by Mar Pages, luxury travel writer
The Great WIT Debate at the final session of the WIT 2015 conference pit Bobby Healy, CTO of CarTrawler against Stephan Ekbergh, former deejay and CEO of Travelstart. The topic? Whether geeks should rule the world.
Bobby’s argument is that a geek is defined as a peculiar person if perceived to be overly intellectual. Every man, woman and child should have a little geek inside of him, as the Pope said, he quipped. The population of geeks, like the Irish, is growing fast.
Geeks created the iPhone and Facebook, very important in such conferences, “so the audience doesn’t have to listen to the speakers.” A vote for geeks is a vote for Tesla and noisy children. “Geekdom is sexy, like the Irish. Geeks are funny,” he concluded.
In the opposing corner was Stephan, who said that when geeks rule the world, the world becomes “more and more stupid”.
“Machines act like the men, men act like machines and the world turns into a world of singularity”. Machines will eventually kill men, said Stephan.
Stephan dreams of a world where smart is replaced by artistry, where empathy and big picture thinking outperforms sequential work.
At the end of the day, brains are over valued, Stephan believes. Quoting Woody Allen, he said, “My brain is only my second favorite organ”.
But despite the poetic exposition by Stephan, Bobby’s sexy references ruled over the geeks.
