Who am I, and why am I an optimist?
I am an Aussie, living in the beautiful San Francisco bay area for the past 8 years, and while this place has changed me in so many ways, it has not been the thing that has made me an optimist – that has been with me for as long as I can remember.
Back when I first started using technology, I was wide eyed with what I was using, and even then I had this imagination that would run wild and come up with ideas that were decades before they would come into reality: the internet, neuralink, web services, and others that are escaping me right now.
Settle down, you didn’t invent those things!
Indeed! I want to be clear that I in no way went on to invent any of these things – my ability to do the actual work that is required to invent is sadly not there. While I am on the autism spectrum – seemlingly a pre-requisite to come up with some of the great ideas – my ability to do the deep analytical work, to develop the code, to create the mathematical and data structures required to turn ideas into reality is not there. I have the ideas, I can see them in my head and it comes naturally to me, building them does not.
Ok, you’re getting off track, how does any of this make you an optimist?
Because I have seen how technology has improved the quality of people’s lives in ways that are truly unimaginable – powering healthcare, autonomous driving (it’s still early however as it evolves, millions of lives will be saved through reduction in avoidable accidents), social media (it’s going through serious growing pains today, that said it’s ability to connect across geographies, time zones, cultures, languages and identities cannot be underestimated), and this is really just the start. Mobile telephony, online shopping, logistics, media streaming, voice assistants, AI (current GPT-3 is the big deal out there), EV and the list just goes on and on. Every one of these either has or will change the world as we know it, and i’m optimistic can help solve the biggest problems of today and beyond (climate change of course being the biggest one as a write this).
So what now?
Well, just like any other privileged, white, male in his 40’s I believe that my voice and everything that I have to say demands an audience. Thankfully i’m not even remotely talented enough for any of this BS to be published anywhere – but that’s ok, because the purpose of this is to make me accountable to myself and to write about things that I see and think about. Maybe one day I can come back here and see if all those ‘ideas’ that I think I have actually turn into reality.
Adam