Gigaom AI Minute – February 11

Transcript

Technology news, in fact all news, carries a nonstop narrative of technophobia, with headlines such as, "Is a robot coming for your job?" "Why the future doesn't need you," "Artificial intelligence, a threat to humanity," "Your children will live in a world with no jobs," and so forth. This, of course, stands in stark contrast to what technology has actually delivered: longer life expectancy, higher standards of living, increased infant mortality, more access to information. Knowledge is, in fact, power. The power to make your life better. And technology provides knowledge.

There seems to be this huge disconnect between what technology has delivered to the world, and what people are afraid it's going to do. I wish that the net result of this was simply academic, that it didn't really matter, and that, hey it sold newspapers so it created some jobs along the way. But, it turns out that psychologists, at least some, believe that fear mongering harms children. That children who are subjected to long term, low grade stress and fear end up with brain damage that can cause them to lose ten or more IQ points. It has another effect on adults that is similar, called Dark Cloud Syndrome, and it's an idea that the world is far darker than reality, in fact, warrants.

Technology has within it, the ability to make a better world, but when the prevailing narrative is that technology is likely to destroy the world, this is a real impediment to progress, and in a way it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.