Peter Thiel on the Failures and “Self-Hatred" of Big-Tech

[Music] we're gonna run a tight ship I'm Steve your I the president of Discovery Institute that's so glad to welcome you to the inaugural Kazem technology summit I have a few things to cover before we get started first and foremost thank you to each of you for taking the time I know many of you have come from out of town and I'm very grateful for you taking the time and energy to join us here at what we believe will become a well known national summit and you're part of the first so thank you so much some people ask me not people in this room of course but people will ask me what does COSM stand for and I I joke about that is cause it nothing it doesn't stand for anything cause um as you probably know if you've read Gilders work over the years means world and together we're gonna explore over the next few days the interconnected world of emerging cutting-edge technology you're also free to announce yourselves to each other as cosmonauts if you would like just thought I'd throw that out there when George and I first conceived this conference and began to talk about the conference we imagined a gathering of leading national experts who would explore not only the cutting-edge technology but also some of the deeper philosophical questions that it raises what what what does AI mean what does it mean for jobs what does it mean for us global Global global competitiveness what are the implications for technology companies and what does it say about us as humans and our own creativity so those some of the things that we'll be talking about in the next few days that Kazem you're gonna hear a variety of viewpoints you almost certainly at some point I know that's hard to believe but you will disagree with some of our speakers you will agree with others and we encourage you we've made a concerted effort to make sure that this is a back and forth with you addressing your questions and so feel free to ask tough questions feel free to say you just agree with something to a speaker be nice to your tablemates but you're free to ask them tough questions as well I want to thank in particular our speakers and our sponsors this would not be possible without a great program and we have a fantastic program lined up for you so the speakers who have come from out of town to this first conference that you had never heard of thank you for that for our sponsors who supported financially a program they'd never heard of as we launched Kazem as an annual technology event here in the Seattle area thank you in your packet there is a list of sponsors and I want to just recognize them briefly a gold sponsor is Microsoft and you're gonna hear from York roads tomorrow at the lunch hour their lead blockchain expert out here from New York laissez faire trilogy international partners Smead capital management madrone venture group INRIX and then some individual sponsors and companies Tony Watley Transpo group ignition partners Jones creative AT&T and the Murdock trust so thank you to them can we have a round of applause we also have some people who helped us along the way develop the conference with in-kind support and spread the word the Bellevue Chamber of Commerce thought exchange and TF blockchains so sponsors please take a moment to thank them if you see a representative of any of those companies thank them for helping to make this possible I also want to take a minute to tell you about Discovery Institute so Discovery Institute was founded by Bruce Chapman and George Gilder in 1991 were headquartered in Seattle so we're coming up on thirty years a year and a half ago we launched the Walter Bradley Center for natural and artificial intelligence so discovery is home to half a dozen programs but this program is put together thanks to the Bradley Center and you're gonna learn more about that Center to our mission our overarching mission is to advance a culture of purpose creativity and innovation we believe in a purposeful universe that we're not here by accident we believe in the power of human creativity to solve problems and we believe that creativity is best Unleashed through a system of limited government free markets so innovation benefits us all so those three pillars again our purpose creativity and innovation those are the themes that link each of the programs of discovery on stitute it's a unique organization I'd urge you to learn more at Discovery org we also have some board members and staff if you were on the board or on the staff would you just raise your hand so that people know thank you so much they have helped make this happen as well [Applause] now before we begin I have to tell you about George Gilder George many of you know many of you are here because of George and I'm grateful to George not only as a co-founder but in helping really craft the content of what you're gonna experience George is the author he's right down here are you at 14 books now 14 I lose track 20 Wow he writes like a book a year now so I can't he's known for wealth and poverty he's known for microcosm he's known for Telecom life after television knowledge and power and most recently the bestseller the international bestseller life after Google and life after Google is another theme that will be inter woven throughout the conference what does that mean now random point here he's also a champion trail runner so if you're if any reason you're upset he's upset at you don't try and catch him you he's probably in better shape than most people in this room it's pretty amazing and and then you need to understand this simple fact about George George likes to stir things up okay many of you who've known