The Future of Technology is People
Whenever pundits and prognosticators speak about the future of technology, they invariably seem to position it in opposition to people. Tech that will steal jobs, tech that will enslave us, tech that will disconnect us, tech that can kill. Technology and humanity are — to many of these folks — enemies locked in a zero sum battle for resources and control.
But I think this misses the point almost entirely. Technology and people are inseparable. This is true in the most obvious of ways, and even in some that are completely out of left field. If you want to understand the future of technology, you have to understand people. And I believe that framework is the most powerful way to predict the revolutions yet to come.
Let’s look at some of the more important touchstones.
PEOPLE MAKE TECHNOLOGY
This is probably the most obvious, but — almost all technology has humans as its mother and father. There are some advances being made in computer-to-computer creation, but even then, the original algorithm was written by a human. For as long as we have been a species, we’ve created technologies. The people who are inclined to perform that function (entrepreneurs, engineers, artists, etc) are intrinsically motivated to invent new things. They would do this even if the economic incentives were less extreme.
