Community Corner
A PROVOCATIVE EXCERPT FROM PETER THIEL'S NEW BOOK: ZERO TO ONE
Thiel makes the case that technology needs to catch up to globalization...the stakes are high.
Most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more. Without technological change, if China doubles it’s energy production over the next two decades, it will also double its air pollution. If every one of India’s hundreds of millions of households were to live the way Americans already do ----using only today’s tools--the result would be environmentally catastrophic. Spreading old ways to create wealth around the world will result in devastation, not riches. In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.
New technology has never been an automatic feature of history. Our ancestors lived in static, zero-sum societies where success meant seizing things from others. They created new sources of wealth only rarely, and in the long run they could never create enough to save the average person from an extremely hard life. Then, after 10,000 years of fitful advance from primitive agriculture to medieval windmills and 16th century astrolabes, the modern world suddenly experienced relentless technological progress from the advent of the steam engine in the 1760’s all the way up to about 1970. As a result, we have inherited a richer society than any previous generation would have been able to imagine.
Any generation exception our parents’ and grandparents’, that is: in the late 1960’s, they expected this progress to continue. They looked forward to a four-day workweek, energy too cheap to meter, and vacations on the moon. But it didn’t happen. The smartphones that distract us from our surroundings also distract us from the fact that our surroundings are strangely old: only computers and communications have improved dramatically since midcentury. That doesn’t mean our parents were wrong to imagine a better future---they were only wrong to expect it as something automatic. Today our challenge is to both imagine and create the new technologies that can make the 21st century more peaceful and prosperous than the 20th.