George for years George likes to stir things up George will be the first one to ask a tough question and so if you're a speaker if you're on the floor and you're asking a question and he challenges you just be aware it doesn't mean he doesn't like you okay he's just asking the tough questions and and I again a conference where everyone agrees is a boring conference and we want to make sure that we're having an interaction that's meaningful and that you get something out of so in a moment we're gonna have Peter teal I mentioned we had sent out an email Peter is joining us via videoconference at the base of the screen there's going to be a cell number okay that cell number is for you to text your questions to Peter so this is a live interactive video conference and so you should be prepared with your cell phone to ask questions okay it just as a spoiler alert the number that you're seeing is not Peters cell phone okay but what it will do is it will alert our staff in the back to the questions they'll consolidate questions and we'll get to as many of them as we can so when you see at any time during Peters remarks or George's interaction with Peter when you hear that please send a text of it your question will get to as many as we can and George will manage the questions from up here so without further ado I'm going to invite my colleague and friend George Gilder up to the podium what's this problem solving stuff Steve don't you know our theme don't solve problems when you solve problems you end up starving feeding your failures starving your strengths achieving costly mediocrity don't let that in a cosmic conference don't solve problems pursue opportunities and we're gonna be talking to Peter Thiel in a while who's been pursuing opportunities all his life and he summed it up in his great book zero to one which in my judgments the best business book ever written and he's some of the humans don't decide what to build by making choices from some cosmic catalogue of options given in advance instead by inventing new technologies we rewrite the plan of the world human creativity always comes as a surprise to us if it didn't we wouldn't need it and socialism would work it's this the key to the information theory of economics and capitalism that we're going to be expounding over these two and a half days is is that quote from Albert Hirschman of Princeton creativity always comes as a surprise to us and all information as Shannon has explained Claude Shannon the great founder of information theory has explained that information is essentially surprisal it's unexpected bits and surprisal is the heart of the information economy that's why machines really don't compete with humans as Peter has explained in in its 0 to 1 machines can amplify people can extend people's capabilities their tools that endow people and by making people more productive make them more employable and at the same time endowing new work this is the promise of machines and and machines are not and going to take over the universe and usurp us that's a quixotic view that is based on an essential failure to recognize the essence of machines and the essence of minds in recent years I've been studying connectomes they connected to the connectome is all the connections that make possible a network system and recently we discover that the Internet the total all the total global connections of the Internet has passed as alibi just to map maybe maybe more than a SATA byte it has for some three or four zettabytes of storage attached to it but at the same time reading about the connectome of the human brain we discovered that the one human brain to map one human brains connectome takes about a zettabyte and in other words zettabyte 10 to the 21st one human brain is as complex is the entire global Internet but one human brain runs on 12 to 14 watts is that right Carver's something like that Carver Mead is is the continuity of the Kaza he's closed every one of my conferences for must be 30 years now and has guided all my technology pursuits so one human brain runs on 12 to 14 watts the inner global internet runs on gigawatts and the idea that these two phenomena are closely linked and represent similar entities is really a delusion and it's something of a delusion of silicon valley's that I've been exploring in life after Google okay let's go so Peter is okay so in this conference is a conference of convergence convergence of people in finance technology science and enterprise it's convergence of all the new technologies that are rising many of them software technologies but in the Kazem we understand that all software technologies are crucially dependent on the advance of hardware technologies and I believe we're in a moment today when for the first time it's going to be possible to eliminate printed circuit boards and cards entirely to really all the passives and all oh she owes wiring that clutters are electronics around the world they're going to collapse at last into a true microcosm of chips this is really beginning to happen for the first time and it's an exciting development and will make possible a whole series of new cosmic developments and in the coming era [Music] the ultimate cosmic man here to their tale hello well Georgia thank you so much for that terrific introduction thank you for the plug for my zero to one book certainly any additional royalty checks are very much appreciated and so thank you for that plug I am you know in my brief comments here I'm going to offer three contrarian ideas for the future where you know where things are going with technology and computers and I thought I would try to double these three ideas up as a sort of a book