Kurzweil begins his chapter titled ‘The Impact…..’ with the sentence “A Panopoly of Impacts”, which makes the point that the range of impacts is extremely far and wide, with the potential to change almost every part of life as we know it.  I will give a small number of examples of positive impacts in this post, before turning to a brief discussion of the downside.

I have held off much discussion of the impact until now because many of the potential scenarios seem fantastical, and might serve to reduce confidence in the other arguments and predictions.  Most of the things I have discussed in this series up to now have had a 20-30 year time horizon.  These scenarios go beyond that.

There’s an old (semi true) parable about frogs boiling in water. While not literal it’s a fun and instructive metaphor for change.

It goes like this: if you put a frog in boiling water it will sense the hot water and immediately jump out yet if you put it into cold water and very gradually turn up the temperature in the water the frog won’t notice and will stay in until it has boiled to death.

There’s some metaphorical truth to this in our everyday lives. When we’re faced with shocking changes the societal impact becomes immediate and obvious. An example would be an economic shocks that causes mass job loss and unemployment as happened after the dot-com crash, 9/11 and again in Sept 08. In times like these we reflect more about life in general and about the impacts technology has on our lives and on our society.

The meme of the lack of women in tech (or software, or entrepreneurship) appeared in several places today. Regular readers of this blog know that I’ve been the chairman of the National Center for Women & Information Technology for a number of years and deeply involved in this issue. It’s very satisfying for me to see a meme like this pick up speed and appear in a bunch of thoughtful articles and discussions. If you are interested in this issue, I have three articles from the last 24 hours that I encourage you to read.

Last year, MIT Sloan School of Management published a study performed by Professor and head of MIT’s Entrepreneurship program Ed Roberts, and Professor Charles Eesley of MIT’s entrepreneurial impact, which may be typical of several of the country’s major universities.

The study was limited to entrepreneurs who founded companies, not including entrepreneurially motivated professionals who answer to their corporate responsibilities rather than to start their own business! But the points presented in the study implicitly suggest (if not helping to define) the rapid growth in entrepreneurship. While this study provides little data about E trends in the office, we certainly recognize the many corporations which have been including E factors in their organization charts, their promotion criteria, their reliance on outside entrepreneurs for assistance, and so forth.