11 reasons to be excited about the future of technology

In the year 1820, a person could expect to live less than 35 years, 94% of the global population
lived in extreme poverty, and less that 20% of the population was literate. Today, human life
expectancy is over 70 years, less that 10% of the global population lives in extreme poverty, and
over 80% of people are literate. These improvements are due mainly to advances in technology,
beginning in the industrial age and continuing today in the information age.
There are many exciting new technologies that will continue to transform the world and improve
human welfare. Here is one of them.

8. High-Quality Online Education

While college tuition skyrockets, anyone with a smartphone can study almost any topic online,
accessing educational content that is mostly free and increasingly high-quality.
Encyclopedia Britannica used to cost $1,400. Now anyone with a smartphone can instantly access
Wikipedia. You used to have to go to school or buy programming books to learn computer
programming. Now you can learn from a community of over 40 million programmers at Stack
Overflow. YouTube has millions of hours of free tutorials and lectures, many of which are produced
by top professors and universities.
The quality of online education is getting better all the time. For the last 15 years, MIT has been
recording lectures and compiling materials that cover over 2000 courses.
As perhaps the greatest research university in the world, MIT has always been ahead of the trends.
Over the next decade, expect many other schools to follow MIT’s lead.