact that people actually don't have very much to say um I hope not speaking for us there Peter um now the promised question on currency um do you believe that PayPal and similar operations have as you first claimed given Everyday People control of their currencies or is this an unachieved aspiration and might cryptocurrencies be the solution to that well I was uh I was I was super into Financial cryptography back in 1998 when I when I started PayPal and and there's certainly um there was this sort of um a classical liberal hope maybe some would say a fantasy that the computer age would decentralize things it would sort of have these decentralizing things that would give more power to small businesses to individuals to um to all these all these different groups of people and um and then there you know there's obviously a way that uh this these sort of cypher-punk crypto Anarchist a narco libertarian hopes of the late 1990s in many ways um it seems like the pendulum swung the other way and that uh there was something about computer technology that was centralizing in the form of big big companies big Tech big big governments um I I don't think it's absolute intrinsic to computer technology itself it's always possible for it uh for it to swing uh swing back you know big is an ambiguous word it can mean strong or it can mean fat and um and maybe um uh and and the and the cryptocurrencies present the hope that that things could uh could uh could go back the other way in in various forms but that's but yes we're we're if I if I had a bet on it I would say we are we're at at an extreme of um centralization of tech and uh and I would have some hope not sure how ground it is that that the pendulum could still swing swing back the other way before we open up the questions from the audience moving on to politics um first question why did you back president Trump in 2016 and do you regret it now you should ask me you should ask me this question in 10 years or so um but I I think the um you know I think I think this I I backed Trump for the same reason that if I was in the UK I would have been a pro-brexit person and and it was just this very deep conviction that uh that uh things were very off track you know our societies um they are too locked down too stagnant we need to change um you know there are there are critiques I could give of myself where I I I you know it was some kind of scream for help and uh and then um did that actually um you know help bring about the kind of debate I wanted to see about stagnation how to move Beyond stagnation um you know I think the jury's still very out on that in the U.S just as uh you know the brexit debate which in the UK you can think of as a debate about uh what's the identity of the UK and um The Hope was that brexit would would um you know would um sharpen that debate would help um uh form a better identity for Britain in the 21st century and uh and certainly for uh the first seven or eight years um there's a there's a there's a worry that both Trump and brexit actually uh delayed that much needed discussion more than they accelerated it why do you think that President Trump and I suppose brexit and the candidates you've backed in elections since Trump have failed to bring about that disruption to the stagnation well it's it's uh it's very hard to you know it's very hard to change look there's there's a way that politics there's a way that uh things like the Oxford Union are super important there's there's one layer where you talk about it and it's probably the the most singularly inappropriate thing I could say here is that you know it's not all about talk you know um it is sort of the um you know it's in in you know in the classical World sophistry is the belief in the omnipotence of speech and uh it's sort of like that's that's supposed to be Monopoly of the biblical God and somehow we you know we always want to have somehow speech combined with action we don't want to think that uh um just um saying the magic words is enough to trigger things and so and so to the extent people had that that conception about uh brexit or Trump or you know about Obama giving a speech in Cairo that these were these were forms of uh forms of sophistry forms of belief in the omnipotence of speech and uh and in a very similar way you know the tech stagnation problem that I touched on you know I I can tell myself that uh giving a talk at the Oxford Union is is a very small step towards it if I said that that was the Panacea wow that would be that would be insanely self-delusional um might be better for our reputation though um but yeah so talking about political donations in general you're one of the largest political donors in America and every election cycle literally billions of dollars are spent on the presidential campaigns or Congressional campaigns of both major parties billions of laws that could be used to fund Innovation break the stagnation or social projects or in any number of ways as a large political donor do you think that a culture of political donation is healthy uh the UK in comparison has very strict caps in the amount that political parties can spend campaigning both locally and nationally should the US adopt similar laws and if not why not well I I don't think it's um I don't think it's healthy for either of our societies to be as um as enmeshed in politics as they are um I think um I you know I always have a very schizophrenic view on it where I I think it's uh toxic and unhealthy and at the same time it's all important because it permeates everything you know so many of these problems won't have at least some political Dimension to to their solution I know challenging the premise of your question I would say it's it's shocking how little people spend on politics in the United States because uh um you know it just permeates everything and you know it is it is so all important even if it even it's not the not the only only Vector for solving it and so I think yeah there's um and the probably there probably is something about the UK version of it where it means that uh um if you if you can't do it these things just get displaced and in different in different forms and so if uh if individuals can't spend the money you know it means that you have even more power somehow uh resides an unelected bureaucracies and and you know and we have some again I don't want to exaggerate the difference between UK and us but but it's uh yeah the problem is is we are we're in a world where it's just uh it's just way too much politics I would I'd prefer to do away with it all together that's too utopian political political atheism that's that's an aspiration but does the world with large levels of political um donation not just privileged individuals such as yourself who can uh invest in political projects that you care about um whilst not allowing that level of political