No Thanks

I go back to something the great Andy Grove said about the microprocessor. A reporter asked whether it was good or bad and Andy said: "That's the wrong question. That's like asking whether or not steel is good or bad. It just is. The right question is 'how do we make it good.'"

I hear the “automation is destiny” argument all the time—especially in Silicon Valley, where people tend to talk about technological progress as a speeding train we either have to climb aboard or get run over by—and I get why it’s tempting to believe. For a long time, I believed it myself. But it’s wrong. And deep down, we all know it’s wrong. From... See more

This is technology’s second philosophy, and it is orthogonal to the other: the expectation is not that the computer does your work for you, but rather that the computer enables you to do your work better and more efficiently. And, with this philosophy, comes a different take on responsibility. Pichai, in the opening of Google’s keynote, acknowledge... See more