review of a Gilders terrific book life after Google and so I'm gonna give you three contrarian ideas but I'm gonna weave in a little bit of a book review of a life after Google as well you know one of the things that's always difficult about talking about the future is that you know we don't really know what's going to happen for sure it's not that deterministic I think it's even hard to talk to know what happened in the past so let's start by talking about the history of the computer age and the history of the future the way people talked about the future in the past and the way they thought where was the computer age going to go and if we were if we've been assembled in 1969 the future of computers was going to be massive centralization it was giant databases giant AI like computer intelligences that would run everything it was like IBM was pawel transposed to the space odyssey movie one letter off from IBM it was one of the early Star Trek episodes they they come to the planet beta which thousands of years earlier had been somebody had unified the planet and left a computer program that ran the whole planet and all the people were sort of peaceful but very docile nothing ever happened and and as usual they sort of follow the prime directive and convinced the computer to self-destruct they don't follow the find directive and and then sort of leave everything in disarray but but the future of the computer age circa 1969 centralization a few large companies a few large governments a few large computers that controlled everything fast forward to 1999 the future of the computer age was going to be massive decentralization a sort of libertarian anarchist it was sort of the corollary to the end of the Soviet Union was that information had this decentralizing tendency and and and that you know the internet was going to fragment things and it was going to be this sort of anarchic libertarian place and if it's uh and then and then if we fast forward to 2019 the consensus view of the future today I would submit is that the pendulum has somehow swung back all the way to 1969 and the consensus view is again that it is about you know large centralization google google like governments that that sort of control you know all the world's information in this super centralized kind of way and and i think the you know the life after google thesis that that I agree with and endorsed is that if we look at this past and people got it terribly wrong in 69 and things we're gonna go to decentralization ninety nine it actually started going back to the other way from the point view of 2019 even if we even if I'm hesitant talk about the absolute future and where this all ends ultimately perhaps the contrarian thing is to say that maybe the pendulum can swing back and that things can swing back towards more decentralization more privacy and things things like that and and this is sort of this is sort of what what seems to be at least contrarian and at least something that we should we should always take more more seriously if you if you want to frame it in terms of the buzzwords of the day in terms of crypto and AI it is it is easily understood by people it's always understood that crypto is somehow vaguely libertarian but we are willing to say the opposite which is that AI if you know the crypto is libertarian then AI is communist and and you know it's it's because it's centralized it's the computer knows more about you than you know about yourself it is it is a totalitarian communist China loves AI and dislikes crypto and and and and that and that we at least have that we should at least consider the possibility that you know Silicon Valley is probably way too enamored of AI not just for technological reasons but also because it expresses this this sort of left-wing centralized zeitgeist and and then and so I think the the first sort of contrarian idea I have is that perhaps it's time for the pendulum to swing back and life after Google on you know at its core means that we are going to go back from this very centralized world today towards a more decentralized one that seems to me to be the correct thing to bet on now the you know the second contrarian idea that is of course um we can talk about how fast these things are happening and how much is happening in technology generally and you know it's it's one of these things where we we live in a world of incredible scientific and technical precision and we can measure Avogadro's number or the fine structure constant physics or other things like this to to many many significant figures but when we talk about the nature of the progress of science and technology and how fast science or technology are progressing we do this in the most qualitative way with you know with incredibly little precision and you know are we are we accelerating in scientific and technical fields are we are we progressing but at a slower pace how fast is this and and with respect to that question we tend to only get these sort of fairly vague answers and I would say but I would submit that the sort of consensus in in sort of a both a so can valley and a sort of academic context is that we are doing great and everything is just moving super fast it's sort of all these forms of acceleration ISM and we can debate whether it's utopian a lot Kurtz while the singularity is near all you need to do is sit back and eat some popcorn and watching the movie of the future unfold or perhaps it is dystopian a lot all the science fiction movies from Hollywood and the robots are gonna kill you or you're going to be in this matrix and we're sort of accelerating we're sort of accelerating to utopia or accelerating to dystopia