Course lectures "Startup". Peter Thiel. Stanford 2012. Session 19

In the spring of 2012, Peter Thiel ( Peter Thiel ), one of the founders of PayPal and the first investor of Facebook, held a course in Stanford - “Startup”. Before starting, Thiel stated: "If I do my job correctly, this will be the last subject you will have to study."



One of the students of the lecture recorded and laid out a transcript . In this case, mg1 translates the nineteenth lesson, the editor astropilot .



Session 1: Future Challenge

Activity 2: Again, like in 1999?

Session 3: Value Systems

Lesson 4: The Last Turn Advantage

Session 5: Mafia Mechanics

Activity 6: Thiel's Law

Activity 7: Follow the Money

Session 8: Idea Presentation (Pitch)

Lesson 9: Everything is ready, but will they come?

Lesson 10: After Web 2.0

Session 11: Secrets

Session 12: War and Peace

Lesson 13: You are not a lottery ticket

Session 14: Ecology as a Worldview

Session 15: Back to the Future

Session 16: Understanding

Session 17: Deep Thoughts

Session 18: Founder — Sacrifice or God

Session 19: Stagnation or Singularity?



During the class three guests joined the conversation:

1. Sonya Harrison , Technical Analyst, author of 100 Plus: How to Coming Aging , and co-founder of Singularity University
2. Michael Vassar , futurologist, former president of the Singularity Institute for the Study of Artificial Intelligence (SIAI)
3. Dr. Aubrey de Gray , expert in gerontology and director of science at the SENS Foundation .

Session 19 - Stagnation or Singularity?

I. Perspectives

Peter Thiel : Let's start with the fact that each of you will outline his vision of what technological changes await us in the next 30 or 40 years.

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Michael Vassar : It is much easier to talk about how the world will be in 30 years than about how it will be in 40. A period of thirty years seems to be observable. Today we have gone from how to calculate one or two genes, to calculate the full human genome, and it costs thousands of dollars. Paul Allen is now conducting an experiment on $ 500 million, which seems to be going well. The path traveled by technology is both breathtaking and frightening.



Imagine that in 30 years we will have computing powers that are more than a million times modern and whose algorithms are a hundred times more efficient. At that moment, we will come close to being able to simulate the brain and all that. And after that everything will turn out.



But such progress over the next 30 years is by no means something that can be taken for granted. Overcoming bottlenecks — for example, energy constraints — will be difficult. If we do this, we will be at the very end of the road. But I guess this path will not be so smooth.



Aubrey de Gray : We have a clear idea of ​​what technologies can be developed, but much more vague ideas about the timing of their development.



Perhaps it will be only 25 years, and we will be able to reach the second cosmic velocity.



But this assumption has two caveats: first, it is a question of the substantial resources that are required for development, and second, even in this case, the chances are 50 to 50; those. we have about a 50 percent chance of reaching the goal. But there is about a 10 percent chance of not achieving the goal in the next 100 years or so.



In a sense, all this does not matter. The vagueness of timing should not affect the prioritization. We must do what we do, no matter what.



If you look at such approaches to artificial intelligence, then you will understand that in order to succeed, you need to have at the same time an excellent understanding of how the world works and much greater computational power.



They are valuable even with a 10 percent chance of success over the next 30 years.



We must understand that we will have to consider very difficult approaches. Planning technology development is not easy. In essence, this is the process of pushing apart the boundaries of the unknown and planning manipulations over nature, begun with incomplete knowledge of nature at the starting point.



Achieving a full-scale download — and its timing — is so speculative that it probably makes no sense to talk about it as something really plausible. But our priorities should remain the same: develop revolutionary technologies in biotech, computing, hardware, etc.



Sonya Harrison : Most of the time I do biotech, so I will talk about this segment in the first place. It is clear that biology is very quickly turning into an engineering problem.



