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Technology prophet George Gilder believes Silicon Valley’ s innovations benefit only a select few.
Is progress in technology accelerating or decelerating? It is not accelerating. It’ s continuing to advance, of course, but I completely agree with Peter Thiel that technology progress is not inevitable.
What do you mean by that? Recall Margaret Mead’ s story of mariner tribes that once made their living building streamlined canoes to catch fish in huge volumes. Over time, they just forgot how to make the canoes. When Mead found them, they were sitting on the beaches looking at the oceans with no idea that canoes were the solution to their food shortage.
But in our day, learning is stored forever on billions of devices. It’ s not going to disappear. We’ re actually at risk of this kind of amnesia. We forget the real entrepreneurial sources of creativity and progress: invention, summed up in technological progress. It’ s not good to have most of the stock market advance [ coming from ] five companies, which buy back their own stock and buy up the shares of their rivals. I’ m talking about Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon.
How does big tech’ s success hurt innovation? Their success does not represent some fundamental change in technology. It reflects, rather, a vast enlargement of government regulations, rules that really favor big companies. It reflects their capability of lobbying and lawyering and litigating and finding a path through the mazes of rules.
Your next book is called Life After Google. Why that title? I’ m convinced the Google paradigm of massive data centers and artificial-intelligence determinism will be transcended in the next era.
Replaced by...? I’ ll refer you to Gordon Bell’ s law: Every ten years, the rate of progress predicted by Moore’ s Law produces a hundredfold rise in computer cost effectiveness. Which then requires a completely new computer architecture.
Your point being that we’ re now past the ten-year point of Bell’ s Law and the cloud. And lo and behold, a new architecture is arising. It will solve the increasing concentration problem of the internet, which is porous security. It will be millions of small data centers around the world, many of them mobile, all using cryptography and a new computer architecture based on blockchains and other inventions.
Why would Google not see this? Google is trapped by its own illusion. The advances in machine learning that Google trumpets and preens about are really just advances in the speed of processing. When their Go-playing computer can play more Go games in a minute than the whole human race has played through all history, that’ s not a great advance in intelligence. It’ s the same intelligence just accelerated to terahertz speeds. And this creates this illusion for Google and others that machine learning can somehow gain consciousness and usurp humans.
Artificial intelligence evokes both excitement and fear. Elon Musk, for one, is fearful. Musk is a tremendous entrepreneur and a quite stale thinker. When he starts pretending that he’ s an ethical visionary, that human life is just a simulation in a smarter species’ game...
A rather demoralizing view of humanity. It’ s really nuts. It’ s clinically crazy. Silicon Valley should stop trying to make human beings obsolete and figure out how to make them more productive again.
GEORGE GILDER SPOKE WITH RICH KARLGAARD, OUR EDITOR-AT-LARGE AND GLOBAL FUTURIST. THIS INTERVIEW HAS BEEN EDITED AND CONDENSED.
FOR THE EXTENDED CONVERSATION, VISIT FORBES. COM / SITES / RICHKARLGAARD.
UTAH POPULATION: 3.1 MILLION 2016 GROSS STATE PRODUCT: $ 156 BILLION( 3 % GROWTH) GSP PER CAPITA: $ 51,243( RANKS NO. 29 NATIONWIDE) NUMBER OF BILLIONAIRES: 2 RICHEST: JON HUNTSMAN SR. NET WORTH: $ 1.2 BILLION
DESPITE HIS best efforts to give away his wealth, Jon Huntsman Sr. remains extremely rich. He and his foundation have donated $ 1.8 billion— more than 150 % of his current net worth— most prominently to cancer research, having founded an eponymous Salt Lake City institute to study the disease in 1995.( It claims to have identified more cancercausing genes than any other such center in the world.)
Huntsman himself has battled cancer four times, and both his parents died from it— experiences that have given him a clear-eyed view of mortality. When Warren Buffett invited him to sign the Giving Pledge in 2009, Huntsman replied,“ You don’ t have the formula right. It should be 80 %. Why should someone who has $ 5 billion give away only $ 2.5 billion?”
Huntsman, 80, first landed on The Forbes 400 in 1989, 19 years after founding his chemicals firm, Huntsman Corp. Today it’ s a $ 9.7 billion( sales) giant; Huntsman remains a director, having handed the chairmanship to his son Peter in December. Another son, Jon Jr., Utah’ s former governor, is currently the U. S. ambassador to Russia.
RICHEST BY STATE BY LUISA KROLL JONATHAN KOZOWYK FOR FORBES; ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS LYONS
24 | FORBES FEBRUARY 28, 2018