and the you know the somewhat contrarian thesis I have on this is always that perhaps the progress is not as fast as advertised and that we've been in this world where things have been slower and they've been slower for quite some time um you know one one cut on this is always to differentiate the world of atoms and bits and that since the 1970s we've had a narrow cone of progress around atoms that they've been around bits the you know computers internet mobile internet software these have been advancing fairly quickly the world of atoms somewhat more slowly when I was an undergraduate at Stanford I was in the late 80s I would say that almost every engineering field in retrospect was a bad field to go into it was already obviously you shouldn't go into nuclear engineering aero-astro engineering weren't that good but even all these other fields were we're not going to do that well in the decades ahead because we were no Electrical Engineering was still okay computer science was the really good field to go into in the late 80s all the other engineering fields it was just regulated to death there wasn't that much you could do in the world of atoms and it turned out that we had and you know a lot of a lot of a slow process progress and I I think that if we sort of analyzed this question of the the rate of scientific progress politically and think of it as as sort of University Professors or entrepreneurs or venture capitalists exaggerating about how much good they're doing and how great they are we understand that the incentives are always to exaggerate and to to say that you know we're we're just around the corner from curing cancer around the corner and all these different things and yet it's been a been in some significant way slower over the last last 40 or 50 years certainly one of the one of the concerns I would have is that that perhaps the danger is that if anything that it's things are slowing down even more at this point and that the sort of world of very fast progress in bits is actually starting to slow down and if we look at at the rate of progress in Silicon Valley um you know that we sort of charismatic in this because it was one place where things were still happening relative to the rest of the US and and it's become a lot less charismatic in the last five years we sort of think about the the vibe in 24 even as recently as 2014 if it's sort of this was the place where the future was being built in 2019 um you know the big tech companies are probably as a self-hating in some ways as as the big banks were in 2009 and and there's sort of a sense that it's it's not quite working and so if you sort of begin to pick on Google a little bit here the you know the Google propaganda of the future was of course was all gonna be bits it was all going to be sort of more automation you know the story in 2014 where things like Google Glasses so you could identify anybody you looked at at any time it was the self-driving car I mean say these aren't like that big and a set of innovations probably self-driving cars that stuff from a car but not as big as a car was from a horse and so you can sort of debate quite how big these things aren't out how to quantify them again but but that was fill the narrative that was very intact in 2014 and when you fast forward to 2019 it's striking how there's absolutely no narrative of the future left Google doesn't even talk about the self-driving car very much there's a sense that it may still happen but it's further in the future the top the expected time seems to be getting further away every passing year it's the expected time is getting even further into the future and and so there's sort of the sense that perhaps there's this danger that we have slowed progress even in tech even in the world of information technology one of the you know one of the parenthetical in one of the ways this tag nation thesis sort of that was embedded in the language is the word technology of course had a very different meaning and that in the 1960s technology meant just computers but also Rockets a supersonic aviation in underwater cities and the Green Revolution agriculture and biotechnology and new medicines and all these things because all these things we're progressing on many fronts and today if you use the word technology it is often synonymous with with information technology and and probably just the software internet part of that because that's the only part that has been moving that has been progressing in recent decades and the danger is that even that has slowed down a lot that somehow Silicon Valley is consolidated into some larger companies it's gotten harder for new companies to break through and it's gotten harder because new companies are small companies are good at doing new things and people are doing fewer new things then then the big companies are are more dominant so so I think the second you know cut on the life after Google book and in these terms is is always what I think is the sort of you know guild is always super optimistic but there is like a small undercurrent of pessimism to the book and the undercurrent is you know the specter that haunts life after Google is that maybe this current regime is going to go on for a really long time and you know you know we're you know there was life after television but but life after Google may take you know it will happen eventually but it may take a little bit longer and that we're that there's a danger that we're in this somewhat slowed somewhat stagnant world so uh so that's sort of a second idea that we I think we need to always wrap it with a lot that maybe we're in this in this world of a tech stagnation third contrarian