Future of Crypto Currency and boom in Ethereum Mining - 2018

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THE 10-Q
RICHEST BY STATE
A NEW GILDED AGE
Technology prophet George Gilder
believes Silicon Valley’s innovations
benefit only a select few.
Is progress in technology accelerating or
decelerating?
It is not accelerating. It’s continuing to advance,
of course, but I completely agree with
Peter Thiel that technology progress is not
inevitable.
What do you mean by that?
Recall Margaret Mead’s story of mariner tribes
that once made their living building streamlined
canoes to catch fish in huge volumes.
Over time, they just forgot how to make the
canoes. When Mead found them, they were
sitting on the beaches looking at the oceans
with no idea that canoes were the solution to
their food shortage.
But in our day, learning is stored forever on billions
of devices. It’s not going to disappear.
We’re actually at risk of this kind of amnesia.
We forget the real entrepreneurial sources of
creativity and progress: invention, summed up
in technological progress. It’s not good to have
most of the stock market advance [coming
from] five companies, which buy back their
own stock and buy up the shares of their rivals.
I’m talking about Google, Apple, Facebook,
Microsoft and Amazon.
How does big tech’s success hurt innovation?
Their success does not represent some fundamental
change in technology. It reflects, rather,
a vast enlargement of government regulations,
rules that really favor big companies.
It reflects their capability
of lobbying and lawyering and
litigating and finding a path
through the mazes of rules.
Your next book is called Life After
Google. Why that title?
I’m convinced the Google paradigm
of massive data centers and
artificial-intelligence determinism
will be transcended in the next era.
Replaced by . . . ?
I’ll refer you to Gordon Bell’s
law: Every ten years, the rate of
progress predicted by Moore’s
Law produces a hundredfold rise
in computer cost effectiveness.
Which then requires a completely
new computer architecture.
Your point being that we’re now past
the ten-year point of Bell’s Law and
the cloud.
And lo and behold, a new architecture
is arising. It will solve the increasing
concentration problem of the internet,
which is porous security. It will be millions of
small data centers around the world, many of
them mobile, all using cryptography and a new
computer architecture based on blockchains
and other inventions.
Why would Google not see this?
Google is trapped by its own illusion. The
advances in machine learning that Google
trumpets and preens about are really just advances
in the speed of processing. When their
Go-playing computer can play more Go games
in a minute than the whole human race has
played through all history, that’s not a great
advance in intelligence. It’s the same intelligence
just accelerated to terahertz speeds.
And this creates this illusion for Google and
others that machine learning can somehow
gain consciousness and usurp humans.
Artificial intelligence evokes both excitement and
fear. Elon Musk, for one, is fearful.
Musk is a tremendous entrepreneur and a quite
stale thinker. When he starts pretending that
he’s an ethical visionary, that human life is just
a simulation in a smarter species’ game . . .
A rather demoralizing view of humanity.
It’s really nuts. It’s clinically crazy. Silicon
Valley should stop trying to make human
beings obsolete and figure out how to make
them more productive again.
GEORGE GILDER SPOKE WITH RICH KARLGAARD, OUR EDITOR-AT-LARGE
AND GLOBAL FUTURIST. THIS INTERVIEW HAS BEEN EDITED AND CONDENSED.
FOR THE EXTENDED CONVERSATION, VISIT FORBES.COM/SITES/RICHKARLGAARD.
UTAH
POPULATION: 3.1 MILLION
2016 GROSS STATE PRODUCT:
$156 BILLION (3% GROWTH)
GSP PER CAPITA: $51,243
(RANKS NO. 29 NATIONWIDE)
NUMBER OF BILLIONAIRES: 2
RICHEST:
JON HUNTSMAN SR.
NET WORTH: $1.2 BILLION
DESPITE HIS best efforts to give away
his wealth, Jon Huntsman Sr. remains
extremely rich. He and his foundation
have donated $1.8 billion—more than
150% of his current net worth—most
prominently to cancer research, having
founded an eponymous Salt Lake City
institute to study the disease in 1995. (It
claims to have identified more cancercausing
genes than any other such center
in the world.)
Huntsman himself has battled cancer
four times, and both his parents
died from it—experiences that have
given him a clear-eyed view of mortality.
When Warren Buffett invited him to
sign the Giving Pledge in 2009, Huntsman
replied, “You don’t have the formula
right. It should be 80%. Why should
someone who has $5 billion give away
only $2.5 billion?”
Huntsman, 80, first landed on The
Forbes 400 in 1989, 19 years after founding
his chemicals firm, Huntsman Corp.
Today it’s a $9.7 billion (sales) giant;
Huntsman remains a director, having
handed the chairmanship to his son
Peter in December. Another son, Jon Jr.,
Utah’s former governor, is currently the
U.S. ambassador to Russia.
RICHEST BY STATE BY LUISA KROLL
JONATHAN KOZOWYK FOR FORBES; ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS LYONS
24 | FORBES FEBRUARY 28, 2018