Guy Raz: “I ask myself this question a lot which is: Is this the future we want? Have we gotten to a place where the train has left the station, where we don’t really have much of a choice about where the future is heading?”

Erik Brynjolfsson: “Well let me try to cheer you up a little bit. Let’s just step back and look at the fundamentals. What are you and I are talking about? We re talking about a world with vastly more wealth, vastly more power to solve all sorts of problems. Vastly less need for us to work. Most routine tasks could be eliminiated. Shame on us, shame on us, if we mess that up and turn that into a bad thing. Wouldn’t that be the worst irony in the world where we take more wealth and less work and say ‘Oh, what a terrible thing?’ I think we can essentially eliminate poverty from planet earth, we can cure most deseases. And the global millennium goals, we are on track to beat them and eliminate severe poverty. There are a lot of positive trends. I think the world in 25 years could be a much better version of the world we have today. But the role of humans would still be fundamentally at the center of that.”

Source: The Digital Industrial Revolution : TED Radio Hour : NPR