I'm not sure what's unclear about what he's saying.
a) Harvard is a pure signaling mechanism that doesn't provide education as much as exclusionary credentials.
b) AI/Big data is a way to solve the economic calculation problem that was once seen as one of the main theoretical hurdles against communism. That a country like China favors AI and punishes crypto tells you something (that it's a communist dictatorship).
I also liked the fact that he points out he'd like to see innovation not just "in some iPhone app" but more broadly in different fields.
I think this is a good point, there isn't enough going on in other areas, like he said people ride the 100 year old subway distracted by their iPhones not realizing the world around them is unchanging mostly.
It's true in some ways, who will build or even demand the better faster subways of the future if 99% of the people don't even realize they're on the subway.
Yup. To be fair, that's a point he's been making for ~10 years about the world of atoms and world of bits dichotomy.
I think it's also, in part, subtly caused by our narrow understanding of the word "technology" to be "software made in Silicon Valley" as opposed to a broader "tool that serves a human purpose."
If we broadened that understanding, we could see engineers applying their skills to problems that would be just as lucrative, but could be more legitimately called "innovative" than working on the umpteenth marginal "tech" app.
Well, but China doesn't use AI to centrally plan the details of its economy. Corporations, prices, and competition are undisputed features of the economy there. Whether you want to call it communist or not, the computational problem is still as intractable as ever. There's a difference between monitoring and regulating society with computers and solving the classical economic calculation problem.
And Harvard is a way for elites to network, but that's not merely arbitrary signalling - it depends on how those elites are selected.
Sure. Thiel is proposing a model. All models are wrong, some are useful, and so on. His models happen to be interesting to people who like to think in more contrarian ways. That doesn't make them right, and we can debate their merit, of course. But it hardly makes them impossible to understand.
That China hasn't solved the economic calculation problem yet is plain to see, and I don't think that's quite what Thiel is saying. He's talking about the principles and the mindset behind the support for AI, as well as its ramifications in terms of the type of society it can produce asymptotically.
No one said Harvard's signalling was arbitrary. It's a very clear signal. Thiel's point is that that signal has nothing to do with "higher education".
"well as its ramifications in terms of the type of society it can produce asymptotically."
My assertion is that it can't though. That's because the complexity of even a fairly small entity makes the number of the particles in the universe look infinitesimal.
"In 2016, Adam Yedidia and Scott Aaronson obtained the first (explicit) upper bound on the minimum n for which Σ(n) is unprovable in ZFC. To do so they constructed a 7910-state[2] Turing machine whose behavior cannot be proven based on the usual axioms of set theory (Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice), under reasonable consistency hypotheses (stationary Ramsey property).[3][4] This was later reduced to 1919 states, with the dependency on the stationary Ramsey property eliminated."
To me, granted I have only a vague idea of the meaning of the above, that's saying that "solving the economic calculation problem" (society having more than 1919 moving parts) is not just beyond physical limits of the amount of matter in the universe that could be used for computation. It's not just beyond the physical laws that we think we know, like a FTL spaceship would be. It's beyond the most fundamental math we have. To me, that's like a third order of infinite impossibility.
And as far as Harvard goes, how can the interaction between students and faculty have nothing to do with higher education? What else is higher education? In every school, people learn from each other, and they interact more than with people at other schools.
I thought I was making it clear I don't care whether China is labeled communist or totalitarian or whatever, nor whether the author labels it so.
My point was that they are not using AI to do the sort of central planning that earlier communists failed at and that economists eventually decided was infeasible. And I don't think there's any prospect of that happening in the forseeable future either.
a) Harvard is a pure signaling mechanism that doesn't provide education as much as exclusionary credentials.
b) AI/Big data is a way to solve the economic calculation problem that was once seen as one of the main theoretical hurdles against communism. That a country like China favors AI and punishes crypto tells you something (that it's a communist dictatorship).
It's pretty straightforward.