It may not always be profitable at first for businesses to be online, but it is certainly going to be unprofitable not to be online.
Esther DysonRead
Part of the problem is when we bring in a new technology we expect it to be perfect in a way that we don't expect the world that we're familiar with to be perfect.
Interpretation
We often hold new technology to a standard of perfection that we don't apply to the current world.
In this quote, Esther Dyson reflects on the unrealistic expectations we often have for new technologies. She points out that while we judge new innovations harshly, we tend to overlook the imperfections of the existing systems and realities around us, highlighting a cognitive bias that can hinder the acceptance and integration of new solutions into our lives.
In practice
During a tech conference, to explain the challenges of implementing new systems.
It may not always be profitable at first for businesses to be online, but it is certainly going to be unprofitable not to be online.
The nature of business and government has been to build a surplus and self-perpetuate, but the Internet fosters and rewards smaller, more fluid organizations.
Encryption...is a powerful defensive weapon for free people. It offers a technical guarantee of privacy, regardless of who is running the government... It's hard to think of a more powerful, less dangerous tool for liberty.
I am much less concerned with whatever it is technology may be doing to people that what people are choosing to do to one another through technology. Facebook's reduction of people to predictively modeled profiles and investment banking's convolution of the marketplace into an algorithmic battleground were not the choices of machines.
I invented nothing new. I simply combined the inventions of others into a car. Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed.
The next great technology revolution might be around the corner, but it won't automatically improve most people's lives. That will depend on politics, which is indeed ugly but also inescapable.
The future is already upon us, it is just unevenly distributed.
What can we do to create shared prosperity? The answer is not to try to slow down technology. Instead of racing against the machine, we need to learn to race with the machine.
I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.
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