Opinion Piece: The End of the Future
We wanted flying cars, we got 140 Characters — Peter Thiel
What is innovation in technology? To anyone born after 2000, technological advancement has been condemned to incremental improvements in largely software-based products. The incremental progress of thirty-minute delivery to Uber Eats’ fifteen-minute version and the optimization of social media algorithms into dopamine on-call machines, represents a staggering decline in the rate of innovation from the Cold War era. With the current trends of our world, be it climate change or geo-political crises, we will almost certainly need that era to return.
The Great Stagnation
The last 40 years have been characterized by unparalleled economic growth, yet they’ve also coincided with a marked stagnation in innovation. One lens through which to understand the severity of the situation is through the productivity metrics of developed countries following World War 2. There is a strong inverse correlation between price trends and productivity gains in a given sector, which makes logical sense as if you can make a good or service more efficiently, then you should be able to sell it for incrementally lower prices.
What is evident from the figure above is that the price trends for goods and services have sharply diverged from one another since 1950; with services becoming increasingly expensive and goods becoming cheaper. From this, we can infer that the production of goods has benefited most from automation, though globalization and the accompanying decrease in labor costs are also responsible, while productivity in services has stayed stagnant. Overall, technological advances have not been equally distributed and the stagnating fields have become massive capital sinks.
By and large, the most jarring evidence for this comes in the form of the lost half-century of revolutions. In the field of energy, we have had to settle for incremental improvements in the energy efficiency of solar panels while letting nuclear energy languish at the hands of sadistic regulators. Or take medicine, how much capital and talent have we poured into projects like cancer research with little to no actual yield from them? Why is it that in the year 2022, our passenger planes fly slower than they did in 1970 when we put a man on the goddamn moon in 1969? Even when there are breakthroughs, they’re canceled and discontinued for incredibly moronic reasons. Take the Concorde supersonic jet, a jet that could fly from New York to London in under three hours: it was retired due to “noise” complaints and one accident. Imagine for a moment, if the Wright brothers ceased their experimentation and trials after their first crash, what kind of a world would we be living in?
This isn’t to say that innovative and transformative software and hard tech companies haven’t been created. After all, I’m typing this (and I’m sure that you’re reading this) on a machine that was created by one such company. Nonetheless, they don’t come close to the radical advances of the past.
One such advance is the Haber Process, created by Fritz Haber in 1909, it allowed nitrogen to be synthesized from the air to create fertilizer. If it wasn’t for the Haber process, the enormous population growth of 1.6 billion in 1909 to today’s 8 billion would’ve never been possible.
To put this in perspective: the Haber process has facilitated the creation of more people (4 billion) than there are users on Facebook (2.9 billion). Even to the most diehard and addicted Facebook users, the creation of human life is far greater than any social network. This is a baffling statistic considering the notoriety of the respective creations, with Facebook being a global name and the Haber process being largely confined to chemistry textbooks. Still, it is also a symptom of a larger issue: our current technological malaise and the death of the dynamism that once powered it. No other program better illustrates this stark decline than Meta’s reality labs. Reality labs is Meta’s virtual reality division and are more akin to a black hole than Xerox PARC. It is largely representative of the immense spending of big tech companies and illustrates the stark decline in the purchasing power of capital for innovation.
In the 1950s, 20 billion dollars (inflation-adjusted) got you the Manhattan Project — the United States program to produce the first nuclear weapon — whose creation vanquished the empire of Japan and ended World War Two; in 2022 it gets you virtual reality characters with legs.
The Unspoken Bond between Innovation and Warfare
Though innovation is often romanticized as occurring in a Silicon Valley garage or a college research lab, in truth there is a common thread throughout all of history’s greatest achievements: Military backing. Whether it be through just funding or providing the entire operational framework, the quest for ever more destructive weapons has driven the creation of humanity’s greatest technologies. Perhaps, there’s something in humanity’s existential struggle that focuses the mind, nonetheless, the result is the same. This phenomenon has occurred to create such technologies as nuclear energy, computers, and satellites. In the case of computers, it was the need to break Nazi codes that drove them to create a machine capable of processing information faster than any human.
In spite of this storied history of innovation and defense, for the most part, in the modern day, large technology companies and startups alike have both largely shunned working with the department of defense. With the severing of this link, there was an inevitable decline in technological innovation.
While I absolutely understand the perspective that many companies don’t want to see their creations cause harm, that is ultimately a naive notion. Let’s take the example of weaponized drones and autonomous weapons. If your issue is that drone swarms with offensive capabilities shouldn’t exist, fine, but this research isn’t just taking place in the US, it’s taking place across the globe. Even if you applied the most stringent and aggressive regulations towards this sector, all you would be doing is handicap your own military, thereby handing the technological high ground to your adversaries. That is unless you have a way to verifiable halt this research globally in a multilateral way, good luck with that. Though it may seem counterintuitive, the best way to prevent these technologies from being used offensively, be they drones or humanoid robots, is to accelerate their development. After all, deterrence is capability times will, and we can use our status as the sole wielder of this capability to dictate the terms, and thus restrict its use. Think nuclear nonproliferation, would any other major power really have made that their doctrine?