I became interested in biotech several years ago, when my friends from IT started buying books on biology. They believed that the next big thing in programming would almost certainly be biology, not computers. Now this view has become mainstream. Bill Gates once said the same thing, along with the rest. The best engineers go to biotech. After 30 or 40 years, the approach to biology as an engineering discipline can radically transform the world. There is a feeling that genomics is developing faster than Moore’s law says.



Prices are falling. The calculation of the first human genome cost about three billion dollars. Now it can be done for about $ 1,000.



In the field of genome compilation, work has been done that allows one to study all kinds of genomes that organisms only have, and this opens up a lot of possibilities. Today, the main complaints come down to the fact that, despite the fact that the first human genome was obtained in 2000, 12 years later, not much has been done in the direction of new interpretations or treatment methods based on this technology.



The position of such critics is rather weak because they overlook an important thing: for most of this 12-year period, genome computing was so expensive that only very few scientists could use the genome in their work. Of course, now that prices have fallen seriously, this barrier is also falling.



Something will definitely happen - because people continue to work on radically new things. Gene therapy as a method of treatment looks promising.



Perhaps we can develop new types of fuel. Kickstarter has a project for combining firefly genes and oak genes. The result should be trees that will glow.



This is more than just a cool idea - perhaps you are using these glowing trees to light the streets instead of street lights. It's great. And there is much more than anything that we now can not even imagine. Very much can happen and will happen at the junction of biology and engineering.



Of the things that are not related to biotech, moving online training seems to be able to radically change the scope of training. Things like Stanford artificial intelligence, Udacity , Khan Academy - we don’t know exactly how it all ends, but it can be argued that there are a lot of things that are expected on this front.



Peter Thiel : Let's get the cultural component involved: why do most people think you are crazy?



Michael Vassar : Having an opinion about the future - it looks strange in any case.



Only a very small minority tries to imagine the future, even the nearest. Perhaps because thinking about the future is somewhat uncomfortable and difficult. People prefer to work with models in which there is only one variable, and everything else remains in the same state. Of course, we know that this is nonsense, because the world is different. But it serves to simplify. Reasoning in such a simplified way, we can focus on one thing and work together. Spraying 100 unknowns in some sense would deprive us of this dynamic.



But thinking about the future is very important, and this is what can isolate you.

Suspension from people means fewer people you can talk to. Less common common meanings remain; people no longer understand where you got this from.



But this does not mean that people believe in something different from what we believe. Usually not. Usually you do not face the fact that someone is sharply opposed to your dissimilarity. Perhaps those who are turned on the idea of ​​global warming or apocalypse are really firmly convinced that other views on the future are unacceptable. But most don't think too much about it all. What is perceived as madness is not the content of views, but rather the very fact of putting faith in the first place.



Aubrey de Gray : I disagree somewhat. People somehow tend to have some idea of ​​the future. This is usually an expectation of relative stagnation.



People tend to think not only that most things will not change, but that even what will change will not change too quickly. People who criticize my point of view in biotechnology and aging, for example, do not recognize bad logical steps and do not capture significant points. On the contrary, they prefer not to believe in what I am saying, because this contradicts their penchant for stagnation. They leave completely convinced that progress in anti-aging technologies and life expectancy will never be accelerated. And it is amazing.



I try and contrast this, drawing attention to the fact that if you had to ask someone in 1900 how long it would take in 1950 to cross the Atlantic, they would predict based on the speed trajectories of ocean liners. They could not have foreseen the appearance of the aircraft. That is, they would be mistaken in calculations by orders of magnitude. Of course, everyone knows how much technological change has taken place in recent centuries and decades. Everyone knows what the Internet has done in recent years. But there is a big reluctance to use any of this as a precedent for what might or may happen in the future.



This can be approached from the point of view of desirability. The fear of the unknown is a very deep-seated emotion. When people are faced with radically new judgments, they tend to think that things will go wrong. It is very difficult for people to consider the reasonable possibility of implementing such scenarios, so they exaggerate the risks. More rational approaches to the discussion disappear.



