PERSON
Peter Thiel
The contrarian who helped build the consensus machine—whose frameworks for genuine novelty, definite vision, and autonomous desire are the sharpest instruments available for asking whether anything genuinely new is happening in AI, and whether the civilization producing it is still capable of the progress it claims to embody.
Peter Thiel made his fortune on a single conviction and then spent a decade publicly doubting it. He co-founded PayPal, made the first major outside investment in Facebook, and built ventures in defense and data analytics premised on the proposition that radical newness is possible—that a person can create what did not exist and capture enormous value by doing so. Then, having profited from this proposition, he argued that the developed world had largely stopped producing it. His compressed formulation is famous: we were promised flying cars and instead got 140 characters. The argument beneath it is not. With the conspicuous exception of computing, he claims, fundamental progress slowed dramatically around 1970 and never recovered—the
AI scaling era being either the exception that breaks the stagnation or its apotheosis, the screen so miraculous that no one notices the physical world stopped moving. From René Girard he absorbed a theory