Most investments these days (even from the govt) are in short-term quick-to-realize projects. If this continues, we'll have endless electronic social playtoys, living as grown-up children in walled gardens, but the 'grand future' would be gone. No spaceflight, no radical new techniques, no new frontiers.
That's why people that are rich and interested in longer-term research, like him, could start a fund to fund more radical and long-term research proposals. Something that was originally the scope of university research, but times change.
I'm all for billionaires using their money to fund research, but that NRO article was so bad that I question his judgement.
1) I don't know what tech slowdown he's talking about. The cost of genome sequencing is falling at faster-than-Moore's law rates; that's probably the most significant growth area right now.
2) Thiel is a Singulatarian [3]; I thought the point of that was that exponential growth is inevitable. It's that coupled with this article that leads me to dub him bipolar. If you believe in the Singularity I presume you believe it will happen with or without any particular pool of money.
3) This paragraph. Maybe sounding like Grampa Simpson is required to get into NRO. And who in their right mind considers Robert Moses and Brasilia good models for anything?
> "towards the end Robert Moses, the great builder of New York City in the 1950s and 1960s, or Oscar Niemeyer, the great architect of Brasilia, belong to a past when people still had concrete ideas about the future. Voters today prefer Victorian houses. Science fiction has collapsed as a literary genre. Men reached the moon in July 1969, and Woodstock began three weeks later. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this was when the hippies took over the country, and when the true cultural war over Progress was lost."
Damn hippies! And here I heard that they helped invent personal computing [1] and saved physics [2].
Most investments these days (even from the govt) are in short-term quick-to-realize projects. If this continues, we'll have endless electronic social playtoys, living as grown-up children in walled gardens, but the 'grand future' would be gone. No spaceflight, no radical new techniques, no new frontiers.
That's why people that are rich and interested in longer-term research, like him, could start a fund to fund more radical and long-term research proposals. Something that was originally the scope of university research, but times change.