Sonya Harrison : I note that no one considers me crazy.



Peter Thiel : You masquerade well ...



Sonya Harrison : Well, it’s hard to call me “crazy” because I’m focused on technology based on reality. I write about the cultivation of artificial tissues, regenerative medicine, the disclosure of secrets of nature, for example. This all exists now, and continues to evolve, and, I believe, is really changing the world. There are three reasons why people have problems with this.



First, they do not understand this. Secondly, they do not believe it. Third, they fear it.



Think for a second about the trees-lanterns. Some people are only excited by the idea itself. This is very different from what it is now. Some react automatically, without really thinking: “Do not interfere in nature! Do not play with God! ”Such a reaction can be understood, but it blocks the road to progress. This is not the best reaction. Often it is not productive.



Peter Thiel : Then the best approach is to ignore these people?



Sonya Harrison : Than ignore, it is better to train them. It is important to communicate things in an accessible language. Technology that people don't understand is often more like magic. And the magic is scary.



But if you clarify - “this is responsible for this” - you can “sell” this idea to them. This is just a question of explaining the benefits and cost. “It will force out fossil fuels,” for example, can be one of the convincing lines of argument in favor of firefly-tree street lamps.



Peter Thiel : There is a very interesting case that we are likely to see unprecedented or accelerating progress in the coming decades.



So why not just sit down, get some popcorn and enjoy the show?



Another aspect of this question is this: in the book of R. Kurzweil “Singularity is already close” ( The Singularity is Near ), progress follows an exponential growth curve. This is a law of nature. In a certain sense, a singularity happens regardless of what certain people are doing for its appearance right now.



The assumption was that there will always be enough people who are trying to do something new, so personally you don’t need to do anything, and you can just wait for something to happen by itself. Is there anything wrong with this argument?



Aubrey de Gray : Yes. The role is played not only by the fact that technologies are developing.



When they develop it is no less important. Take, for example, the fight against aging. About 150,000 people die every day. About 100,000 of these deaths occur from old age. (Probably, about 90% of deaths in western countries are due to old age). That is, every day that you do not hesitate, save 100,000 lives. From this point of view, it does not matter how inevitable the singularity is.



The fact that it is inevitable is a poor consolation for people who are dying or losing their loved ones now. We want to conquer aging with the help of medicine as soon as possible, for the simple reason that the sooner we achieve this, the greater the number of sufferers we will alleviate the suffering.



Michael Vassar : I completely agree. It is important to work towards the realization of benefits and the avoidance of harm. Inevitability can be double-edged: sometimes you want it to come (if it has good consequences), and sometimes you don’t want something to happen. By focusing on the inevitable, you can lose a lot of other important things. If death is inevitable or seems so, then we will assume that all of us will die sooner or later, but still there is some chance of survival, and we must fight for it. In addition, popcorn is bad. Although, I think Aubrey could have figured out how to make him not so harmful ...



Sonya Harrison : It’s dangerous to focus only on inevitability, because it allows people to become complacent about bad systems that are already being used ... People can ignore a lot of perverse incentives that often interfere with or demotivate scientists working on radical technologies. Too few people think about how the FDA (US Food and Drug Administration) at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), without the consent of which the drugs cannot be put on the market, .transfer.) can block very important developments. If all this happens in any case, then there is much less sense in reforming what we have now, that is, we can better understand our goals. But of course, such a reform is extreme It is necessary, and it will not happen if we do not work on it.



Peter Thiel : Well, so who do you think will do this? Who will forge our technological future?



Michael Vassar : You. (laughs)



Peter Thiel : (pause) Michael ... you are supposed to motivate people in this audience ...



Michael Vassar : But I'm serious. There are few such people. You, Elon, Sean ...



Sonya Harrison : In my opinion, innovation comes from two sources: top down and bottom up. There is a huge DIY community in biology. These lovers work in laboratories that they have set up in their kitchens and basements. At the other end of the spectrum is the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency); the agency that seeks and finances promising technology projects — which spends a lot of money trying to bring out new organisms.



