Live From eDay: Ben Hammersley

Ben Hammersley, a globe-trotting lunatic in a kilt and wearing army boots, has some deeper insights in the way life is going. He’s been around the world and apparently he’s quite the rebel. Tune in for some thoughts:

We’re undergoing a new Renaissace. The original Renaissance was a time of great change, a time of new technologies and great breakthroughs in art, sciences and medicin. Let’s talk about human development.

Art, for example: ‘caveman goes shopping’ - a suggestive drawing of a wall painting from the Stone Age, picturing a caveman who pushes a shopping cart. Human development is a thing that is going up and down in cycles. From cave-painting to Michael Angelo’s “The David”. There’s a rate of change. A rise and a fall. Things start up pretty low down, blossom up and then go back down again. After the Romans, we had the Dark Age; After the Dark Age, we had the Renaissace…. and so on until today.

Something weird is happening today and has been happening over the past ten or fifteen years. The human society is undergoing a change that has never happened before in the history of human beings. Technology has always been a bit self-limiting, up until today. Computers aren’t like horses. At first horses were wild and unpredictable until some started domesticating them and then saddle them so they became means of transport. Computers are unique. You use today’s computers to produce tomorrow’s computers. You never get to the point like with the horse where you reach the maximum of its capacity, and unless you started breeding them with five legs, that’s the end of that.

We’ve got a technology that can’t slow down, it’ll only get better, it builds upon itself. IT changes everything else in our lives. It’s a chain reaction.

“Information Technology builds upon itself and facilitates every other type of progress.”

A new form of collaboration: a new set of challenges for everyone. It’s like being Gallileo’s best friend. Our grand kids are going to sit on our knees and we’ll get to tell what the internet was like when it first started.

The point: we’re lucky bastards, we’re at the beginning of a new revolution. We get to see it evolve. This is the only revolution that isn’t going to slow down and stop. It’s completely changing our lives as we know it.

But, we’re also unlucky bastards, our grandchildren are going to ask us: what did you do at the beginning of the revolution mommy? And you, grandfather, where were you at the very start of the internet? That brings us to the message of today:

We’re reconfiguring human existence. We start tomorrow, after the drinks.

/ eDay site /