Eric Stetson is the founder and CEO of 60 Best Inc., a Northern Virginia based information technology company that is developing an online periodical media aggregator to launch by July 1, 2012 at 60Best.com.

60Best will simplify the way people find what’s worth reading and follow their favorite bloggers and news feeds.  In the first part of the interview with Eric, he shared some of his own employment experiences.

Eric was very gracious to share some more about himself in this second part of the interview.  Here he discusses some of the challenges and rewards of writing his books and some of his views on how the technology is transforming the world and the job market.

After conversing with him and hearing his ideas, I have no doubt in my mind that Eric’s determined personality, intelligence and passion for what he’s creating may just make him a pivotal figure in history.

So, without further ado, the second part of the interview with Eric Stetson:

How did you decide to write a book?  How many have you written? How’d you find the motivation? Any advice for me as I embark on writing my first book about my 28 day experience and the lessons I learned during the job hunt?

I have written one published book, Christian Universalism, which is about my belief in the unconditional love of God and the forgiveness and reconciliation of all people. That was published in 2008, while I was serving as executive director of the Christian Universalist Association, an ecumenical liberal Christian ministry. Over the past couple years, as a side project, I’ve been working on a second book which is expected to be published later this year. This one is about the history of the Baha’i faith, a universalist religious tradition that emerged in 19^th century Iran. It’s a compilation of newly discovered testimonies and essays by children and grandchildren of the Baha’i prophet, the manuscripts of which were provided to me by his great-granddaughter, who is a friend of mine.

The motivation for writing these books has been my interest in progressive spirituality and religious history, and my desire to share broad-minded ideas to help people overcome negative, judgmental and limited perspectives. I believe humanity has the potential to create a world of peace and mutual understanding, overcoming the ideological obstacles that so often divide us. Much of my writing has been inspired by this vision.

Regardless of the genre of the book you want to write, I would advise any author to write from the heart. It’s true that a book can be a great promotional tool for an organization, business or cause, but the best books also include a personal aspect. People can tell when an author is just writing with some external goal in mind, like selling something or selling oneself, or when they’re writing with an inner motivation such as learning and self-transformation. There’s nothing wrong with writing for an external goal, but a book will usually be more effective if that’s not the only goal of writing it.

Would you say that writing a book was a rewarding experience?

Yes, definitely. It’s a great feeling of accomplishment to pursue a big project like that to completion. Even if only a few thousand people ever read your book, it’s something significant you created through the power of your ideas, talents, and self-discipline. And if it’s useful, inspiring, or fun to read, you will get an audience of some size. How many people read a high-quality book depends mostly on how well you market it – and today that’s easier than ever, thanks to social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter.

Did you use the ideas from your books for inspiration as you set up your new online business?

Starting my business has been a career change for me, because I was primarily working in nonprofit management and ministry, with only some freelance website development on the side. So I can’t say that my books have directly inspired me to start my company. However, I can say that the fact that I have been able to become a successfully published author has contributed to my confidence that I when I get an idea for a big project, I can do what it takes to complete it and persuade others to invest in making it a reality or to buy the finished product.

Also, one of the main reasons I decided to become an entrepreneur is because I would like to have the resources someday to be a philanthropist. Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve been passionately reading, discussing, and writing about ideas for making the world a better place. Writing books can have a positive impact on people’s lives, but impacts of any kind are multiplied through the power of money. Big money donated or invested wisely can change the world perhaps more than anything else. The problem is, most people with big ideas don’t have big money. But those who do can have a truly phenomenal impact. My dream is to provide education for impoverished children, improve global cultural literacy, promote interfaith dialogue and peacemaking, fund visionary startups founded by brilliant individuals who don’t have access to traditional sources of capital, contribute to capital-intensive projects of civilizational importance such as green energy technologies and private space exploration, and make it possible for the thinkers that could be in the history books of tomorrow to get funding for the research they need to do today. To make my dreams come true, I need to become wealthy. And there’s no better way to do that than by starting a business that creates cutting-edge products or services.

What are some of the biggest opportunities you see for people looking to do business in today’s fast moving digital world?