Scientists from different countries communicate with each other, working together on complex projects in the field of biology. And this interconnectedness plays a very important role. Together, these interactions will bring about the necessary changes.



Aubrey de Gray : Disagree. My answer is Oprah Winfrey.



Yes, there are few people like Peter. There are very few such divining people who can really make important changes at the early stage of project formation. But there are still quite a few people with a way of thinking, like Peter, who do not. This does not mean that these people do not understand the problem or importance of technology. They all understand this very well. But they are constrained by public opinion. They may not be able to clearly explain it to themselves ... But they can feel the emotional blockade that other people are raising around them. A good financial situation does not mean that you are not afraid when people laugh at you. Many potential soothsayers refrain from actions only because they do not resist the pressure of society. That is why those who form the opinion of the majority are so critically important. It is possible that no other group of people can do more for the revolutionary technologies of the future.



Overpowering public resistance and influencing discourse, these people can encourage anyone to build technology. If we can change public opinion, major benefactors can launch this mechanism.



Michael Vassar : I do not think that progress will be initiated from above or below, well, really. Individual patrons who focus on specific things, such as Paul Allen, of course, do a good job. But they do not really accelerate the future; they are more accelerating a separate stream in the hope that this will accelerate the arrival of the future.



The feeling is that these people do not compare the clocks with each other. Historically, the top-down approach does not work. And the bottom-up approach too. Changes occur somewhere in the middle - communities such as Quakers, royal society or founding fathers (meaning the group of politicians who founded the United States, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founding_Fathers_of_the_United_States - approx. Transl.) These effective groups had a few dozen or several hundred members. Almost never geniuses working alone.



And these are almost never defense departments or large institutions. You need dependency and trust. These features can not be in one person or among millions.



Peter Thiel : There are three points of view on who defines the future: the combination of "top down" and "bottom up", the creators of public opinion and community. Let's work with the idea of ​​Michael about the community. Imagine that this is just a small group of people working in the technology field who are promoting their ideas.



Aubrey de Gray : I think the community argument is correct. Michael is right that one person will not change anything. Here a lot depends on the infrastructure. In biology, work costs a decent amount of money. Algorithm development can also be quite expensive. People need to build themselves into a network of cash flows, no matter whether it comes to funding from business, philanthropists or the public.But the really radical technologies discussed in this lesson are so early that the help of philanthropists will probably play a key role for some time. This can change quickly if these technologies make great progress and more people see commercial viability in them. When public opinion changes, people who want to be elected will finance the things that the public wants, and we will see that these things will be financed more.



Sonya Harrison : In a sense, the desire to see only one source of progress is wrong. Progress may occur, and usually does, from many areas. Things are interconnected. Ideas grow out of each other, and often ideas that seem unfit can work later.



Question from the audience: We know that progress has been made in the past. But quite rarely, this progress looked the way people had supposed at the beginning. So how do you know that your statements about how progress will be made in the future are true? What do you think about the conventional wisdom that “most discussions about the future are either fantasies or crap”?



Michael Vassar : People used to predict the future in a fairly specific way. Imagine you are looking for oil. This implies a rather specific forecast: there is so much oil in such a place, which will end in so many years. The majority of people stopped doing this. The recent science fiction is going to do a little more than the science fiction of the past.



It was usually difficult to predict the distant future. It may be relatively easy to predict what will happen by the end of the 2020s, based on previous experience. But it is extraordinarily difficult to make any statements about the year 2040.



Before the era of film and mass media, people knew how to predict the future much better. They used logic and trend analysis, not something that looks cool on the big screen. Current forecasts of the future are more aimed at looking more likely than making reasonable and accurate forecasts.



