Larry Page once opened the door for me as I went to have lunch in Google's canteen. I think I said Thank You but otherwise we didn't speak. I was visiting to discuss co-operation.
And this week, another Google personality has got me thinking. Not about what to have for my free lunch but about progress. That other "googler" (a normal employee being a "googlee") is Eric Schmidt being interviewed by McKinsey. I like the interview, especially as I don't think he mentions Big Data once!
About a year ago, a close friend brought some of his grandchildren to stay. We had a great time but one rather precocious youngster had an annoying habit of shouting "It's not fair", if she didn't get her own way. She shouted a lot, until my wife told her that life isn't fair and she had better get used to it. She shouted a little less after that.
So how do you build a bridge between such a brat and my friend's grandchild?
Well - you ask MIT, of course.
Erik Brynjolfsson (MIT Prof) co-authored a book (short title Race Against the Machine, followed by a longer, worthier codicil) about how technology is marginalising mankind. This gloomy assessment is mine but, in less than 100 pages, the book paints a pretty bleak picture - offering only truisms as hope. Schmidt uses less threatening language and talks about Man not "against" but "with" the Machine, with computers becoming quasi-friends.
I tend towards Schmidt and I am sure that will make him sleep better at night. In getting to understand robotics better, I looked at the implications of Technology Singularity Theory - easy version stating that humankind gets overtaken by machines by around 2050. I coined My Best Friend's a Robot to describe my positive view on how this would impact the future.
Erik and Eric both make another valuable point - that progress does not by definition reward everyone. Indeed, progress will tend to reward fewer and fewer people with more and more. As Orwell said "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others".
So that young lady was right after all - it is indeed not fair.
But that is how it has to be. We need to recognise and over-reward innovation and step-function change. That creates egos and, occasionally, monsters. Against these latter beasts, we need to protect ourselves.
Over the weekend, I saw a brilliant old movie. It's called The Man in the White Suit - excuse for some sound effects - and tells the story of a chemist who invents a fabric that never gets dirty and never wears out. The really interesting thing is how big business and ordinary workers unite to destroy the invention. The film shows how hard it is sometimes to know who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.
Alongside such shifts, we need more than ever to work on societal solutions that recognise that growing the economic pie is unlikely to benefit us all and will likely rather create bigger divisions between richer and poorer - dixit OECD Report. That is indeed the biggest challenge that technology will bring in the next 20-30 years.
The problem is that we are not always good at solving problems this big - tending to quick-fixes and band-aids. Maybe we just need to wait a while and ask a computer for the answer? Or a Big Brother? Or maybe a poet?
FWIW
Nar is a Dutch word for a fool - something of an English court jester. The jester was a critical position at court. The Nar was the only person able to make fun of the King, and live to tell the tale. Through the Nar's buffoonery, the King could gently be educated - sometimes to be told he was not wearing kingly clothes before others found out!
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