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- Peter Thiel on the link between technological progress and the health of our democracy
Peter Thiel on the link between technological progress and the health of our democracy
Thiel explains the famous “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters” quote on the Founders Fund website:
“It was a commentary on technology — we were promised these massive breakthroughs that would transform the way the world works, and then we got incremental communication technologies.”
He continues:
“The striking thing is that we live in a world that doesn’t look that different from the 1980s. We’re looking at screens and distracted by our iPhones all the time, but the iPhones that distract us from our environment also distract us from the way in which our environment strangely hasn’t changed. We’re riding on a 100-year-old subway in New York City. The zoning laws made it so that cities like San Francisco haven’t changed in 50 years and aren’t that technologically advanced.”
Thiel elaborates on why this is such an important problem:
“One of the ways our society — liberal democracy or representative government — works is that you have scientific, technological progress going on in the background. You have growth and the pie is growing. If the pie grows, we can find creative ways to shift the pieces so that everybody gets more. When the pie stops growing and there’s no progress, then you end up in this polarized world with these zero-sum politics — for every winner there’s a loser, and anyone who succeeds is suspected of being part of some kind of racket or something. And so I think there is actually a pretty deep link between this question of scientific and technological progress and the health of our representative democracy.”