Don’t worry, be happy: meet Pablos Holman, the tech evangelist who’s (mostly) optimistic about a global future centred on AI and nuclear energy.
Intellectuals in the public eye are different from what they used to be. Once they were venerable Oxbridge dons who might risk their reputations by stepping out from their ivory towers to explain the complexities of the modern world in what they imagined to be the common tongue.
Now, they’re technology’s rock stars. They wear black leather jackets and funky eyewear, and sprinkle their lectures with unprintable vocabulary (for E+T, at least). They also express their ideas in broad brush strokes that seem to imply the outline of the message is more important than the detail.
When Pablos Holman bounds onto the stage to deliver his keynote at the 2026 edition of 3DExperience World in Houston, Texas, in February, he brushes aside the applause of the ecstatic crowd waiting to hang on his every syllable. “We’ll do that later,” he says curtly. “If there...