Technology for the Most Effective Use of Mankind

Techno-optimism is defined as the belief that technology can improve the lives of people. It was famously satired in the U.S. television comedy series "Silicon Valley," with a startup-company's founders pledging to "make the world a better place through Paxos algorithms for consensus protocols." But some people take techno-optimism very seriously. Ray Kurzweil, an accomplished tech innovator, described his techno-optimistic vision in his books: The Age of Spiritual Machines, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, and The Singularity Is Near. In a keynote address (see https://goo.gl/RwkwK1) at the 2016 meeting of the Computing Research Association, Kentaro Toyama argued that "In spite of the do-gooder rhetoric of Silicon Valley, it is no secret that computing technology in and of itself cannot solve systemic social problems."