Excerpt
SUMMARY: In the 30 years since Steve Case co-founded AOL, the global tech landscape has seen immense growth and change. What new developments wait in the near future, and what does the rapidly expanding online world mean for human life? Case explores those issues in his new book, “The Third Wave.” Case joins Judy Woodruff to discuss his vision of the future.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Back in 1985, when Steve Case co-founded America Online, only 3 percent of Americans were actually online. Fast-forward some 30 years, and we can see the global change brought about by the Internet and an ever-growing array of devices and social media.
So, what is next?
Well, we get a glimpse from Steve Case himself. He is the author of a new book, “The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur’s Vision of the Future.”
Steve Case, it is good to see you.
STEVE CASE, Author, “The Third Wave”: It’s good to see you again.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So you borrowed that term the third wave from the futurist Alvin Toffler.
STEVE CASE: Yes.
When I was in college in the 1980, I read Toffler “Third Wave.” It completely mesmerized me inspired me. I spent the last almost four decades pursuing some of the ideas he talked about.
So, when I was writing a book, I wanted to pay respect to him. I open the book with talking about my experience reading Toffler. And I hope others will similarly be inspired by my book, and because the future once again is going to change, and the path forward is going to be different than what we saw in the last two waves. And that’s what I was trying to lay out in this book.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, in a thumbnail, first wave was the creation of the Internet, which you were involved in. Second wave was building on that, you describe, social media devices and so forth.
What is the next wave?
STEVE CASE: It’s really integrating the Internet seamlessly throughout our lives.
And there is a lot of things that haven’t changed that much in the first wave or the second wave. How we learn, our kids learn is about the same. How we stay healthy is about the same. How we manage energy is about the same. Even how we think about food is about the same.
And work itself is starting to change in the third wave because of the freelance economy, what some call the gig economy. So, I think it’s important for everybody, not just businesspeople or technologists, to understand what is happening next. And that is what I try to lay out in this book with sort of a — a little bit of a road map forward and a little bit of a playbook in terms of how you can think about orchestrating your career and your life, and how you think about maybe your kids and even your grandkids. What world are they going to be inheriting?
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