idea I will give you is sort of a qualification on my first two ideas because I think you know the first one was it's about pendulums gonna swing back to to decentralization second one is yes it swing back but it's just going to be slow because everything is slowed and weirdness in this world of stagnation but a qualifier to both the back to decentralization and the stagnation idea is that you know at the end of the day technology is about people it's not about you know inanimate forces it's not some kind Marxist historicism about you know the way things are inevitably going to happen and so the stress is always on on individuals small teams that start companies that start new projects that that do new things and and it's a question of human agency it's not deterministic we have every possibility to do these things but at the end of the day it is up to us to make it happen and it's it's not set in stone that it's going to happen one way or another and so you know in conclusion I think you know sort of one other one other gloss on life after Google is that perhaps you should think of the title as you know with life being italicized or stressed or put in bold and that you know that the critical thing is you know there is life life goes on and in particular human life Humanity goes on and and that that even though the dominant narrative is the tech is about inanimate forces or marks as to Storace ism it really is at its core about human beings and we should we should always we if we have to bet on it we should always bet on the indomitable 'ti of the human spirit maybe leave it that and open it to some questions and more of a conversation thank you [Applause] well last first question Peter so today the US government has a kind of full-court press against always giant technology companies their claim to be monopolies Peter your deal of world's leading expert on monopolies how they form what they contribute what their lifecycle is what do you think of this always huge fines for relatively trivial offenses and the array of litigation against Facebook and Google and always giant companies these classes that rule our world well I have to be you know I always think you have to disclose one's bias these when one speaks and one of my by season one things that makes that gives me makes me somewhat careful in answering your questions I'm on the board of Facebook and so I have to be pretty careful how I answer your question here but let me let me ask let me sort of give a somewhat indirect answer you know there's um you know we there are obviously the big tech companies are facing you know antitrust there's sort of a lot of regulatory stuff Europe is pushing a lot of tax related things there are their privacy data ownership issues so there's sort of you know and then of course on there's sort of a lot of different levels on which they are under on sort of cultural and and political attack and the the you know the way I understand what is what is you know we serve debate the merits what parts of these criticisms are justified what parts are not justified I think the the way I I think of the context of why this is happened is you know it's always always a story where it's like you know Silicon Valley did all these bad things and I don't think that's the main story I think the main problem Silicon Valley has is that it's not done enough good things and you know the story that again picking on Google that Google would should be able to tell is yeah maybe there all these things we're doing that are problematic in certain ways but we've made the world a better place in all these other very important very tangible ways and that story has gotten harder and harder to tell and I think I think that remains sort of the you know the core on the core challenge of Silicon Valley you know on the on the specific you know merits of these questions the the way I believe Silicon Valley should defend itself like I think you know there's a lot some of these criticisms are justified in Silicon Valley needs to do a better job in in many ways but I believe that the core defense Silicon Valley should give against the accusations of being too big and too centralized in all these problematic ways is that the alternative to Silicon Valley the practical alternative at this point is perhaps not the crypto anarchist decentralization but the the most likely alternative is even more centralization in the form of Chinese Communist tech companies where you know the in where it's basically just one giant org like thing that's controlled by the Chinese Communist Party and so if there is a problem with big tech if it's you know too homogenized too centralized and so on we have to be careful that we don't set up an alternative where it's even bigger and even more centralized and and literally communist we've got some questions here thank you I'd very much respect and appreciate your views on education 95 theses Founders Fund and beyond I guess that's 15 17 that oh we do together and I describe in life after Google how do you envisage the ideal improved education system to produce young people who will bring progress rather than more cogs for the existing existing machine yeah let me say something about the 95 theses and the the 1517 reference we we sort of had this idea that anon this was two years ago in 2017 but still very very much correct you the way to think of the universities today is that they are as as corrupt as the Roman Catholic Church was 500 years ago and they are basically you know it's it is it is you have sort of this system of indulgences that takes the form of you know runaway tuitions you have this priestly or professorial class that is