Looking at the stars

I spent much of yesterday talking to people at the MIT Media Lab, and then much of today talking to people at the Bose Corporation. In both places, we spend most of our time talking about possibilities for the future.

Of course those possibilities are not all roses and sunlight. After all, as our access to ever advancing technologies increases, there is a concomitant increase in opportunities for invasions of privacy, identity theft, and other social ills we might not yet even have words for.

As with all technological advancements, with great power comes great responsibility (thank you, uncle Ben). With that idea firmly in mind, while we did discuss the very real potential pitfalls of advancing communication technology, our conversations mostly steered toward the positive.

People are marvelous and terrible creatures. We humans have so much potential for either good or evil, and things can go very wrong. Yet I find myself siding with that great observer of human nature, Oscar Wilde: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

2 thoughts on “Looking at the stars”

  1. Tom: Thanks so much for catching that!!! I was in a meeting with somebody named Joe just before posting that, and mind-slippage happened. Fixed now!

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