One of the great ones, a former student of mine, gets a hearty shout out from Marginal Revolution today.I’ll leave it for readers to evaluate the ideas Dan summarizes there. Per usual, as much as I think I agree with the general gist of the argument, I think there are also reasons to be worried about how much we really understand what is going on in technology and why. Note, too, that this topic can easily go off the rails and devolve into a game of picking political sides as explanations for what is potentially going on. You can imagine the left arguing that we’ve starved the basic research funding beast (in many ways I agree with that). You can see the right arguing that the brutal regulatory and tax environment is responsible, and I’d find reason to agree with that. But it’s complicated, as is most stuff.
Well worth considering.
“Note, too, that this topic can easily go off the rails and devolve into a game of picking political sides as explanations for what is potentially going on.” –––> Yes.
In one of his talks to a political audience Thiel resolutely *refused* to talk about the “why,” only the “what.” “These things get immediately ideological, and I’d rather focus on what’s actually happening to technology.”