Saturday, March 3, 2018

If Elon Musk is a Luddite, count me in!

6:09 AM    
On December 21, the company SpaceX made

history by successfully launching a rocket and returning it to a safe landing on Earth. It’s also the day that SpaceX founder Elon Musk was nominated for a Luddite Award.
The nomination came as part of a campaign by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a leading science and technology policy think tank, to call out the “worst of the year’s worst innovation killers.”
It’s an odd juxtaposition, to say the least.
The Luddite Awards – named after an 18th-century English worker who inspired a backlash against the Industrial Revolution – highlight what ITIF refers to as “egregious cases of neo-Luddism in action.”
Musk, of course, is hardly a shrinking violet when it comes to promoting technology innovation. Whether it’s self-driving cars, reusable commercial rockets or the futuristic “hyperloop,” he’s not known for being a tech party pooper.