engagement that you said you should expect everyone to have given the importance of politics in everyday life oh but you could say you could say that about uh you could say that about investing in science you could say that about free speech about media platforms um you could say that about all all um all kinds of things so then then that just becomes a you know that that just becomes a question about uh about inequality inequality generally and and um you know um and and and then I I don't I don't think inequality is our biggest problem I think our biggest problem is stagnation but science and technology and social media companies don't claim to have an equal buy-in in the same way that democracy and politics do yeah but in in democracy and politics you have to you have to still somehow convince people it ends up being you know it ends up being you know a fairly competitive Dynamic on where there's a lot of funding on both sides it's it's kind of an arm's race so I I'm certainly my from my involvement I you know there's there's I would I would say it's always surprising how um how hard it is to impact things it's not like you can just spend money and people change their minds the translation function is is quite weak you know I'd I would I would like it if um if um you know if you could translate things more if you know if again just not just in politics but let's you know if I could if I could just spend some of my money and get cures for cancer or could you know overcome these things and uh unfortunately it's it's mainly not a financial problem it's you know it's a regulatory problem it's a social problem it's it's these other kinds of things but yeah the translation function is shockingly weak so the money doesn't solve the problems that you're identifying have you ever you try to use it but it is it is a shock the translation function is shockingly weak have you ever as a solution to that considered getting involved directly in politics yourself and running for election I'd go I got totally out of my mind if I did that no I I I've said too many things that are incompatible with that um on that note I'm aware it's been a bit of a Whistle Stop tour of various topics I want to very quickly open up questions to the audience I'm sure that'll be a lot I'm afraid we're about to get through everyone uh but if I call upon you uh please wait whilst uh um my colleague here brings you a microphone stand up and asked me to steal your question I call upon the I'll remember in the black quarter zip in the front row foreign thank you so much for sharing your thoughts the question that I have for you is that there are two things that I've learned that first is that there's some parts of technology that you're excited about some part you aren't which is surprising and second is that stagnation is not exciting to anyone so in your personal capacity with someone who has the power position and money to either solve or influence these problems what how are you contributing to it so I didn't quite hear the question could you repeat the question yeah the question is that in your personal capacity how are you trying to solve the problem of stagnation and secondly there are some parts of technology that you're not happy about are you going about solving them with the Investments that you've made um sure I mean I'm not here to flog all my investments but yes that is my day job is I'm a venture capitalist and um I uh you know I try I try to invest in business that are both successful and that somehow create um major positive externalities for the world and that uh and and I've yeah I've tried doing things in all these different verticals it's quite hard outside of I.T outside of computers but I have I've tried a wide range of wide range of these things and that's that's probably my that's that's the primary thing and then secondarily not you know not zero percent I I also try talking about it like right now um The Honorable member with the blonde hair over here hi my name is Alison thank you for being here um I'm in terms of your personal sense of spree of sorry free speech uh in your writings that you've been doing for decades I imagine your ideas evolve do you ever regret anything that you've written and if so um does that influence the way that you communicate and do you ever regret or I'm sorry have fear of future regret uh regret sort of an ambiguous word yeah there are all sorts of things um there are all sorts of ways that speaking is dangerous writing is even more dangerous uh you can um you know I remember um back in the 1980s was uh sort of one of these sort of conservative people the Hoover institution told me that yeah you know it was um writing a book was a more dangerous undertaking than having a child because um if the child turned out badly you could always disown your child but you could never disown anything that you had you had written and that that struck me at the time as this slightly ridiculous academic perspective on the world um but yes there there's there's something about these things that's that's quite you know it's it's um it's it's there's something about this that's uncomfortable and uh and I you know I I don't know I I draw some balance in between I probably say more than I should and uh and uh less than I um might have a mind too uh you'll remember in the gray sweatshirt the front row here thank you um given that the left dominates mainstream culture why isn't the right producing more great art what means what why is it or why is it not why is it not producing more great art yeah the right I don't know it's it's uh these things are these things are all super hard to do I I um I I always I always am encouraging people who do things I'm it's it's not the sort of thing I I know much about at all like I have some idea of how to how to produce um um Innovative tech companies science companies um but uh but you know it's it's always there's always a part of it um Let me let me do let me do one version on the hall the Hollywood movie version where I've been you know I've gotten pulled into you know a number of these projects over the years and there's always a somewhat stale conservative argument that you know it's it's all very biased and um it's you know it's a machine and they don't they don't allow anybody with um dissenting views to produce um to produce movies that don't fit the um the sort of center-left zombie straight jacket or whatever you want to call it and all that may be true but um but the problem is um you know it's always an and you need to yeah you need to do you it needs to still be very high quality it's still extremely hard to do this and uh and if we when we frame these things too ideologically um that often becomes an excuse for for um you know um uh losing sight of how hard it is to get the quality high enough so uh yeah I I suspect I don't know that