/biz/ - Business & Finance

>>14801339
>>14801339
Peter Thiel started out his speech by evoking the photograph of earth from the moon on the Apollo mission, 30,000 miles away. From afar, the earth looked unified, with no boundaries between nations. But the picture excludes the city and the political, and we have not gone back to space very much since then.

That picture epitomized the year of 1972: the year that Nixon went to China and globalization began.

Now, we need to step back and ask ourselves of the things we do: Is this good for the U.S.?

In particular, we need to ask:

> Is big tech good for the U.S.?
> Is free trade good for the U.S.?
> Is college good for the U.S.?
> Is war good for the U.S.?

Google is building the Star Trek computer. It knows everything and can answer all of your questions. It’s organizing the world’s information.

But now let’s ask the question on the level of the U.S.: Are people’s living standards improving? Silicon Valley says yes, but their story is at odds with what people are experiencing on the ground.

There’s been a lot of innovation in the world of bits and software, but not in atoms — real, hard engineering problems. If you had been in college a few decades ago, it would have been a bad career move to go into engineering at Stanford. Instead, there has been a narrow cone of progress around bits (software). (Note: This has been a consistent point in Thiel’s talks.)

Maybe we’ve built the Star Trek computer, but we don’t have anything else from the Star Trek universe. We’ve had a few decades of relative stagnation. The younger generation is now finding it a struggle to live up to the living standards of Baby Boomers.