Writing as Infant Technology … the thing about new technologies… is that it takes several generations for us to decide what they’re good for. They’re… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (2): Half-baked Beginnings
We often think of writing (and reading) as primarily a matter of culture and education, which obscures its position as one of humanity’s most transformative… Read More »Writing and Reading as Technology (1): Transforming Fire; Slow Burn
In short This book – about the origins of the internet – comes highly recommended by lots of people, and is really excellent. Longer I… Read More »Technology (9): The Dream Machine
This extract is from one of the best interviews with Kevin Kelly I’ve heard, on David Perell’s The North Star podcast. It covers a lot… Read More »Technology (8): Kevin Kelly on finding jobs for infant technologies
On the Hook Here’s the promised graph, explained below: Fishing for Complements Robert Solow (1987) pointed out that “a technological revolution, a drastic change in… Read More »Technology (7): Solow-ng (and thanks for all the fish) – Brynjolfsson, Rock and Syverson on intangibles and the Productivity J-Curve
You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics. Nobel Prize in Economics winner Robert Solow, in 1987 (quoted everywhere but it’s… Read More »Technology (6): How did we sink Solow? – true ubiquity, clotheslines and switching costs
You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics. Nobel Prize in Economics winner Robert Solow, in 1987 (quoted everywhere but it’s… Read More »Technology (5): Paul A. David’s Computer and Dynamo – on the evolution of techno-economic regimes
This is an excellent introductory series of videos giving an overview of what data is, important differences between different types of data, how it’s processed… Read More »Recommendation: Computerphile on Data Analysis
A history of augmentation Wikipedia has a nice, roughly chronological list of early technologies. It seems that weapons, cooking and languages were the trio that… Read More »Technology (3): A history of augmentation
… technology predated our humanness… The strategy of bending the environment to use as if it were part of one’s own body is a half-billion-year-old… Read More »Technology (2): Artifice-ial Beings