People always underestimate the impact of technology. To give you an example: In the 1970s the frontier for offshore development was 200 meters, today it is 4,000 meters.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Technology advances at exponential rates, and human institutions and societies do not. They adapt at much slower rates. Those gaps get wider and wider.
If you look at the history of technology over a couple hundred years, it's all about time compression and making the globe smaller. It's had positive effects, all the ones that we know. So we're much less likely to have the kind of terrible misunderstandings that led to World War I, for example.
It's not just the effect of technology on the environment, on religion, on the economic structure, on society, on politics, etc. It's that everything now exists in technology to the point where technology is the new and comprehensive host of nature of life.
Personally, I believe that government, rather than money, tends to be the primary factor limiting the development of new technologies.
For much of this decade, both Congressional and administration budget projections showed a decline in science and technology accounts of between 20 and 30 percent in real dollars. The real impact to date has been far less severe.
Technology is the fashion of the '90s. It affects everyone, and everyone is interested in it - either from fear of being left behind or because they have a real need to use technology.
Innovation and disruption are the hallmarks of the technology world, and hardly a moment passes when we are not thinking, doing, or talking about these topics.
When we assess the impact of technological changes, we tend to downplay things that happened a while ago.
If anything, the impact of digital technology is creating bigger brands and bigger superstars.
A technological advance of a major sort almost always is overestimated in the short run for its consequences - and underestimated in the long run.