Introducing Digital Optimist

you

Hey, this is Scott Klazowski. You've landed at the Digital Optimist, a podcast that looks into the future of technology impacts on the world. Yeah, I see a brighter future coming, so jump into a few episodes and see if you agree. In the beginning. Everything has a beginning. Even this podcast series has a beginning.

And I thought it might be helpful to do two things. One, talk about this podcast series in general and what it's about, why I'm even doing it. And then also give you a little bit of information about me. as a human being. I listen to a lot of podcasts and I always wondered why people don't do an episode zero. So here is your episode zero. So this podcast series is all about looking at technology, where it's going to go into the future, with an optimistic lens.

is you'll hear more when I talk about me personally. I've been in technology for an awful long time. And today I get to get feedback from many audience members, and I'm shocked at both in society in general, and then also from audiences, how much of the discussion is dystopian. For example, when we look at movies, when we read science fiction books,

The vast majority of these are very dystopian in nature, very dark, post-apocalyptic. Either machines destroy the world or we use machines to destroy the world. And very, very few times do you ever see... Any type of media or movies, books, anything that looks at some positive future. And if we do, typically it's a positive future city. Everybody's dressed in white. It's got a lot of glass.

he gets blown up and that's part of the story is how the futuristic utopian society gets destroyed by some bad character. So we do have, if you really step back and think about it, we do have a situation where either we will have what we would term a utopian future or a dystopian future. In other words, the future may...

get much better as far as quality of life or the future could get much worse. Now, Because most people see when they look at what's written and movies, what's created a dystopian future, I think we tend to spend a lot of time thinking about the negative. In fact, as human beings, we're a bit more wired to be attracted to danger and the negative and always trying to make sure we have a plan for how we're going to deal with what goes wrong.

And this, of course, is anthropologically sound from when we were in caveman days. But we're not in caveman days anymore. we are in a much different place. And I think it's time to step back and really look a little more logically at whether we will have the utopian or the dystopian future.

I spend my life and my career looking forward into the future, and that's what this podcast will be doing. When you think about words like precognition, do we have precognition or the ability to really understand what is coming next?

believe we do. We tend to call that being high beam, the metaphor of the car, actually having your high beams on so that you can see into the future accurately. And that's a little bit of what we will be doing. This is not going to be a science fiction podcast if you jumped into some of the middle episodes you probably have noticed that at times we may talk about technologies that are a little bit more far-reaching but in other cases we'll be talking about technologies that are happening today

what the impacts likely will be just over the next year or two. You see, I really believe that the seeds of the technology future are already planted today. In other words, The way technology works in general is we invent concepts or we invent new tools. And then it takes a certain amount of time, normally years, before those tools really manifest themselves out in the world.

And so the seeds are always planted. And so I think it isn't that difficult if this is something that you do for a living or you spend an awful lot of time looking at to understand how these seeds will evolve. Now, I have been doing this for decades. What really inspired me to do the podcast series started probably five, six years ago when I began to write a book called Did God Create the Internet?

And in that book, I spent a few years researching and thinking about the combination of spirituality, philosophy, technology. But ultimately, the question of will technology help or hurt the human race? And that had started me down a long path of trying to really think and speculate about what technology would really do for us or to us. And ultimately, people would ask me the question, is the world going to be a better place?

Now, that's not an easy answer. It's not a simple thing because when we talk about technology, we're talking about a thousand different points of impact on society. on us as human beings. And so not a simple answer, but is an absolutely critical question that we need to answer. Will technology ultimately make us happier? Will technology ultimately make our...

quality of life better or will it degrade our quality of life? This is a debate that we don't have enough. And a lot of the reason for this podcast is to help people be able to see what technology might do in the future, but also through... positive lens. Now, this podcast series is meant to teach To educate, to help people understand and learn things about technology they may not know today. To speculate where different technologies may take us.

to inspire you as far as what you might be able to do to be part of the solution and not part of the problem, and ultimately to give hope. I feel like there's too little hope in the world. And sometimes when I listen to people talking about where we're going in the world, there is too much dystopianism. Now, I don't have rose-colored glasses on. The point of this podcast is not just to try to make people feel comfortable about a future that isn't realistic.

I 100% believe that the future will be a better place than the past or than the present. And I believe I've got the proof points to show that. And that is what this podcast series is about.

You can look up online and you can learn a little bit more about me. But again, it's fair to understand who I am. And so I wanted to at least tell you just from my own words. I'm a speaker. I'm a consultant. I spend all my time, my career time, either helping to communicate to people what technology is doing and where it's going or helping organizations learn how to use technology. healthy ways that will either keep them safe or help them to prosper. And so that's what I do for a living.

As a human being, I'm a bit of a strange mix between a technologist and a student of humanity. And so I spend a lot of my learning time, not learning necessarily about technology, but learning about philosophy or spirituality. about why we are who we are, how we can improve as human beings. So I'm just as interested in the human side of the world as I am the technology side of the world, even though I'm a technologist. by trade. For example, I love awakening or becoming enlightened to humanity.

I think that's a critical thing that each of us needs to do. And it's my sincere hope that technology frees us to spend more time and gives us more tools to be more human. and to really understand the spiritual side or the philosophical side of life. On the other hand, I've been fascinated with technology since I was a kid. And I have learned...

program with my own hands. I learned to build computers way back in the early 80s. I've enjoyed building companies around new technologies. I love learning about new concepts. I love the influence of technology on the world, both on my world and just on the world in general. So add all of this together.

And what it means is this podcast series for me is a way that I can hopefully help you and help the world to be able to see distinctions about technology and where it's going to go that maybe you haven't seen in the past.

So this is episode zero. This is the beginning of the ride. If you're starting here, congratulations. But if you backed into this from listening to some other episode, at least you know a bit of the history before the episodes got put together. I thank you for taking the time to listen. I sincerely hope these podcasts make a difference for you.

Thank you for listening and giving these ideas a chance. Let this be a two-way conversation and connect with me on Twitter at S. Klasowski or on LinkedIn. I also write a blog that you can find at scottklasowski.com. An added bonus is a library of thought-leading graphics you can download from the site. One more thing, please take a moment and race this podcast on whatever platform you use. Ideas are powerful change agents and positive reviews will help spread the digital optimism.