Expand Your Mind: Food for Thought
by Miki Saxon
I have only two items for you today, not because they are longer than typical, but because I hope they will stimulate your mind as they did mine.
First, a provocative essay from Andy Grove, Intel’s legendary CEO, now retired, but obviously not from thinking. In it, he explains why startups aren’t really an engine for job growth what actually needs to happen.
[New York Times columnist Thomas L.] Friedman is wrong. Startups are a wonderful thing, but they cannot by themselves increase tech employment. Equally important is what comes after that mythical moment of creation in the garage, as technology goes from prototype to mass production. This is the phase where companies scale up. They work out design details, figure out how to make things affordably, build factories, and hire people by the thousands. Scaling is hard work but necessary to make innovation matter.
The scaling process is no longer happening in the U.S. And as long as that’s the case, plowing capital into young companies that build their factories elsewhere will continue to yield a bad return in terms of American jobs.
Now for the real mind bender.
Are you familiar with the Singularity?
…the arrival of the Singularity — a time, possibly just a couple decades from now, when a superior intelligence will dominate and life will take on an altered form that we can’t predict or comprehend in our current, limited state.
At that point, the Singularity holds, human beings and machines will so effortlessly and elegantly merge that poor health, the ravages of old age and even death itself will all be things of the past.
Some of Silicon Valley’s smartest and wealthiest people have embraced the Singularity.
Read the article, read some of the links, think about the pragmatic, ethical, moral and religious aspects, then come back and share your thoughts.
Flickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pedroelcarvalho/2812091311/