We’ve entered an era in which the volume of information produced and disseminated every day is overwhelming. Many of the most successful businesses of the 21^st century will be those that provide solutions to enable people to better search for, rank, filter, sort, and effortlessly find and use the information that’s most relevant to them. 60 Best is aiming to be such a company. Right now we’re focusing on periodical media, but we may expand into other areas as our business grows. The need for useful and user-friendly data processing solutions cuts across all kinds of different fields and types of information. Everyone wants to know what’s worth their time – the proverbial needle in the haystack or diamond in the rough – and what they should ignore or never even have to see in the first place.

Beyond algorithms, which is largely the methodology of today, the development of deep artificial intelligence will play an ever-increasing role in this booming industry. In only a couple of decades, natural language processing may advance to the point where computers – or perhaps the internet itself as some kind of world-encompassing artificial organism – can pass the Turing Test, and once that happens, all bets are off. Crowdsourcing will also continue to play a big role and likely be implemented in new and revolutionary ways. The hive mind of humanity will increasingly manifest itself in online applications. Wikipedia is the classic example that has already made traditional encyclopedias obsolete, and a new company I heard about recently aspires to translate the entire internet as their customers learn foreign languages by translating small chunks of text from millions of websites. In the coming years, I expect it’ll be interesting to watch an unfolding battle between crowdsourcing and AI, as different companies pursue either a more human-centric or machine-based approach to information processing.

How do you see the outsourcing to offshore employees changing the job-scape?  In Australia many are being laid off from customer service jobs and small businesses are employing Filipinos for software, customer care, automation and virtual assistant roles.  Is this finally bridging the gap between the haves, and have-nots of the world?  How will those people laid off from their ‘secure’ jobs cope? Please give some examples from the U.S. on how the people are coping.

I think to some degree, companies outsourcing work to offshore freelancers, contractors and employees will gradually equalize the standard of living between the peoples of different nations. However, I don’t think this should be seen as a panacea for the problem of international economic disparities. Some countries may still lag behind – perhaps far behind – because of lack of education in their population, poor health care, inadequate infrastructure, political instability or cultural conflicts that can deter companies from wanting to enter particular markets.

One of the biggest problems I see is the variable standards of human rights in different countries. Businesses that don’t have high ethical standards will naturally tend to move more of their operations to countries that allow workers to be exploited. So there is the danger that globalization can produce a widespread “falling to the lowest common denominator” rather than “rising to a higher level” for everyone. The bottom line is that no economic system, in and of itself, can advance common human interests. Economics can just as easily drive people to act on our common weaknesses of character. Strong moral values – a shared belief and practice of the basic principles of the great philosophical and spiritual teachers – are necessary for any system of social organization and production to produce results that are humane and broadly acceptable to the collective human conscience.

In the big picture, the fundamental challenge I see on the horizon is that more and more work that used to be done by human beings will be done by increasingly intelligent computers. Ideally, that would mean that more people could work less and enjoy a higher standard of living. And this is exactly what has happened in previous periods of rapid technological advancement – but not without a lot of dislocation and hardship as the transitions occurred. Here in the United States, the decline of the middle class and long-term unemployment of many are growing concerns. Some people are coping with it better than others. For capable and motivated people who want to survive and thrive in the new economy, the best practical suggestion I would make is to go into business or computer science. Businesses need human executives and computers need brains in “meatspace” to program them – at least for now.

Education and retraining can help mitigate the unemployment crisis somewhat, but let’s not assume this is a total solution. When computers become smart enough to solve complex engineering problems, for example, even a lot of knowledge workers could find themselves out of a job. The rate of technological change is faster now than ever before, and the implications of this accelerating pace of advancement are impossible even for the brightest minds to fully comprehend. I suspect that the opening of new frontiers in the oceans and in outer space later this century – starting with seasteading and followed by colonization of the Moon, Mars, and the Asteroid Belt – may be what we need to get beyond the present socioeconomic challenges, because people have always found new opportunities to dream, create, and become prosperous whenever there has been a frontier.

We are living in interesting times, with both the profoundly good and the profoundly bad that accompany such times. One way or another, I have to believe we’ll find a way to get through it. But to build the future we desire, we must not only build it with our hands and our minds; we must build it with our hearts. The future of humanity demands a return to humanity on the part of us all.