Fear mongering tends to be the default pattern with new technologies — they get scapegoated for society’s current problems.

The fact of the matter is that people have been complaining about new communication technologies since forever.

The Luddites were a 19th century group of English textile workers who opposed new technology. As a means of protesting technological progress, they’re best known for destroying the textile machines on which they worked.

People love an idealized version of nature. They like nature without lions roaming, or nature that’s somehow replete with western medicine, a fast internet connection, and a warm bed at night to sleep in.

What luddites fail to realize is that humans are, in their very nature, a technological species. We build tools to make our lives easier and better.

The simple fact is that how we used to live may have fit a world of 10 million people but won’t fit a world of 8 billion.

once you get technology growth going, it's pretty hard to stop it from eating the world. It’s hard to tell billions of people who want access to food and clean water and warm beds that there's no more room.

Another example of luddism is around job-loss. Sure, every tech revolution has destroyed old jobs (farmers have gone from 70% to 2% of our economy, for example), but every revolution has created more jobs than they destroyed.

Human needs are infinite.

Not only does technology create more jobs, but better ones too. We automate the boring and painful parts of the job so we get to do more meaningful work

That’s not to say we shouldn’t make it easier for people to re-skill, relocate if needed, and recover via a strong safety net. We should.

from that came a radically new way of thinking about the world, the idea that our ancestors laid the foundation we could build on top of, based on the premise that we could build better things than our ancestors in the first place. This mentality created the world we have today

One way to move past nostalgia and embrace the future is to realize that everything about us, from the clothing we wear and the music we listen to, to the technology we use — every single thing we are and do is something that a previous generation thought was bad.

Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things