The world I wanted to live and work in when I was a teenager is just beginning to emerge. Electric vehicles, Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence are all beginning to reach a level of usefulness that I expected to spend my adult life working with. This is somewhat disappointing since it’s about 30 years behind schedule, but I’ll take it.
Other aspects of this word seem to have moved backward. Culturally, socially and philosophically we seem to have slid backward thirty years or more, and it’s easy to get dragged down by this, because it feels like advances in technology are meaningless if we are loosing what makes us human.
I don’t think you have to trade one for the other, technology for humanity, although this is often how the situation is portrayed. I think the reason for this has more to do with the financial binding between these two forces, and we forget or are simply ignorant to the fact that this binding is artificial, a system we volunteer to persist.
So I choose to focus on realizing the positive potential of these tools, and hope that by doing so, in an open, collaborative way and with the intent of making them as accessible to as many people as possible, will offset the power invested in maintaining the status quo.
We simply have to build the world we want faster than they can take it down.
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- Jason