Alfred Lin

Those who fight technology end up on the wrong side of history. -- I’ve spent most of my life working in tech and largely ignored the haters. I started building clone PCs in junior high to fund my obsession with nerdy gadgets, back when being “into tech” was decidedly uncool. In high school and college, many people went out of their way to avoid the techy or nerd label. After college, ExxonMobil was the largest company in the world, and the most prestigious paths ran through investment banking, tied to power and energy. I was rejected from that track, moved west for a Ph.D. in Statistics, dropped out, joined the tech industry, and never looked back. (Ironically, power and energy may now be making another comeback.) As tech grew more popular, I never felt the need to defend it. But Sam Lessin’s recent Narratives of 2026 post was so dystopian that I jokingly told him he sounded like an old man longing for the good old days: small farms, tight-knit towns, simpler times. He followed up with a more optimistic piece this week. That exchange, combined with a question at Sequoia’s AMA about the ethics of investing in AI amid potential societal disruption and job dislocation, made something clear: skepticism about technology used to come from outside the industry. Now it’s coming from within. As a venture capitalist, I’m admittedly biased toward optimism, but history is unambiguous. Those who fight technology end up on the wrong side of history. Every major shift, from the printing press to electricity to the steam engine, sparked fears of job loss and social collapse. In 1800, 70-80% of Americans worked in agriculture. By 1900, that number had fallen to roughly 40%. Today it’s under 2%. We didn’t become obsolete. We found new callings. Technology is simply applied knowledge. Tools spread because they deliver real value: saving time, lowering costs, extending life, and expanding capability. You can slow adoption through regulation or social pressure, but you cannot suppress tools that materially improve human outcomes and expand human potential. Expansion of human potential is personal to me. My father grew up in a small farming village in Taiwan. Fascinated by the abacus, he became a high school champion and was hired as a bank teller because he was a human calculator. That skill allowed him to attend college (and put three sisters through college), study accounting, and rise through the bank. As calculators replaced abacuses and computers replaced calculators, he understood each transition deeply. He came to the US for a Master’s in Computer Science, returned to modernize the bank’s accounting systems, and eventually ran the bank. One day, while testing a PC we’d built, my father showed me one of the first spreadsheets he had been using and explained that its cells were no different from rows and columns of desks filled with people using abacuses or calculators. He used to be at one of those desks and is now replaced by a cell in the spreadsheet. He wasn’t nostalgic for the old days. He was proud of how technology had expanded human potential. It transformed someone destined to be a farmer into a human calculator, an accountant, a programmer, and eventually the president of a bank. As we worry about AI and jobs today, it’s worth remembering that farm automation freed 98% of us to pursue other work, and spreadsheets increased employment in finance. Every solution creates new problems, but also new opportunities and new possibilities. We may not understand them for years or decades. Admittedly, it took a long-time for my grandparents to understand my parents’ careers, and my commercial banker parents had a hard time understanding my career choices. Tech optimism isn’t blind faith. It’s the recognition that technology isn’t an external force acting on us. It’s an expression of human problem-solving. If AI really is this powerful, the real question is: what big problems will you help solve for humanity? The rest of us will find other pursuits.