How Technology Grows (a Restatement of Definite Optimism)
danwang.co
How Technology Grows (a Restatement of Definite Optimism)
Bill and I have been frequently paired in a variety of venues as pessimist and optimist respectively. Recently a Noble Prize winning panelist dismissed Bill’s concerns, exclaiming that, “we’re not going to see self-replicating nanoengineered entities for a hundred years.” I pointed out that 100 years was indeed a reasonable estimate of the amount o... See more
Ray Kurzweil • The Law of Accelerating Returns « the Kurzweil Library + collections
Technology is not popular nowadays. As I write these words in early 2018, it even appears to be an enemy of our entire way of life: it disrupts whole industries; it displaces jobs; it widens the inequality gap; it endangers our privacy; it undermines the economic security that was at the heart of the post-war social compact; it even threatens democ
... See moreNicolas Colin • Hedge: A Greater Safety Net for the Entrepreneurial Age
Most of the big last gains in software productivity have come from removing artificial barriers that have made the accidental tasks inordinately hard, such as severe hardware constraints, awkward programming languages, lack of machine time. How much of what software engineers now do is still devoted to the accidental, as opposed to the essential? U
... See moreFrederick P. Brooks Jr. • Mythical Man-Month, Anniversary Edition, The: Essays On Software Engineering
