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"Now that the Valley's companies are increasingly competing against traditional businesses, society is not so quick to give us a pass on this behavior. Take Airbnb and Uber again, both of which have attempted to avoid regulations and taxes in their fields (hotel taxes and taxi and license commission regulations, respectively). The tech press often writes these up as "disrupting" unwieldy government regulations, and to a degree, this is accurate (the best writers also mention that many of these laws were designed with consumers in mind, back when cabs and hotels were far less safe than they are now)."

"Progress in computers and the Internet helps with communications, and it's enabled us to make things far more efficient. On the other hand, most other fields of engineering have been bad things to go into since the 1970s: nuclear engineering, aero- and astronautical engineering, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, even electrical engineering. We are living in a material world, so that's pretty big to miss out on. I don't think we're living in an incredibly fast technological age."

"The technology industry, by sequestering itself from the community it inhabits, has transformed the Bay Area without being changed by it-in a sense, without getting its hands dirty. Throughout most of Silicon Valley's history, its executives have displayed a libertarian instinct to stay as far from politics and government as possible. "

"Diamandis believes that solar energy will soon satisfy the demands of the entire planet and replace the market for fossil fuels. This will mean fewer wars and cleaner air. Systems for converting atmospheric humidity into clean drinking water will become cheap and ubiquitous. The industrial meat industry will also vanish, replaced by tastier and healthier laboratory-grown products with no environmental downsides. He also predicts that exponential increases in the power of AI would soon render teachers and universities superfluous. The best education in the world will become freely available to anyone."

"Tech companies and higher education come together to increase the level of skills and awareness of accessibility among graduates." By Jeremy Van Hof, MSU Broad.