A good friend of mine invited me to a party hosted by Palantir Technologies this week. At that party, Peter Thiel - co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies amongst others - shared his thoughts on the future of technology and innovation in a dinner speech.

In his talk, Peter explored the idea that perhaps technology, and our view of future technology has stalled. It was an interesting dichotomy, sitting in Silicon Valley, arguably the center of technology innovation, hearing a technology pioneer talk about how technology has stalled.

Thinking about it some more, he's got a really good point. We used to think about the future differently - if you look at popular culture from the 1960's - the Jetson's being one example - we used to have a very Utopian view of the future. We would all live in automated houses, have robots as servants, fly around in our cars, etc.

But somewhere along the way, a lot of our 'innovation' turned back onto itself. For example:

Look at the recent trend of 'retro' styling in the automotive industry. The Mustang, Camaro, Beetle, etc all were re-designed with a strong influence on their original designs.

In the high-end denim industry, the most sought after jeans are developed with a process called selvage. This process was the original way to produce denim; it was actually phased out in the 1950's in favor of more modern techniques.

The M14 rifle was phased out by the US military as the standard infantry rifle in 1970. Yet, when we needed a longer range, harder hitting caliber in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was the venerable M14 that was brought back into duty. The M14 is a great rifle mind you, but its basic design is over 50 years old - where's the innovation? Mind you, the standard infantry rifle, the M16/M4, is not much newer, it's basic design is about 50 years old too.

Those are just a few examples, I'm sure there are many more. It's worrisome to think that as a society we might have reached some peak and are now looking back to rekindle our past.

What I enjoyed about Peter's talk is that it is inspiring to think about pushing past that peak and re-capturing some of that pioneering spirit again.

Anyways, just wanted to share some ramblings about a fun evening I was fortunate to be part of.