The 25 Year Bet About Technology

 Kevin Kelly was the executive editor of Wired magazine, and he believed that technology would make huge advancements with poverty and economy across the globe by the year 2020. Patrick Sale was a Neo Luddite writer who believed that technology would cause the collapse of civilization and make the world return to how it was during the caveman era. The two men were both extremists on two different sides about technology, Kelly was for it and Sale was against it. The two men made a bet for one thousand dollars, the topics consisted of global economy status, how much the rich and poor will change and how different environmental disasters will affect civilizations. In the economic collapse aspect of the bet, Sale said that "currency would be worthless by 2020" (page 8) and Kelly said that the Dollar would just be worth less per capita, Kelly was deemed and the winner of that category. For the global Environmental Disaster aspect, Kelly argued that "despite worsening climate change people are still living life as usual." Sale said that there are many natural disasters such as melting ice caps, wild fires, rising sea levels, flooding, and global warming, that are starting to intrude on civilization as well as the start of the pandemic in 2020, and overall had caused quality of life to go down for the environment, these points show a pretty clear win for Sale in this category. The rich and poor were deemed to have much less of a gap after 25 years as shown from Kelly's book. The civilizations that he photographed through the years showed constant improvement and Sale did not have a great opposition to this either, win for Kelly. I agree with the judge, Bill Patrick. Patrick deemed Kelly the winner of the bet, I agree because each point that Kelly gave was valid and I believe that technology will continue to help human civilization grow. I think that some areas that should have been included and would be if I were to be in on this same type of bet would be how has gender equality changed, and how would rights for people of color would be different.  I think that the next 25 years will bring more equity and equality for people and the economy around the globe, I would hope that the equity of the general public would be better, and that hopefully people will be on the move to help slow environmental disasters.