Jason
Pontin starts his speech talking about the moon trip, saying a lot of people
participated in that and a lot of money had been spent. He uses it as a
metaphor, because technology had brought us there, and now the question is: Can
technology solve our big problems? He answers this question as he goes on with
the talk.
Firstly he says mobiles, apps, and basically all
social media isn't bad in our society, but it can't really solve big problems.
"Sometimes we choose not to solve our big problems". He explains he
could go to Mars, but: "we aren't going there because it doesn't interest
to people", that people preferred to invest on technology or energy,
things on Earth, before doing it on the project of
going to Mars. Then he talks about technological energy. He says it is
only used because of political and economic interests, because it's cheaper to
use petrol than wind energy.
"Sometimes the problem isn't technological."
He is referring to problems such as famine. We used to think it was a problem
on food supply, but 30 years of investigation
had told us that famines are political crisis that catastrophically affect food
distribution. . In Pontin's opinion, "there would be famine so long as there are bad governments".
"Sometimes we don't understand the problem". We can
solve big problems with technology but we must consider four elements:
political leaders and the public must care to solve the problem, institutions
must support its solution, it must be a technological problem and we due to
understand it.
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