The latest episode of Conversations With Bill Kristol features Peter Thiel:
“In this wide-ranging conversation, Peter Thiel discusses the global economy, the state of technology, and the future of computing and artificial intelligence. Thiel argues that we have had less technological innovation over the last few decades and explains one reason is an increasing aversion to risk. Finally, Kristol and Thiel discuss artificial intelligence and the extent to which it might transform our lives,” writes the Foundation for Constitutional Government, the sponsor of the series.
Key excerpts include: On the innovation slowdown
THIEL: Certainly if we went back to say 1968, and you asked where would people have thought the world would be by the year 2016, it’s fallen way short. If you look at the movie Back to the Future, 1985, they went back in time thirty years and things had changed quite a bit from 1955 to 1985. Back to the Future II went from 1985 to 2015, 30 years into the future. That was a world that was supposedly radically different. But I think the actual day to day changes, outside of computers, have been quite modest in those thirty years. I would argue since the 1970s.
On whether we’ve become too risk averse
THIEL: If you look at the word “risk” over the last two hundred years, from 1800 to 2000, it’s sort of a very infrequent word. It’s very rare until about 1970. And then it goes up at an incredibly steep curve. And, it becomes much more common in titles, “how to manage risks,” “how to take risks,” etc. I’ve been wondering whether a lot of talk about risk is actually counterproductive to risk… [I think] its more frequent occurrence is a symptom of a society where less and less good risk taking is actually taking place… There are all these ways where the focus on the processes of “risk minimization” distracts you from substance and ideas, and figuring things out, and of doing new things.
On whether humans should fear artificial intelligence
THIEL: One basic point I always try to make it that it’s not at all obvious why near term AI—so not the way futuristic stuff but the next generation or the generation after that—should be seen as an adversarial [force]. We’re always talking about computers as substitutes for humans and yet the reality is they are very different. Computers are able to do things in this incredible brute-force way. But humans are sometimes able to do more things far more effectively.
On the limits of globalization
THIEL: If I were talking to a young person graduating from college, I would discourage them from working at a big bank in New York, or for McKinsey, the global consulting firm: classic globalization careers. “The Clinton Global Initiative,” that sounds very dated at this point. That’s so 2005. World Economic Forum. All these things have a sort of a dated kind of a feel. This is the “way the future used to be.”
