5 - The Amish understand a life-changing truth about technology the rest of us don’t

In my younger years, I was an early adopter for almost everything - Linux distributions, software, hardware, lifestyle choices, you name it. Nowadays, I'm much more conservative and seek out stable builds for most things.

Technology has the potential to disrupt but not all disruption is good and in many cases, some consequences only show up a few years or decades down the road. It's hard to square that with the Facebook/sillicon valley ethos of "most fast and break things", when the thing you're breaking might be society itself.

The Amish approach is nice in that they have a framework for dealing with it - using the rest of the world as a pteri dish to observe the effects of technology before adopting it themselves. What are other ways in which we can better understand the implications of a new technology that doesn't involve rolling it out to the world?


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