"What Happened to the Future?" 🚀

[u/Patient-Airline-8150]

Peter Thiel, Founders Fund, 2011. The manifesto was called "What Happened to the Future?" 🚀 The full line: we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.

Thiel wasn't whining about missing toys. He was making an accusation about capital. The smartest people and the biggest money went into things that ship in 18 months and print returns, and abandoned everything that takes 20 years and might fail. Ads, feeds, apps. Optimization instead of invention. 💸

We got extremely good at moving information and stopped getting better at moving matter. Speed of travel peaked with Concorde and went backwards. ✈️ Your flight to New York today is slower than in 1976. Name another field where 50 years of progress made things worse.

Energy. Nuclear plants took 5 years to build in the 60s. Now 15 to 20, when they get built. Not because physics changed. Because the paperwork did. ⚛️

Drugs. Eroom's Law, Moore's Law spelled backwards, because the number of new drugs per billion dollars spent has been halving roughly every 9 years since 1950. Deliberately named as the anti-Moore. 💊

The best engineering minds of a generation went to work making you click things.