pretty lazy and doesn't do very much work you have you have this theory of salvation where salvation consists of getting a diploma and if you do not get a college diploma what you were going to end up in a very bad place and so there's a sort of soteriological story as well and and I think that it's it's it's sort of a universalized centralized big stories on its a successor to the universal Catholic Church is this universal university system and you know it's maybe it's an oxymoronic way to describe but I think you have to think of it as the Atheist church with a capital A and a capital C and and that you know one of the things that I think you know I have I have no problems with the church and I have no some problems with atheism but I think the Atheist church is really simply too much and we should be fighting the atheist church and in in in all of its forms and and and I think the you know and I think the the 1517 analogy again I can't quite you know predict the future but is that reform does not come from with that you know they're sort of for all these attempts you do to reform these universities from within and it is just feels like a fool's errand of sorts you know I remember in 2007 over a decade ago I had this idea that my big non-profit plan three project was going to be to start a new university and I had someone at my foundation spent a year and a half looking at all the universities that had been started in the u.s. in the preceding hundred years with 1907 to 2007 and it was a soaring tale of donor intent betrayed and money wasted and things just not working at all and there were a few tiny things that you could say sort of work on the whole it was just a sorry sorry tale of failure and and you know the the lesson I took from it was one of you know a little bit of humility because you know one reacts well people have failed us for a hundred years and I'm gonna do it better and and the less I took instead it was you know maybe the system is actually unbelievably hard to reform on the inside and like in 1517 the Reformation starts from the outside it and the and the alternative is not to create some new universal university system some some new template it's for people to do different things and you know the way the way we started was with this teal Fellows program we try to convince you know 20 students here to stop out of college and start companies so it was not it was not a plan but it was going off the sort of ever narrower tracks that are working ever less well and and some generalization of that is is what I think we all sense that we need and you know a lot of it you know these sort of you know one-one-one-one framework that I had for our program that might be you know a good framework for the post university thing is you know there's always a lot of there's a lot of stuff that one can still do in computers and so we always thought you know a lot was about programming and then and then then to the extent we wanted a program for what we were doing we thought what we need to do is deprogramming and so the sort of the label I thought for the internal label we had for the teal fellowship was it was about programming and deprogramming and we need to deprogram people from the cult of the atheist church what about online education what what is the promise of that there are a lot of really significant initiatives which are actually having an impact what do you think of are the prospects really in and using information technology to provide high entropy education well but there's obviously a lot that one can do online in in you know in all of these DS on these forms when I take my venture capitalist hat and look at these things as as things to invest in on I always think it's very important to sort of break down a little bit the abstractions and to remember that education itself is always an abstraction and if we make it a little bit less abstract let me suggest there are four different things that education means in practice in our in our society one one thing is is certainly you know the official meaning is that's all about learning it's about information so positive sum game it's about learning but so that four four four sort of variations of it is it's an investment in your future so you go to college it's sort of an investment into a better future second it's a consumption decision so it's like a four-year party and and I used to think that it was sort of this bad superpositions bad quantum superposition of investment and consumption it was sort of like people in the housing bubble bought a large house with a swimming pool and it showed how frugal they were and how much they were saving for retirement and it was you're sort of conflating investment consumption which is always a mistake but I now think that it's the other third and fourth one that are the more important the third one is that it's an insurance product and that it's something you buy to avoid falling through the ever bigger cracks in our society and even pay and they can charge more and more for you because people are getting more scared about some of the things have gone wrong in this country and the fourth one is it's a zero-sum tournament where you have to think of Harvard and Stanford and Caltech and the other elite universities as a sort of studio 54 nightclub in which the value is not that you have this information and that it's actually the value comes from from exclusion from excluding people and and so you know there's like a Harvard or a stanford version of putting Harvard or Stanford classes online and letting people take them and these universities have done it and people can can take those classes in many cases but