Technology Reveals Who We Are, Not the Future

Singularity.FM

I recorded this virtual keynote for a corporate client about 10 days ago and decided to share it publicly. Hope you enjoy it 😉 Technology is a Mirror, Not a Crystal Ball; It Reveals Who We Are, Not the Future The 1st atomic bomb was nicknamed “gadget.” Does this say something about who we are? Or does it say something about the nature of technology and the power to do good or evil? Today we live in a universe of ever-more-powerful gadgets and humanity has never wielded more technological power because we live in the most scientifically advanced century in the history of our civilization. The paradox, however, is that ours is also the most dangerous century not only for countless other species going extinct but also for our own existence. But how can that be? Isn’t technology good both for us and the world in general? And, most importantly, what can we do about this? Those are the questions I want to focus on today. But I want to begin by sharing a personal story. In 2016, my wife Julie and I took a road trip through California. Needless to say, Los Angeles and San Francisco were among our points of interest. Now, if you were going by car as we were, chances are that the very first thing you will see upon entering LA is those makeshift camps of tens of thousands of homeless Americans. Well, 2 years before our trip, Peter Diamandis published his best-seller “Abundance” and told us that the future is better than we think. In it, Diamandis claimed that we can solve all of humanity’s grand challenges with enough capital, technology, and “the right people” – whom Peter titled the new Technophilantropists. And, yet, there we were, in his hometown, in the one place in the world with probably the highest concentration of all of the above, and we witnessed shocking poverty, high rates of crime and homelessness, severe drought, environmental destruction, and crumbling infrastructure. I got so shocked that I decided to do some research. Only to get even more shocked in discovering that if you calculate the cost of living the “Golden State” of California, is, in fact, America’s poorest, because perhaps 1 out of 4 live at or below the poverty line. So while California has the 5th largest economy in the world and the largest in the US, according to McKinsey’s, it ranks 46th among the states for opportunity, 43rd for fiscal stability, and dead last for quality of life. This paradoxical situation raises many important questions. For example: How is it that poorer countries such as Canada, which have less access to advanced technology and much fewer billionaires, somehow end up having a happier, healthier, and longer-living population, free health care, lower crime rates, and lower degree of homelessness? Peter claims his 3 requirements for abundance will help us solve humanity’s grand challenges but the current COVID19 challenge provides more shocking evidence against his claim. Because the United States has 2 ½ times the Canadian death rate. And this leads us to the 3 most popular myths about technology: The 1st myth is the myth of Tech Utopia or what Diamandis calls Abundance. That the future is better than we think. Read the rest here: https://www.singularityweblog.com/technology-reveals/