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Question 5: Air and Disruptive Technologies
This book was written just before the iPhone came out, and we have now gone through social media and now AI. How does this book tackle the issue of disruptive technologies and their impacts on society and the people that live in it? Did it do a good job of looking ahead to some of the challenges we have already gone through and continue to face with something like AI or did the unlikely nature of some of the tech create too much of a disconnect from reality?
Comments
I thought it did very well considering the time it came out - sufficiently so that many of the points seem kind of obvious now!
As mentioned in a different thread, although I wasn't convinced by the alluded-to theoretical underpinnings of technological Air, that didn't bother me as regards the development of the story Air.
I think in may ways is was remarkably prescient. I did think it did a good (if narrow!) job at examining the impacts of changing tech in general and applying this examination to what felt like real people far from the centres of change. It did not at all tackle who benefits from disruptive change or ask if we want or need it.
Again, I can't add anything to the two previous replies. I agree totally with both.
Agreed, I touched on this already elsewhere, but the way it laid out how employing highly disruptive tech (evenm if the tech was essentially fantasy in the way it operated) without really caring about the consequences, and then trying to clean up the mess as you go, was not a great way to approach things, feels like we have people who should be reading this book (though I suspect they would take the entirely wrong messages from it).
I had to keep reminding myself when the book was written because it just felt to pertinent to some of the ways we are messing up in this regards right now.
It also did a great job in my kind of pointing out how technology like this might change a lot about society, but crappy people will still be crappy people (or vice versa)