Quote of the Day -- Thomas Sowell

The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.

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According to Wikipedia, Thomas Sowell is an American economist, social theorist, and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Sowell has written more than thirty books, and is a National Humanities Medal recipient for innovative scholarship which incorporated history, economics, and political science. Sadly, I had never heard of him until I encountered this quote.

Quote of the Day -- Eric Schmidt

The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had. 

-- Eric Schmidt

Quote of the Day -- Bruce Schneier

Data is the pollution problem of the information age, and protecting privacy is the environmental challenge. 

-- Bruce Schneier

Quote of the Day -- Nicholas Taleb

The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free.

-- Nicholas Taleb

Quote of the Day -- Nicholas Taleb

They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)

-- Nicholas Taleb

Quote of the Day -- Molly Wood

Data is a weapon that can be used in many ways. Facebook is the world's biggest arms dealer.

-- Molly Wood

Quote of the Day -- Cathy O'Neil

It's the Age of the Algorithm and we have arrived unprepared.
-- Cathy O'Neil, mathbabe and author of Weapons of Math Destruction

Digital Disruption

People have bemoaned how fast the world is changing for as long as I can remember. I often marveled at the changes my parents (born in the early 1920's) saw in their lifetimes. The ubiquity of the automobile, air travel, television. And then computers, VCRs, microwaves, cell phones, the Internet. That's a lot to happen in 90 years, and they coped pretty well with the degree of change.

But the changes that technology has wrought in the last 10 to 15 years are of a completely different order of magnitude. Social media, crowd-sourcing, a modern "barter economy." Being connected all the time. The Internet of Things. When we talk about educating our children (or grandchildren), we often hear that the types of jobs many of them will have when they graduate from college don't even exist yet. 

I worked in technology of sorts for my entire career. I consider myself more tech-savvy than most of my contemporaries, but it is definitely a struggle. For most of my career, I could at least understand the value and use of technological advances, but that has become increasingly difficult. And I don't think it is only because I am older. We're seeing a veritable explosion in many many directions. Few people can begin to get their arms around all of it.

Take the list on the graphic above. I've only participated in a few of these (Facebook, Netflix, Apple, Google, Skype). I understand the basics of the others, except for SocietyOne. What in the world is a bank with no money? I struggle to explain the value of Facebook to friends just a few years older than I. And it took me a long time to appreciate how Twitter provides quite different value.

As I watch my grandchildren grow and embrace technology as a given, I wonder a lot about the world that will greet them when they enter college, or when they enter old age. And I wonder about the divide between the digital "have's" and "have not's." Will the gap be unbridgeable? And will the generation gap be similarly vast as our grandchildren reach adulthood. 

Digital disruption. Definitely.