JOHN MCGINNIS

Through writing, Homo sapiens then became the first species to preserve learning, enabling knowledge to grow, ultimately at an exponential pace. Collective learning over time then became the source of technological improvement, a process that could move much faster than evolution.

Gun control does not decrease gun ownership by criminals but instead reduces their incentives to refrain from violence because it decreases the supply of armed law-abiding citizens who might resist them.

The result [of more rapidly adopting technology] is likely to be more unemployment in the short term and perhaps greater inequality—a recipe for social instability. Economists are right to remind us that workers who are displaced by machine intelligence need not be condemned to long-term idleness. Given the infinite variety of human desires, there is always more work to be done. But society will need to facilitate social structures that help employees face a lifetime of job changes.

The Internet greatly facilitates betting pools called information or prediction markets that permit people to bet on the occurrence of future events. Such markets already gauge election results more accurately than polls do. If legalized and modestly subsidized, they could also foretell many policy results better than politicians or experts alone. We could then better predict the consequences of changes

Abroad, technological change will create even more disruption as the wave of acceleration engulfs societies that have not yet come to terms with the social demands of industrialization, let alone more recent technological change. Mass disorientation can become the source of both national aggression and non-state terrorism—aggression and terrorism made all the more devastating by access to weapons that are not only increasingly powerful but also deployable by ever smaller groups.

Because human nature evolved in an era before collective learning accelerated, we are all fitted to living in a world that does not change much after our formative years.

The technological transformation of society contains within itself the dynamo of its own management, but only if we create laws and regulations to permit the information revolution to wash through our democratic structures.

The central political problem of our time is how to adapt our venerable democracy to the acceleration of the information age. Modern technology creates a supply of new tools for improved governance, but it also creates an urgent demand for putting these tools to use. We need better policies to obtain the benefits of innovation as quickly as possible and to manage the social problems that speedier innovation will inevitably create—from pollution to weapons of mass destruction.

Today technology permits knowledge to bubble up from more dispersed sources that are filtered through more competitive mechanisms, sustaining a more decentralized and accurate system of social discovery. We can acquire general expertise without being beholden to particular experts.

The central political problem of our time is how to adapt our venerable democracy to the acceleration of the information age. Modern technology creates a supply of new tools for improved governance, but it also creates an urgent demand for putting these tools to use. We need better policies to obtain the benefits of innovation as quickly as possible and to manage the social problems that speedier innovation will inevitably create—from pollution to weapons of mass destruction.

The result [of more rapidly adopting technology] is likely to be more unemployment in the short term and perhaps greater inequality—a recipe for social instability. Economists are right to remind us that workers who are displaced by machine intelligence need not be condemned to long-term idleness. Given the infinite variety of human desires, there is always more work to be done. But society will need to facilitate social structures that help employees face a lifetime of job changes.

Today technology permits knowledge to bubble up from more dispersed sources that are filtered through more competitive mechanisms, sustaining a more decentralized and accurate system of social discovery. We can acquire general expertise without being beholden to particular experts.

The technological transformation of society contains within itself the dynamo of its own management, but only if we create laws and regulations to permit the information revolution to wash through our democratic structures.

The Internet greatly facilitates betting pools called information or prediction markets that permit people to bet on the occurrence of future events. Such markets already gauge election results more accurately than polls do. If legalized and modestly subsidized, they could also foretell many policy results better than politicians or experts alone. We could then better predict the consequences of changes

Abroad, technological change will create even more disruption as the wave of acceleration engulfs societies that have not yet come to terms with the social demands of industrialization, let alone more recent technological change. Mass disorientation can become the source of both national aggression and non-state terrorism—aggression and terrorism made all the more devastating by access to weapons that are not only increasingly powerful but also deployable by ever smaller groups.

Through writing, Homo sapiens then became the first species to preserve learning, enabling knowledge to grow, ultimately at an exponential pace. Collective learning over time then became the source of technological improvement, a process that could move much faster than evolution.

Because human nature evolved in an era before collective learning accelerated, we are all fitted to living in a world that does not change much after our formative years.

Gun control does not decrease gun ownership by criminals but instead reduces their incentives to refrain from violence because it decreases the supply of armed law-abiding citizens who might resist them.