they don't get credit at Harvard or Stanford and taking those classes does not lead to a Harvard or Stanford degree and that that tells you that a lot of the value of this very strange good that is called education comes not from the actual learning but more from things like status selection exclusion on think things of that sort and and I think that when we look at these different approaches we have to we have to try to disentangle what they're doing so online education is great for learning but unfortunately learning has almost nothing to do with the so-called educational system Peter Hayek said that the route and source of all monetary evil is the government monopoly of money you started tape how and in part to overthrow this government monopoly of money how is it going it's what can we look for in the future and the cryptic azam it's a little bit it's a little bit harder than I thought in 1999 certainly it you know I was um you know I was uh I was uh very um on you know I was uh you know one of the one of the books that tremendously influenced me when I started PayPal was the sovereign individual was written by Rhys MOG the father of Jacob Riis mark the the British brexit parliamentarian and it was about how we're gonna have crypto currencies and it was going to be the central decentralized world where sovereignty would itself would get decentralized to the individual level and I read that book in the summer of 98 and it it sort of inspired me to start PayPal as this you know sort of libertarian project that was going to liberate people's money from the control of the central monetary authorities we were sort of the whole set of ideas we had around that and you know it's in the context of pay pallet we certainly built a successful business but but that part of the vision turned out to be quite hard to do and there were certainly forms of electronic money that in theory were decentralizing and practice enabled more centralization and more control and especially after 9/11 and the Patriot Act and all the ways that the the regulatory state was able to more precisely track the flow of electronic money that you know it may have actually trended quite the other way now I think I I do think of Bitcoin as as you know the the real thing it is it is the sort of it is sort of this this this it's sort of a centralized currency that we we fantasized about at PayPal but but didn't quite build you know I I have um I have all these speculative thoughts on who Satoshi is and you know and the Bitcoin origin story and without without stating precisely who let me who I think it is let me uh let me give what I think is the key origin story for uh for Bitcoin on we were at this when when I started PayPal we were at this financial cryptography con I went to this financial cryptography conference in Anguilla in early 2000 sort of an annual conference and after this gathering of people were libertarian and into crypto currencies and probably a decent number of people working at the NSA and spying for the US government other governments as well so sort of this rather interesting gathering of people and you know my my theory is that Satoshi was at that conference or at one like that in in in early in early 2000 and that you know these ideas were germinated in in in the late 90s already and one of the manifestations of cryptocurrency at that particular conference was was a system called eagled and it was anonymous encrypted electronic gold certificates and it was the company was based in southern Florida they had these servers distributed all over the planet but it was in theory this gold based alternative to the dollar it was going to be encrypted and and save all these problems with thee gold we made it interoperable with PayPal turned out it was sort of a lot of criminal fraud criminal activity maybe that's always hard the territory these things we sort of disconnected it but the people who started eventually got in a lot of trouble you know the whole system was shut down they were the company was targeted they were they were prosecuted I don't know went to jail but the whole whole thing was sort of disbanded and there was something about the eagled architecture that was in theory of cryptocurrency and in theory fairly decentralized with their servers Iceland and Dubai and you know one or two other places but in practice it was still centrally attackable by the larger central government and I I believe that the true Bitcoin origin story was in contrast to e-gold um it's almost the same name and it's like Eagles Bitcoin you know it has roughly the same the same it's like you would think about Eagle dough coming to the next D gold and then change each a bit mmm point of gold and and it was sort of a contrast to that and so I think the reason we do not know who Satoshi is is integral to the history of Bitcoin if we knew who it was you know are our two powerful central government would probably do some very unpleasant things to that person Peter why do you believe that the Communist Party of China could nurture or run giant companies with tremendous capabilities that actually are competitive with the best companies in the United States how is it possible that a communist party can actually be a threat in this commercial creative domain well the well I suppose I suppose on you know I am I think these companies are a threat and I think they are very tightly controlled by the Communist Party so so the the counterpoint to it is is you know that's that seems to me to be the empirical reality I think I think the theoretical and so that's the empirical answer the theoretical answer to your question is I don't yeah I don't think centralized