Macroeconomics and Singularity
Where singularity is concerned, there are four possible futures. The singularity will either happen or not happen, and this will be either good or bad for mankind. I will focus on the quadrant that we are tempted to ignore: the singularity doesn’t happen, and that non-event is bad news.
In many ways, people in the 1960s expected a dazzling future that never arrived. While we can all mourn the lack of the flying cars we were promised, we face a more urgent problem. Most economic decisions today implicitly count on a tech singularity. If this expectation is wrong, the consequences will be worse than people think. A world without progress would be a scary place.
Biographies: Peter Thiel
Peter Thiel is president of Clarium, a global macro hedge fund. He is also the founder and chairman of Palantir Technologies, a national security software firm, and a founding investor and board member of Facebook, which serves more than 200 million active users. He helps launch many other new technology companies as a founder and partner of the Founders Fund. Previously, he was founder and CEO of PayPal, which manages more than 175 million financial accounts.
Mr. Thiel has philosophy and law degrees from Stanford University, where he occasionally teaches on globalization and sovereignty and serves on the board of overseers of the Hoover Institution. He funds research in artificial intelligence and life extension technologies.
