Breaking Smart - Season 1 Quotes

“Shared languages and currencies allow more people to harmoniously co-exist, despite conflicting values, by allowing disputes to be settled through words or trade4 rather than violence. We should therefore expect software eating the world to cause an explosion in the variety of possible lifestyles, and society as a whole becoming vastly more pluralistic.”
― Venkatesh G. Rao, Breaking Smart: How Software is Eating the World

“Finnish concept of sisu: meeting adversity head-on by cultivating a capacity for managing stress, rather than figuring out schemes to get around it.”
― Venkatesh G. Rao, Breaking Smart: How Software is Eating the World

“Even if one inventor chooses not to pursue a possibility, chances are, others will. As a result, all pastoralist forms of resistance are eventually overwhelmed.”
― Venkatesh G. Rao, Breaking Smart: How Software is Eating the World

“Ephemeralization — the ability to gradually do more with less — creates room for the pluralistic expansion of lifestyle possibilities and individual values, without constraining the future to a specific path.”
― Venkatesh G. Rao, Breaking Smart: How Software is Eating the World

“the principle of generative pluralism. Generative pluralism is what allows the virtuous cycle of surplus and spillover to operate.”
― Venkatesh G. Rao, Breaking Smart: How Software is Eating the World

“In other words, human pluralism eventually expands to accommodate the full potential of technological capabilities.”
― Venkatesh G. Rao, Breaking Smart: How Software is Eating the World

“Old lifestyles do not necessarily vanish: there are still Jeffersonian small farmers and traditional blacksmiths around the world for instance. Rather, they occupy a gradually diminishing role in the social order. As a result, new and old technologies and an increasing number of value systems coexist.”
― Venkatesh G. Rao, Breaking Smart: How Software is Eating the World