A technological advance of a major sort almost always is overestimated in the short run for its consequences - and underestimated in the long run.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Maybe the preoccupation with technological progress has overshadowed our concern with human progress.
The most important advances, the qualitative leaps, are the least predictable. Not even the best scientists predicted the impact of nuclear physics, and everyday consumer items such as the iPhone would have seemed magic back in the 1950s.
When we assess the impact of technological changes, we tend to downplay things that happened a while ago.
Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us.
So many technologies start out with a burst of idealism, democratization, and opportunity, and over time, they close down and become less friendly to entrepreneurship, to innovation, to new ideas. Over time, the companies that become dominant take more out of the ecosystem than they put back in.
The speed at which technology evolves affects everyone; we repeatedly hear that constant innovation is overwhelming for consumers, who struggle to keep pace.
Good, bad or indifferent, if you are not investing in new technology, you are going to be left behind.
We are living, we have long been told, in the Information Age. Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us.
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.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.