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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