Changing Tides
The radical decline in our capacity to generate new technologies and implement them has also been mirrored in the public view of new technologies and the behavior of venture capitalists. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the areas in which investment has largely flowed, food delivery and crypto, and where it has not gone to, biotech and nuclear energy.
Nuclear is a curious case as it’s a breakthrough technology that sits at the intersection of energy production, warfare, and startups. Though it’s often conflated with nuclear weapons and nuclear war, its ability to function as an energy source is simply incredible. Nuclear power plants can operate regardless of external weather conditions and generate immense electricity relative to their physical footprint. Most importantly, the amount of carbon they emit, rounded to a whole number, and expressed as a percentage of global emissions, is zero. With all of these attributes, you might think that there’d be a nuclear reactor in every major city, or hell, every backyard, but sadly the reality is anything but the case. Since the nuclear “disasters” of Fukushima and Three Mile Island, there has been a persistent global aversion to nuclear energy. It should be noted that these incidents were hardly earth-shattering events, as the UN’s own investigations into the Fukushima incident in 2014 and 2022 found no increase in physical or mental disorders in babies following the accident.
This anti-nuclear fervor spawned the single most draconian regulatory body in the US: the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Since its inception in 1975, not a single new nuclear power plant has been approved to be constructed, which is ludicrous considering how safe and clean nuclear is.
Relative to other forms of energy, nuclear energy is among the safest forms given that the actual risk of a dangerous event occurring is minuscule. Even with this in mind, this once vibrant sector, which was delivering cheap and emission-free energy throughout the world, has been strangled and caged up by onerous regulations.
The stagnation in nuclear power plant construction is among the 20th century’s greatest tragedies if you account for the increased carbon dioxide emissions from their closures and the openings of coal and other fossil fuel plants.
With this tragedy in mind, you might think that VCs with such illustrious mission statements of accelerating the future would be attempting to bring nuclear power back. Though you would be wrong, because why work on reviving a source of carbon-free energy when you could invest in the 89th slightly faster delivery company.
Despite the enormous resources that have been poured into delivery, accompanied by the legions of engineers working on it, for the most part, their efforts have been met with minimal success outside of a few large companies. There are really only a few almost profitable food delivery companies, followed by a trail of startups burning VC dollars and Saudi money.
This also ties into the issue of talent, as tech companies (fueled by VC bucks) have utilized their cash hoards to hoover up as many engineers as possible. The resulting dearth of engineers has deprived other essential fields, be they electrical engineering or biotech, of essential talent which would otherwise fuel their development. It would be misguided to lay the fault with the individual engineers, as it has been the technology industry, driven by the historic misallocation of VC capital (on par with the dot-com bubble given the crypto debacle). On a broader level of technology fields, software has an innate advantage given its incredible operational margins. There is also the innate business model of software being build once and sell forever, as opposed to material companies in which the marginal cost of a new product is always non-zero.
The Future
Though I might be making it out to seem fairly doom and gloom, there are still some incredible bright spots. The current brightest is SpaceX. SpaceX represents the highest possible state of a tech company; whether it’s with its work with NASA on lunar missions, helping the DOD (department of defense) launch satellites, or delivering Starlink (providing underserved rural communities with high-speed internet), SpaceX truly embodies the ethos of innovation.
By and large, SpaceX’s crowning achievement is the sheer scale of its launches. SpaceX’s launches are of course not comparable to that of an entire nation-state, they’re so much better. Though number of launches is often used as a proxy for space capabilities, it often shrouds the true scale of a given program, after all that metric would count the launch of an aircraft carrier as equivalent to a small fishing boat. Therefore total spacecraft upmass (which is the mass of things brought into orbit) is the better indicator of stellar capabilities.
What makes SpaceX even more impressive is that it not only worked with NASA but revived the US space program from a dilapidated carcass with minimal plans to go to the moon, forget mars, to a force gearing up to build a permanent lunar base and land on the red planet. SpaceX epitomizes everything that tech companies could be and is leading the vanguard in restoring the bond between innovation and defense.
The Future is Now
Ultimately, with the cascading crises of climate change and great power conflict on our shores and looming over our skies, we need more tech revolutions, not regulations.
Works Cited
“Fukushima Nuclear Disaster.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 28 Jan. 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_disaster.
Benaich, Nathan. “Meta Reality Labs Is Gonna Cost as Much as the Apollo Space Program, or about 10 Manhattan Projects. Pic.twitter.com/f5aqhaztnw.” Twitter, Twitter, 29 Oct. 2022, https://twitter.com/nathanbenaich/status/1586400993381687298.
Parsonson, Andrew. “SpaceX Rules the Ultimate Roost in Q1.” Payload, 3 Aug. 2022, https://payloadspace.com/spacex-rules-the-ultimate-roost-in-q1/.
Ritchie, Hannah. “What Are the Safest and Cleanest Sources of Energy?” Our World in Data, 10 Feb. 2020, https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy.
Teare, Gené. “Global Venture Funding and Unicorn Creation in 2021 Shattered All Records .” Crunchbase News, 21 Jan. 2022, https://news.crunchbase.com/business/global-vc-funding-unicorns-2021-monthly-recap/.
