I used to think that the world was as good as it could be. That things were this way because nothing better had been invented yet. I felt that progress and technology were a linear scale that all of humanity marched towards equally, stopping only at problems no one had solved.

The reality is that the world is nowhere near as good as it could be.

We live in an age of self-driving cars, and some people still drive stick.

In much of the world, people drive stick because their cars are old and they can't afford to upgrade. Others drive stick for sport, which can be a fun way to learn about engines and experience driving in a new way.

But some people swear driving stick is better. That they have better control of the vehicle, that automatic gear shifting is imprecise, that having one hand on the stick and one foot on the clutch is the only real way to drive. Race cars use paddle shifters. Electric vehicles have no gears at all. Yet people will die on this hill.

You can extend this analogy to pretty much every aspect of society. I see it every day working in financial services, in the stubborn resistance to new payments, lending, and compliance technology. I see it in our cities, where we don't like building new things anymore because it will ruin the 'character' of our neighborhoods. I see it in my own family members, attached to traditions and ideologies completely impractical when it comes to our lives today.

This makes me both happy and sad about the state of AI. The rate of progress and invention will accelerate, and yet the inertia of society will remain. We will have PhDs in our pockets but insist we know better. We will have robots to do our chores but refuse to let them in our homes. We will automate all computer-based work, and yet someone will still write VLOOKUPs in Excel till their dying breath.

On one hand, I'm relieved that the world won't change all at once. On the other, I'm disappointed that we've built the tools for a better world, but may choose not to use them.