Chris Dixon: “We are very early in the development of the internet. Historically, with really major tech breakthroughs, in the first few decades you get first-order effects. The first order effect of the automobile was getting you from one place to another faster. But the really profound things happened in the next phase from second-order effects: suburbs, commuting, highways, trucking, fast food and big box retail, eventually e-commerce, ride sharing, and so on. We are just now entering the second order effects phase of the internet, and it will take many decades to play out.”
FT on nuclear fusion and why the race to harness the power of the sun just sped up: “Advances in technology and funding have sparked optimism in an area that has promised much but delivered little in six decades.”
Atanu Dey: “What is wealth? Anything that is of value. Value is subjective. Therefore there has to be a subject to do the evaluating. The existence of people (sentient, evaluating beings such as us) is prior to the existence of wealth. Before the arrival of Robinson Crusoe, there’s no wealth on the island. After he arrives, he “creates” the wealth by valuing the coconuts, the freshwater streams, the fish. Certainly, he did not “manufacture” the stuff provided by nature. But that stuff became wealth only because he found it to be of some value.” More: “Just a few hundred years ago, no one had trillions of dollars and the average person had a couple of hundred dollars of wealth. Now there are a few people with hundreds of billions and the poorest person has a few thousands. I would rather take my chances with a world with the extreme wealth disparity of the kind we have today rather than in a world with little disparity but with extreme poverty. I may envy the rich of today but I look forward to a world with no poverty if that means there are extremely wealthy people.”
