The Liberal Arts Bias vs. The Software-Excitement Bias
Reflecting on the pace of change as 35 approaches
New world navigation
My dad is a psychologist who is 72 years old. My son is an infant who is 7-months old.
On a recent walk with both of them, my thoughts kept darting from the naval ship my dad sailed on in the waning year of the war in Vietnam, to the CRM software that didn’t exist in the 80s and 90s as my dad built his practice, to whether I’ll be dolling out allowances to my son in some crypto currency, to whether he’ll be playing soccer games in the metaverse or on the grass field near our house.
These thoughts reflect what I’ve lately viewed as contradictory impulses around my own approach to new world navigation.
For example, on some days, NFTs strike me as JPEGs with no intrinsic value, fueled by a bazar, faddish consumerism. In other words, a bubble, driven by our deeply programmed capacity for boosterism.
And then on other days, NFTs strike me as a next generation engine of economic creativity, in which wealth flows away from those who broker value and toward those who create value. In other words, an uplifting leap forward, driven by people willing to venture a little ways past the limits of the possible.
I’ve started interpreting these contradictions as representatives of two categories of bias: the liberal arts bias, and the software-excitement bias.
The liberal arts bias
Having received a liberal arts education, I spent a lot of my early life studying history. History teaches us that history repeats itself, and within this simplification, it can be easy to view any new technology dispassionately. It’s just another Perezian cycle of technological irruption, financial frenzy, and then mutual synergy and maturation. It will happen again. We’ve seen this before. Keep calm and carry on.
The software-excitement bias
On the other hand, history also teaches us of the technological inflections that radically transform the human experience. As someone who both loves history and works in the broader software industry, at a time when software is eating the world, I generally view software as both profoundly exciting & profoundly scary. Exciting for its ability to alter human experience, asymmetrically and incrementally. Scary for the same reasons.
Asymmetric & Incremental
By asymmetric, I'm referring to transformational revolutions (e.g. agricultural, industrial, knowledge) which exponentially alter the course of history. As I’ve explored in a prior 2-part (1 & 2) synthesis of Albert Wenger’s World After Capital, the emergence of software is catalyzing the 3rd major convulsion in human history, a moment of transition from industrial era to knowledge era, "as profound as the one which took humanity from the Agrarian Age to the Industrial Age."
By incremental, I'm referring to two things:
First, cycles of high-paying jobs that fuel a robust & global middle-class. There are already more then a billion “knowledge workers,” and over the next decade, it is likely that more than half the world’s population will be middle-class or wealthier.
Second, a steady stream of life-changing products (e.g. personal computers, internet browsers, search engines, social media platforms, smartphones), which are produced and reproduced as technologies cycle through phases of gestation, installation, and deployment.
The engineer & the PC
On our recent walk, I asked my dad how he’s interpreted his own biases around new waves of technology, throughout a lifespan that has so far witnessed the emergence of the interstate highway system, landing on the moon, the advent of PCs & the internet, mobile & social, and now web 3.
He replied with a short story about his own dad — an engineer, who graduated from Georgia Tech and served in WWII as a radio technician. After the war, he gave up his career ambitions as an engineer to stay in post-war Atlanta with the woman he’d fallen in love with and ended up selling life insurance for 40+ years. In his spare time though, he built ham radios, and communicated with people all across the globe from the little basement study he retrofitted. When PCs hit the market in the 1970’s, he was in his early 50’s, and as the PC revolution proliferated, he rejected their intrusion into daily life as too alien for his sensibilities.
My grandfather died at age 80, and it was interesting to both of us that a person who loved network technology throughout his life refused to adopt personal computers with still another 3 decades to live.
I asked my dad about the technology that he’s refused to adopt, and he surprised me again, saying, “you know, I wish I had an AI robot to talk to about neurobiology and quantum physics. And to help with the dishes.”
Approaching 35
In February, I'll turn 34. 35 is approaching.
Douglas Adams had 3 laws of technology which I first came into contact with through Venkatesh Rao, who's referenced them often:
Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
In his recent blog article, Here we Go Again, Venkatesh captured these contradictions perfectly, and concludes with a note-on-the-wall-deserving reminder:
”...Every new wave of technology presents something of a moral challenge. That part doesn’t change. Whether you’re 15, 35, or 47, how you respond to a new tech wave is a test of character.”