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Co-Founder of PayPal Peter Thiel: Society Is Hostile To Science and Technology
dcblogs writes Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, billionaire investor and author, says "we live in a financial, capitalistic age, we do not live in a scientific or technological age. We live in a period where people generally dislike science and technology. Our culture dislikes it, our government dislikes it. The easiest way to see "how hostile our society is to technology" is to look at Hollywood. Movies "all show technology that doesn't work, that ... kills people, that it is bad for the world," said Thiel. He argues that corporations and the U.S. government are failing at complex planning.
The man simply doesn't understand the need for conflict in a plot. If you have a movie about a super computer, there needs to be something to work against. The computer takes over or fails spectacularly. This in no way indicates that this is society's view of computers.
Obviously, most of society loves those technologies that make their lives easier.
What people don't love is anything that requires of them a higher level of mental effort. Things like safe password management, for example. Similarly, if being of above-average intelligence means you can more greatly utilize available technological resources to give yourself greater success, then everyone really hates that, and hates you while they are at it. For example, they don't want to have to learn to code, because that's hard. So they dislike the fact that they might have to learn to code (or maybe master Excel or similar) in order to pull the kind of income you can pull.
Lastly, they hate having their favorite myths challenged by scientific progress, especially when understanding why the science behind whatever it is they don't like is actually solid requires them to do a lot of study and hard-thinking (like understanding the philosophical foundation of, and practical necessities that drive, the expensive details of the scientific method (such as the need for control groups and Large Hadron Colliders)). THAT is way too much work, and the people who do this are way too arrogant, and so the things they create will necessarily doom us all, so we would be better off without the lot of it.
The problem with corporate taxation is that it's based on profit, not income. Personal tax is always income based - imagine if you were only taxed on the income you didn't manage to spend each year! If corporate tax was based on income, it would be commensurable (and would presumably also be a much lower rate). Corporate INCOME tax would also make all these tax dodges irrelevant, since they work only because companies manipulate their profit.
When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s science culture was popular in the US. People looked forward to new discoveries and gadgets and careers in science. Big industry did need to be restrained by environmentalists and that did mostly work in the US. Then young people got seduced by higher paying jobs in finance, an industry that doesnt really create much else than money.
When I travel in China I see the pro-science and technology attitudes of my youth. It i s refreshing.