There’s a small but lucrative industry made up of people who argue that technology is bad for us and we should stop it, as if these assertions and suggestions are useful. A much more sensible approach from Tom Foremski at ZDNet:

“We have at our disposal immense, irrepressible technologies of mass abundance, yet we constantly seek to muzzle them, to create sustainable economies that are only sustainable within the GDP metrics that made sense in the past.

It doesn’t add up, it doesn’t make sense, and it’s because we don’t have the language and the concepts to even begin to know how to talk about living in a world that celebrates the end of work, the fruits of thousands of years of progress.

Yet we insist that 7 billion people work, or else they are failures, failed societies, failed countries, failed economies. The Internet is helping to create a lot failed economies, it’s what it does best.

Our technologies overall, replace more jobs than they create, that’s why they are successful. Don’t look to Silicon Valley to create tens of milions of jobs, unless they are replacing hundreds of millions of jobs elsewhere. That’s what Washington DC and all other governments don’t understand about innovation.

We need a new way of understanding the future and coming to terms with it on its terms — and not those from our past way of thinking. That’s going to be hugely difficult but we need to start now. 

Predicting the future is easy, figuring out how we live in it is much harder.”