A good world in 2050 – will computers help or hinder? David Gelernter Chief Scientist, Mirror Worlds Technologies Professor of Computer Science Yale University Two related themes usually dominate our conversations about the goodness of computers: computers are good because they make us (1) better informed and (2) more productive (and therefore richer). But we’ve long had good reason to doubt whether (past a certain threshhold) money buys happiness, and there are good reasons to doubt whether information buys happiness either. We have far more information on hand than we did a generation ago, and as a nation we are much richer, but there’s no evidence to suggest that we are any happier. Happiness seems, if anything, to be trending down. On the other hand: computers do (tentatively) seem to be accomplishing something of great value, in essence the same thing that great artworks accomplish – they help us know mankind better; after all, human beings are mainly interested in human beings. This trend seems to hold both pragmatically and theoretically. I’ll explain why I think so.