JEFF BEZOS
Currently a global e-commerce giant, Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 in his Seattle garage for which he was appointed as the Executive Chairman in 2021 after he stepped down as the CEO. According to reports, it is being found that he is seeking to invest a major chunk of his Amazon fortune in the development of space technologies through his aerospace company Blue Origin. In an interview with the CBS Evening News, he stated, “Why? Because I think it’s important. I think it is important for this planet. I think it’s important for the dynamism of future generations. It is something I care deeply about. And it is something I have been thinking about all my life.”
He referred to his childhood dream of working in the aerospace sector and he believes that with the advancement in technology, the process has become quite easy thus a tweet by the CBS News Exclusive stated that “@JeffBezos wants his space tourism company Blue Origin to be an “instrumental part” of an American return to the moon.”
Bezos believes that “We humans have to go to space if we are going to continue to have a thriving civilization. We have become big as a population, as a species, and this planet is relatively small. We see it in things like climate change and pollution and heavy industry. We are in the process of destroying this planet. And we have sent robotic probes to every planet in the solar system — this is the good one. So, we have to preserve this planet.”
Bezos said that it might take multiple generations and hundreds of years before it turns to reality but Blue Origin is working towards it and with the great technological setups that are available, nothing is impossible. “We send things up into space, but they are all made on Earth. Eventually, it will be much cheaper and simpler to make complicated things, like microprocessors and everything, in space and then send those highly complex manufactured objects back down to earth so that we don’t have the big factories and pollution-generating industries that make those things now on Earth,” Bezos says. “And Earth can be zoned residential.”
Jeff Bezos is quite hopeful about the concept of space tourism and believes that Blue Origin is building the best infrastructure that is required and the latest technology has helped build the New Shephard, which would be used for space tourism.
“I think that is entirely believable,” Bezos says. “If you went back in time a hundred years and told people today that you would be able to buy a ticket and fly across the world on a jetliner, they would have thought you were crazy. But that’s the kind of change that can happen in just 100 years or less.”
STEVE JOBS
Steven Paul Jobs who was the co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of Apple and a majority shareholder of Pixar among many other things that he has done, had seen the technological industry grow from scratch. Hence, his opinions and thought processes are relevant to today’s world as well.
In an interview with the New Yorker during the launch of the iPad 2, he had stated, “It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough — its technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanity that yields us the results that make our heart sing”. He always believed that his companies namely Pixar to NeXT to Apple, the scientists, and the artists and designers all collaboratively should come together to bring about the best innovations that the world has seen through an amalgamation of technology and humanities.
Jobs had insisted on the fact that “In an era of intellectual fragmentation, the greatest innovations happened when individuals from different fields were joined together when our different ways of seeing the universe were brought to bear on a singular problem”.
Even after over 10 years of his death, the world is still being dominated by his name as he has created some revolutionary excelling technological products that have been giving us the top-notch experience since 1976. During his initial days in the field, he made the statement that “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”He had predicted that this technology one day will be responsible “to link it into a nationwide communications network.”
In an interview with the Wired Magazine in 1996, Jobs prophesied that the web would be received and used by consumers across the globe, and as of April 2019, an estimated 4.4 billion people around the world use the internet. That’s about 56% of the world’s population and 81% of the developed world.
He prioritized the advent of technology always and he told the Wired in 1996 that “The web is going to be very important. Is it going to be a life-changing event for millions of people? No. I mean, maybe. But it’s not an assured yes at this point. It’s certainly not going to be like the first time somebody saw a television. It’s certainly not going to be as profound as when someone in Nebraska first heard a radio broadcast. It’s not going to be that profound.”
REED HASTINGS
The Stanford alum is also the co-founder of Netflix and is one of the best CEOs in the world. He has always emphasized the vitality of technology and recently during the graduation ceremony of 2022, he addressed almost 17,000 attended and stated that “I have to say two years in, the pandemic continues to throw curveballs. But fortunately, we’re all very practiced now connecting over technology when we can’t be together in person and pivoting when COVID interferes.
When he mostly emphasized how we all could see better results produced by the technological advent, he also believes that all these revolutions have helped the society accelerate more towards progress and makes us strive for a better tomorrow. Hastings had told that “Inventions – meaning broadly all of science and technology- are the most obvious ways the society moves forward.
When discussing the success of Netflix all around the globe, Hastings in an interview had stated that the technology-driven recommendations algorithm differentiates it from the other video streaming platforms and its unique user interface is also a major reason for its popularity. He stated that the success behind his company is that it is a tech-powered entertainment company and these technological advancements have paved the way for today’s success and will continue to do so in the future as well.
In an interview, he spilled the success behind his venture and stated that “Tech, I mean, we’re tech-powered but we’re not like Microsoft that is in multiple areas of tech or Google. We are a single application, single service.”
BILL JOY
William Nelson Joy, commonly known as Bill Joy is a computer engineer and an investor who has immense contribution to the field of science and technology as well. He is the founder of Sun Microsystems and also created the Berkeley UNIX which is a version of the UNIX operating system that uses TCP/IP networking systems.
Even after all his achievements and inventions, he thinks that 21st-century technologies—genetic engineering, robotics, and nanotechnology (GNR)—will extinguish human beings as we now know them, a prospect he finds deeply disturbing.
Joy eventually went ahead to state that“Biological species rarely survive encounters with superior competitors.” and also suggested that “the humans will be driven to extinction by our superior robotic descendants. But it isn’t obvious that robots will be superior to us and, even if they were, they may be less troublesome than our neighbor’s next door.” His predictions also include that robots and humans will remain separate creatures, and humans will gradually incorporate technology into their bodies thus eliminating the situation that is anticipated.
Joy’s concern with self-replication always makes us worry about the fact that Robotic self-replication appears to be out of our control, as compared to our own or other humans’ self-replication and he fears that robots might replicate and then enslave us. This arises out of the fact that he believes that “uncontrolled self-replication in these newer technologies runs … a risk of substantial damage in the physical world.”
Joy’sargument as stated in his well-known piece claims that 20th-century technologies—nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC)—required access to rare “raw materials and highly protected information,” while 21st-century technologies “are widely within the reach of individuals or small groups.” This means that “knowledge alone will enable the use of them,” a phenomenon that Joy terms: “knowledge-enabled mass destruction (KMD).”
Although his thoughts and statements are despised by many, they cannot be completely neglected as he is quite aware of how the technological world operates and what are the natural consequences that we might face soon. Hence it is expected that we completely do not get driven by creativity and compassion and work intuitively as well to avoid any possible future threats.