Look at things like Neal Stevenson in “Avalanche” - there is some kind of good abstraction here, some of which is satire. Many details that probably won't be like this in the late 2020s. But we can perceive them to be as reasonable as the Kurtzwel descriptions of the possible future of technology.



Sonya Harrison : This question ultimately says, “Okay, a lot of people in the past were wrong about the future, so why do we have to talk about it at all now?” This is nonsense. Yes, people will be wrong. But we are not talking about speculations from the series “finger in the sky”. We are talking about what is now and repelled by this. This is not science fiction. Gene technology and therapy already exist.



Yes, we can create viable code, as Craig Venter demonstrated . The question is how long it will take, and how quickly we can move forward. These are questions that are difficult to answer. But this does not mean that you should not think about it. We have to think about it. The fact that people have different points of view does not devalue the project.



Question from the audience: Will the future be a scientific or engineering problem?



Aubrey de Gray : If you put the question this way, then we are exactly in the middle. In medicine and computing, for example, we see a transition from research and science based approaches to an engineering approach.



Michael Vassar : Science is more important than engineering.



But it's easier to talk about the latter. That is, someone must use engineering to remove 99.9% of people who have no idea what is going on. But then this one must plunge into science with the remaining 0.1%. This is where the successes will come from.



Sonya Harrison: There is still the problem of knowledge aggregation. It is difficult or impossible for one person to know everything. And it turns out that people do not know what others are doing, so sometimes they work on the same or something redundant. With the help of computers, you can better organize knowledge, whether they are science or engineering.



Question from the audience : In the field of iron, Moore's law seems to retain its relevance. But in the software field, the development and collaboration process seems to improve only linearly. Is this a problem of searching for means of acceleration or are we dealing with some hidden limit in this area?



Michael Vassar: Linear growth opportunities will help you overcome major barriers. There is a feedback circle. Linear growth can be enough to control the process, speed it up and get positive feedback to see the changes that will lead to exponential growth. And then you return to linear growth. This is true, probably, for all psychology and artificial intelligence (which, in fact, is psychological engineering).



Peter Thiel : We know that time planning is very important in practice.

Therefore, at that very time when we do not know exactly when the revolutionary technologies of the future will be embodied, time planning plays a very big role. This is all science fiction, which only resembles the truth, and maybe it does not make sense to work on it now. It will be like the Chinese who tried to launch a rocket in the 11th century. Nobody worked and could not work on supersonic flights in the middle ages.



Aubrey di gray: I do not think that the aspect of time is so critical. On the way to the final goal, there should always be intermediate points. In the 11th century, the goal could be to fly to the moon. But the technology then allowed only, say, off one foot from the ground. That is, at that time you could get an advanced degree if you developed a system that would allow you to get 10 feet off the ground.



That is, the question is which paths will lead to the final goal, and which will not. We must recognize the good ways and give them the green light. But without a long-term goal, you will not be able to organize a competitive path and you will never achieve anything.



Peter ThielA: So, perhaps, a goal for 20 years ahead with many intermediate goals is a good approach. The problem is that the more milestones, the more abstract the question of goal reachability becomes.



Aubrey de Gray : You have to watch it come and avoid making bad turns. And there are more humanistic reasons for looking at things more widely.



We have to remember that 100,000 lives are saved every day due to the fact that the solution to the problem of aging appears earlier. In this light, 20 years is much better than 21.



Sonia Harrison: People are usually scared off by a goal that seems too difficult or impossible. We cannot see in every tireless seer. That is, a demonstration of the chances of success is the key thing. We can grow blood vessels, tracheas and bladders in laboratories. So we can get to the hearts. Demonstration of intermediate steps is the key to success, because without them fewer people will be fascinated by the prospects of growing new hearts.



