It’s not the strangeness of new technologies that frightens us but the way technology threatens to make us strangers to ourselves. In a semi-Freudian spirit, then, I’d like to propose that where Frankenstein and its spawn are concerned, our fear of the unknown may really be about our discomfort with knowing.
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I think the obvious thing to do with one computer per planet is fix climate change before it destroys agriculture and leaves billions of people to starve. That seems like a fairly reasonable kind of an objective. You know, there are all kinds of little optimizations you could do with these things, but fundamentally the big unsolved challenges that humanity faces are climate change and resource scarcity.
Just as this country did a hundred years ago, it’s time to rethink the basic bargain between workers and companies. As greater wealth is generated by new technology, how can we ensure that the workers who support the economy can actually share in the wealth?
One of the ways that industrial revolutions are interesting to think about is that they look differently depending on how and where you see them from. They look different whether you see them from Europe or Asia or Africa. But regardless of time or place, economists and historians generally tend to look at industrial revolutions through the lens of innovation. And in my short talk today I want to encourage a different way of thinking about this.