Skip to content

Technology Doesn’t Work Without Poetry

Don’t abandon state of the heart for state-of-the-art.
Sign up for the Smarter Faster newsletter
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

Change has always been with us, but the rate of change is changing.  It’s no longer evolution, it’s revolutionary.  The trajectory is changing, and the momentum is accelerating.  It’s acceleration and trajectory change all at once.  And three dimensionally.  


But you really have to recognize that what moves people is not state-of-the-art technology, it is state-of-the-heart technology.  The idea that this technology is a cold comfort.  Unless the engineer can be the poet and the poet the engineer, unless there’s that connection between the two, technology doesn’t do anything. 

Unless it moves something, unless it renders a benefit, unless it makes the distances closer, unless it makes it more resonant, more memorable, unless it offers a deeper meaning into your heart, into your soul, a deeper purposefulness, it’ll be vestigial, it’ll be gone.  

So the idea is, don’t abandon state of the heart for state-of-the-art.  Ask yourself a very important question.  The benefit of this technology, how does it make us connect better?  I don’t mean connect technically better, that’s important but how does it make us connect better.  How does it get more and deeper heartfelt connection between people?  Now I think a Twitter is an incredibly invaluable tool. 

In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think’s studio.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

Sign up for the Smarter Faster newsletter
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

Related

Up Next