I just found this in my drafts from August. I think I connected with it as someone who is constantly on the lookout for what’s going to end us all. I can’t help it. It’s fascinating and terrifying to me. Sort of like fast food or the coffee creamer we have at the office that doesn’t need to be refrigerated. Also, I really like the idea of using what you do for a living to be helpful. Advertising isn’t always the best career for that. But it does afford the occasional opportunity to do some good.
Neal Stephenson:

“It would be saying a lot to say that SF can save the world, but I do think that we’ve fallen into a habitual state of being depressed and pessimistic about the future. We are extremely conservative and fearful about how we deploy our resources. It contrasts pretty vividly with the way we worked in the first half of the 20th century. We are looking at a lot of challenges now that I do not think can be solved as long as we stay in that mindset. This is more of an ‘if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail’ kind of thing. My hammer is that I can write science fiction, so that’s the thing I’m going to try to do. If I had billions of dollars sitting around, I could try to put my money where my mouth is and invest it. If I did something else for a living, I would be using my skills – whatever they were – to solve this problem, but since I’m a science fiction writer, I’m going to try to address it through the medium of science fiction.”

Via Slashdot