Last October I was invited to speak at the Telluride Tech Festival . My topic was the Zen of Productivity and I spoke about the gap between what technology has promised, and what it has actually delivered. The implied promise of technology – as articulated by George Jetson – was that things will get easier, we’ll go faster, and life will get better. And technology delivered. But there were off-setting side effects: because things got easier, we tend to do more, creating a confusion surplus and an attention deficit in everything we do. Because we go faster, everything is blurred – both literally, and figuratively. And because life truly did get better, now we want more and are less satisfied with what we have.
There were about 10 other speakers during the two-day event and they represented a wide range of “technology topics.” But if there was one common theme, it was the “maturation of technology.” In other words, now that we have all these gizmo’s, what are we actually going to do with them? Or, to paraphrase Ellie McPherson, the character in Carl Sagan’s Contact, “How to survive our technological adolescence.”
