Fearing the wheel

David Pogue, on Charlie Rose:

I would just love to say to the parents and teachers of the world that technology always scares us, I mean, tractors scared the farming industry when they came out, this is true, and the microwave scared us, and I’m sure the wheel scared…‘Why can’t you walk to the woolly mammoth skeleton like the rest of us?’ Technology is always scary, there are always trade offs. Yes, we are more isolated and yet the young people of today…There was a survey in the nineties of college graduates, ‘what do you want your job, your career, to bring you?’ The number one answer in the nineties was money. When they repeated this survey recently the number one answer was ‘I want to change the world. I want to fix something that’s wrong.’ That is good news. So everything is a blessing and a curse, they are just tools, and nothing has changed since the beginning of invention. New stuff is scary, but somehow we find a way to use it in the right way.