After his interview to Barton Gellman, The Atlantic, “Thiel is taking a break from democracy, one of his many disappointments”, November 2023
Dear Peter,
You are too important for us to lose your, as you say, determinate optimism. If not you, then what should feel we, ordinary people? Your interdisciplinary synthesis and taking into account complexity of society is staggering among techno-optimists.
First, extremely interesting to see what kind of future you want in details, other than your famous negations like “we wanted flying cars but got 140 characters”. Something specific like “humans should be multi-planet species” of Musk etc. What is your vision for ideal world and ideal society?
By the way, curious to hear your stance on longtermism (cross-generational optimization) or e/acc (effective accelerationism) or effective altruism (or this is too socialistic for you?). Or is it something else? Then what is it?
You did 11 unicorns from 270 of your Thiel Fellowship recipients, but maybe you should also disrupt how scientific process is done? Especially in the world of atoms, not bits. Business simply distributes some tech across populations with economic and other limitations, but anyway it roots from science, from solved puzzles of physical reality. Any ideas of your impact on science?
About longevity: even if this computationally irreducible brainteaser will not be solved during our lives (and provide us truly complicated optionality), it anyway will improve how comfortably we age, no? Plus for your kids…
Also, capitalism (a multi-agent system which extracts the most motivation from peoples’ souls + increases quality of civilization-wide decisions through decentralized mechanics of decision making) is quite young, but maybe you know how to upgrade/reinvent it into something new? Maybe capitalism is outdated?
Or not outdated? Elon Musk gave up on expansion of NASA’s budget of $5 bln/year for launches (not even mentioning unimaginable today level of resources allocation like Moon program $1 trln in 10 years 60 years ago) & decided to do every tech in dual (space, not military) use:
– Starlink for $30 bln/year revenue in 2030 to build Starships for Mars at scale,
– The Boring company (for under-earth living due to surface radiation on Mars),
– Hyperloop (failed here on Earth to sustain vacuum but will be fine on Mars with 100x smaller atmosphere pressure),
– Tesla bot for radiation
etc.
I see you somewhat kinda tired of democracy. But maybe it is just about the crisis of presidential democracies (discussed by people like Gaspard Koenig)? Or it is just a capture by bureaucracies?
Or maybe it is just about people’s biology, of all 8 bln. as of now? I mean, any ideas how to live in the world under attack of populists? People do indeed have pre-installed referential adaptations, so they always seek annual incremental improvements of their consumption? And we have growing leverage almost in any country and with any per capita GDP. How should we live with such insatiable people’s expectations? How to live if people usually prefer 1 marshmallow today instead of 2 tomorrow (so-called Stanford marshmallow experiment)
And so on.
Many important questions.
Peter, missing your contrarian and sophisticated optimism within our technological civilization.
Your big fan,
Victor Osyka