No Limits to Growth

Over the course of the last few years I resolved the cognitive dissonance between my short term pessimism about the economy and my personal optimism about humanity, the technology world I inhabit and about my life and of that of my friends in general. I realized that over the long run, as painful as recessions are and as long as sovereign debt crisis take to play out, the overall tidal wave of technology driven productivity growth is bound to transform our lives for the better. This will happen sooner than most suspect and can be accelerated by applying best practice economic policies from around the world as I documented in The Economy: An Optimistic Thought Experiment.

I have been spending more time thinking and researching the future of late. The process has made me increasingly optimistic. My upcoming keynotes at Techcrunch Disrupt in Rome, NOAH in London and LeWeb in Paris will present the case for optimism. They will showcase inevitable upcoming technology change that will transform our lives as profoundly as the computer, cell phone and the Internet have transformed our lives over the past 30 years.

Coincidentally my good friend Einat Wilf introduced me to an article written by Tsvi Bisk. He is a former senior researcher for the Labor Party in Israel, is the author of “The Future of Constitutionalism” and director of the Center for Strategic Futurist Thinking. He wrote a very compelling article on the case for optimism in The World Future Review.