For better or worse, Tim O’Reilly has become known as something of an oracle for the technology industry in his forty-year career as a technical publisher, author and venture capitalist, credited with coining terms like Open Source and Web 2.0.
Today, O'Reilly finds himself in the interesting position of being both a techno-optimist – for instance, about how artificial intelligence could augment human workers and help solve existential problems like climate change – while also being a fierce critic of the new power centres technology has created, particularly in Silicon Valley.
Finding a new class of problem
"I totally think that there is a massive opportunity for us to augment humans to do things, we need the machines," O'Reilly told InfoWorld last week, from his home in Oakland, California.