We are always at the beginning. Every time I look closer at a wonderful thing being explored right now, I see just a hint of the true potential of the thing. No matter how far we think we’ve come, since the ancient Greeks, the age of enlightenment, the industrial ...
We are always at the beginning. Every time I look closer at a wonderful thing being explored right now, I see just a hint of the true potential of the thing. No matter how far we think we’ve come, since the ancient Greeks, the age of enlightenment, the industrial revolution, since the dawn of the rocket age and the computer age, all of that put together just paints a hazy impressionist picture of the potential outcome. Everywhere we look there is technology that, while often not as new as we think, is about to offer rapid change to our world. The roots of things like AI and 3d printing are older than you think, but what we can do with them is just at the very start of a explosion of application that hasn’t been seen since the steam engine and widespread electricity. At the same time, these technological changes will alter our society and culture in ways that we’ve never seen. None of the tech booms of the past will compare to what could be getting underway right now.
We are always at the beginning. People still do awful things to each other. I just read a story about a group of people kidnapping and beating a mentally disabled young man. They will be charged with a hate crime, in part because of the racial epithets they used at they
live streamed
the event on Facebook. To me, things like this, the war in Syria, all of it, sits like a rock in my gut. This repeated cycle of hate a violence, mistrust and abuse is a failure of civilization. It’s a failure of us being better than our gut-level instinct and emotional reactions might want us to be. If we can’t avoid giving in to violent reactions and if we, as a civilization, can’t learn to avoid the inequality, hopelessness, and rage that leads people to act out or allows them to be mislead, we will fail.