Michael Vassar : Apollo Projectwas a giant project 10 years in length, which absorbed many technologies. That was over 40 years ago. In this case, we probably will not even be able to go to the moon anymore. The creation of the US Constitution was an incredible success. The founding fathers knew how to do this. They wrote based on a specific socio-economic and technological context. They were not going to write a comprehensive guide for the world at all times. And yet, when we seize power in Arab countries today, we simply repeat our constitution. We have no idea how to do what the founding fathers did 200 years ago. We have lost the ability to make a system that is so elaborate in terms of cultural nuances. Applied history is greatly undervalued.



Question from the audience: No tendency exists without any restrictions. Where is the asymptote of the future? At what point do we reach the limits of the physical world? How long is the exponential growth, and at what point does it end?



Michael Vassar : It's hard to say where it ends. It is possible that not yet - there is still a lot to be done. If something happens x times in a row, and there are no other variables, the only way to think about the chance that it will happen again is to evaluate it using the formula (x + 1) / (x + 2). This is a very rude reception, but it can be quite useful.



Aubrey di gray: Kurzweil assumes you get S-curves. But these curves can be replaced by new S-curves, and each time the paradigm will be improved. Glue all these curves together, and you get an S-shaped megacock. Obviously, within the physical laws this is the limit to which you can move. But we have not gotten to these problems yet.



Sonya Harrison : In a sense, things slow down. But it normal.Necessity begets all inventions. There will be other things that you can do. There will always be a new exponential curve.



Audience question : We at the Stanford Transhumanist Association are interested in an open dialogue about the effects of technological change, and we do a lot of research on how basic emotions, such as fear or empathy, affect a person’s technology assessment. What, in your opinion, are the most effective ways to get people interested in transhumanism ideas?



Sonya HarrisonA: Sometimes you can just appeal to humanity. Some aspects of transhumanism, if well understood, could alleviate so much suffering. Some questions very well fall into this category. Therefore, if you correctly label them, the output will be asked for itself. No one wants increased suffering.



Other things do not fit well in this plane. There are things that only look revolutionary new - we may think that they are wonderful, but for others it is not. The emotional argument in such things is that people must be free to be personal. But the moment of fear is very important. Many people are afraid of freedom. That is, the problem lies deeper.



Michael Vassar: You can appeal to the human sense of amazement. If you have talked to those who suffer from Alzheimer's disease or some mental illness, you might feel that they are missing something. Also, like all of us. The gap between them and us is negligible. We may be missing a lot of things. Shouldn't we try and fix it in order to lose less?

Ii. Final Thoughts (by Peter Thiel)

This course was mainly devoted to the transition from zero to one. We talked a lot about how to create new technologies, and how radically improved technologies can bring a singularity closer. But we can use much more tools to go from zero to one. Every new thing in the world contains something important from the point of view of singularity. Whether you are creating a new company or making a key decision in your life, this is a miniature singularity. In reality, each person’s life is a singularity.



The obvious question is what do you do with your singularity.



The obvious answer, unfortunately, is to go the beaten track. You are constantly encouraged to reinsure and be ordinary. The future we talked about is only probabilities and statistics. You are only part of the statistics.



But the obvious answer is wrong. It's like selling yourself on the cheap. Statistical processes, the law of large numbers and globalization - these things are timeless, derived from probability theory and, possibly, random.

But, like technology, your life is a story that consists of events that occur only once.



By its nature, singular events are difficult to study and generalize. But the big secret is that there are a lot of unsolved little secrets left. There are still a lot of white spots on the map of human knowledge.You can explore them. So go and fill in these white spots. Literally every moment is an opportunity to go to these new places and explore them.



There is, in all likelihood, no special time that is necessarily the right one to start your own company or your life. But some moments seem more favorable than others. Now is the moment. If you do not take responsibility and do not open up to meet the future, if you do not take responsibility for your life, there is a feeling that no one will do it.



So go in search of your frontiers and explore them. Decide to do something important and different from everything. Do not limit yourself to the concepts of “luck”, “impossible” or “useless”. Use your power to build your own life, go and do new things.



Note :

I ask translation errors and spelling in lichku. Translated mg1 , editor AstroPilot , all thanks to them.