much about the art world per se I suspect there is it's it's a crazed you know left-wing racket I believe that and then um and then I think uh most uh most people who go to Art School are just are just really lousy at it and that includes most conservatives who are in art school um The Honorable and perspective called member uh in the third row here uh the red red scarf yeah hi thanks uh Alp during an MSC in environmental sustainability and Enterprise um I want to ask you a question on climate change um and perhaps kindly push back on the statement that you made that um the left or the greatest of the world do not advocate for technology oriented solutions to climate particularly given um the Biden administration's recently passing of the impression reduction act the single biggest investment in climate uh ever which provides in hundreds of billions in incentives for hydrogen EVS storage wind solar ccos all the above so kind of given that what is your solution to climate change and how does that align with the political donations um that you've made in the US and also a mcgregated person and she's she can actually be quite lovely in person well well I think um again it's a very it's a very multi-dimensional thing I um I I tend not to agree with the Marxist analysis of measuring input so I don't care whether the government's spending tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars I'd be interested in measuring output and um and probably the um you know the very the very difficult challenge with Energy Technologies are you want you somehow want things that are cheaper cleaner you know that uh that uh that uh that uh that somehow uh meet a lot of these criteria and that's that's not quite what we're what we're trending towards and uh and certainly my my rough calibration of the energy around uh people concerned with climate change is that it has it's about like 95 Luddite and about five percent you know accelerationist it's it's more keep the thermostat down and wear a sweater um and it's it's it's not really we're going to invest in thorium to develop a third track of of along with uranium and plutonium for nuclear power technology so they're you know that I don't hear I hear more excitement about wearing sweaters or riding bicycles than uh than uh working on thorium plants and uh and um and then and then you know and then and then you're not even allowed to of course comment uh if you comment on you know how the windmills don't seem to be the most efficient thing then I then I end up being like Don Quixote or something like that but uh um um probably to have one or two more questions you'll remember the heart for college scarf thank you uh full disclosure I'm a you and your companies have an extensive record investing in healthcare and biotech and palantir is as has been widely covered pursuing a major NHS data contract which has seen a great deal of opposition the NHS being a major State operation how would you fix it um well that that's uh man that is uh you know it's always you these ques all these uh one thing is always tricky about all these political questions is there's sort of like a theory and practice so in theory um there's all sorts of things one would do very differently and you know it's uh in practice like you know what we do if you're president United States and it's always the superposition of you know on the one hand you're like the dictator on the other hand you're the mayor just kissing babies and Theory or dictator and practice your mayor kissing babies and so um and so in theory I mean you know you just rip the whole thing from the ground Out start over and in practice uh you have to somehow uh make it all all backwards compatible and and all these uh you know ridiculous British ways in the case of the NHS um I uh I I suppose I suppose again um I suppose the you know the first step the thing that seems very odd for an outside Observer of Britain is that is a sort of Stockholm syndrome people have with respect to the NHS where it's like uh it's like they think it is the most wonderful thing in the world and uh and perhaps um you know perhaps the you know the um the first step is to just understand it as as a as a very iatrogenic institution you know sort of play some formula where we can go through you know all the institutions in our society and think of them as more iatrogenic than healthy you know the highways create traffic jams and Welfare creates poverty and the schools make people dumb and the NHS makes people sick and that's that's what I would start with I would start by well I like use that the first step is you have to get out of the Stockholm syndrome that uh that that it's that it's that it's anywhere close to working and then yeah there are there are all kinds of there are all kinds of ways you would try to um um you I mean you have to go into all the layers but you'd uh try to figure out ways to have Market mechanisms um uh you try to you try to avoid rationing you try to um you try to make it uh uh less regulated than it is those would be those would be my those would be my intuitions when you say introduce Market mechanisms do you mean privatize feather um you would you'd you'd you'd you'd you'd try to find elements that you could privatize you would try to you know obviously you um you know we live in a society where you can't privatize these things completely so but uh but even even the uh even the parts that would be subsidized you try to find market mechanisms even for the uh for uh for the parts that uh that are treated as a form of welfare the CEO of NHS England is the next librarian of the union and is coming back this term so I'll be sure to pass on your comments to her um I'm afraid I think that's all we have time for this evening ladies and gentlemen um but before we thank Mr teal for his time um I'll ask you the question we ask all of our speakers at the end of our talk which is if you could give one piece of advice to the members of the Oxford Union and the students at the University of Oxford well that one piece of advice be well it is um it is it is sort of along the lines of what I've already articulated which is always that uh um uh you know these sorts of debates discussions are um are absolutely important they're sacred but they're they're they are also just just the first step and we we need a you know a little bit more of the sort of um Faust and go to where you know in the beginning is the deed and we need we need talk but also action ladies and Gentlemen please join me in thanking Mr Peach teal [Music]

Channel: OxfordUnion

Views: 199,738

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Id: fQ4rc7npiXQ

Length: 67min 11sec (4031 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 27 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/DeepValue47]

Can you give us a 'TL:DR' please.

[u/Ta323Ta]

Hmmm okay.