Innovation can be scary. It changes established orders, makes jobs obsolete, creates new risks to our privacy or even safety.
But to obsess on the negative is to miss the overwhelming positives.
- NPR recently shared this story of how 3D printers are bringing better, and vastly cheaper, prosthetic limbs to adults and children.
- Progress in gene therapy looks like it will cure a form of inherited blindness. They figure that out and my wife gets to see her daughters’ faces for the first time in her life.
- One of the founders of my angel group is backing a startup with a treatment for an extremely lethal form of brain cancer who’s initial trials are extremely promising.
If we get to caught of in technophobia, it will cost us the progresses I highlighted above and thousands more. Innovation has both pros and cons, and both must be weighed. BUT, we must remember that us humans are programmed to weigh negative outcomes more heavily than positive.
If you want more, check out some articles on techno panic by the great Jeff Jarvis.
Post originally published on http://paulgsilva.wordpress.com/