totalitarian communism is that good at creativity you know I mean you did have good number theorists and good chess players in the Soviet you so there probably is are certain forms of creativity you're able to have even in a Stalinist or Maoist system but but I don't think you know I don't think the creativity is essential and the the competitive threat from from these companies in China is that they are just extremely fast at copying they're they're very fast at copying things that work and there's always you know in any sort of creative business there there's a balance between the creative inspiration what I call into the you know the zero to one the miraculous beginning and and and then scaling the business and building it and you know I think I think in every area of Technology and innovation the United States and the West more generally are still at the cutting edge we're still ahead we're we're the only place in the world where innovation is really happening but how much value it is to us depends on how quickly it gets transferred and exfiltrated to China and so the West developed the atom bomb in 1945 and that was you know again it was uh it was a form of innovation it was that there was possible in a free society but you know within four years you know once you had proven that it could be done it could be copied even in the Stalinist Soviet Union so copying is much easier to do than originating and and if you have no IP protection if you if if we have this sort of massive exfiltration of information and ideas then the disadvantage is not that great for China and they they can be quite a big threat see we have how does your understanding and this is a question from the audience okay how does your understanding of technology inform you about the current pulse of personal relationships in the broader social and societal fabric looks like now and into the future you can talk forever Peter any any room for the human spirit in our futures well there's one one one one would one would hope so I look I think there are all sorts of unhealthy trends in our society and things that are you know that are that are very off and and certainly um certainly you know I think I think the way I understand the Jordan Peterson phenomenon is that it's not that he's correct about Julian psychology which i think is just ridiculous but but what's what's Peterson's been effective because Julian psychology is a politically correct way to talk about the extremely dysfunctional gender relationships in in the United States and the West and so yeah so I think I agree with that premise of the question that there are some some some really big problems I I would you know I would disagree with the claim that it's mainly driven by technology I mean maybe there are aspects of on on of tech of the sort of sort of constant attention distraction or things like that that are unhealthy and that are socially unhealthy but I I think the you know I think it's actually driven by its over these things are over determined there are many things that drive it and and you know Mike my intuition for for you know what's what's gone wrong and in a lot of these cultural areas is just the sort of general sense of cultural malaise of stagnation of you know the future is is not getting better our society's not progressing and so when people retreat into playing video games or living in their parents basements or you know staying in graduate school it's it's it's it's probably it's probably uh maybe this is just like a you know um you know I think I think the solution is yeah you may be used to give them a sword and Petersons like psychology lesson maybe you can tell them to turn off their iPhones that were take away their iPhones but but I think I think the the real structural thing is we have to get back to the future we have to get back to growth in our economy generally thank that that's at least always my bias yeah that's a wonderful challenging opening to the concrete and thank you thank you very much to do so much you really set us up and challenged us and we got next to do now thank you next you up next y'all try do it in person my apologies for the long distance but thought we'd give it a try Thanks Hey Thank You Peter to you and your team for making the time enough for it [Music] you

Channel: Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence

Views: 69,395

Rating: 4.8517442 out of 5

Keywords: mind matters news, mind matters, mindmatters.ai, artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural and artificial intelligence, deep AI, AI, consciousness, free will, Peter Thiel, Thiel, clarum capital, palantir, COSM, George Gilder

Id: Ufm85wHJk5A

Length: 55min 13sec (3313 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 10 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/musclehacking]

Submission statement:

Note: I skipped to 15:38 to get straight to the Thiel.

Peter Thiel discusses how artificial intelligence, 5G wireless, and blockchain security are converging in a new era.

Thiel outlines how new Internet and monetary systems can remedy the currently torturous relations between the U.S. and China, and how understanding money as time overthrows the prevailing economic and technological models and opens the way to a cornucopian future.

[u/musclehacking]

It’s always understood that crypto is somehow vaguely libertarien.

But we’re never willing to say the opposite [...] that if crypto is libertarien, then AI is communist.
[link]

I love this point.
Given machine learning – currently one the most commonly practiced and effective forms of AI – has a heavy reliance on large datasets, it does lend itself to centralization.