I want to encourage you to read Rich Karlgaard’s interview of George Gilder at Forbes. Here’s a snippet:
In my last book, The Scandal of Money, I talk about governments having forgotten what money is for and how it works. As a result, they’re issuing more and more of it, on the assumption that somehow money constitutes wealth, instead of realizing that money measures wealth. Now, the biggest industry in the world economy is the $5.1 trillion per day currency-trading carnival, which, in the end, doesn’t even yield stable currencies. It doesn’t even provide a measuring stick for entrepreneurial activities. So I think it’s perfectly possible for people to blind themselves to the real sources of their progress and prosperity.
Other topics discussed include that technology isn’t inevitable, the importance of changes at the margin, consolidation, blockchain, student loans, Elon Musk (“the Elmer Gantry of Silicon Valley”, an apposite characterization), “nerd fascism”, peak Google, artificial intelligence, and autonomous vehicles. My favorite passage from the interview is this:
The advances in machine learning that Google trumpets and preens about are really just advances in the speed of processing. The Google guys woke up with a Moore’s Law bonanza from the chip industry and imagined that they had invented it.
Gordon Moore himself has said that Moore’s Law is running out of gas.
Nerd fascism, will have to add that to my vocabulary. Scientism remends me of the old trots who after invoking the dialectic dismissed all criticism as unscientific.