We began with humans as beasts of burden and moved up: we automated legs, then arms, then fingers, and now brains. We went from farm… Read More »Eye on AI: Benedict Evans on automation and the Jevons paradox
Until about now, most of the text online was written by humans. But this text has been used to train GPT3(.5) and GPT4, and these… Read More »Eye on AI: Ross Anderson on model collapse; or, The Curse of Recursion
I’ve been using Python with pandas on and off to automate analysis of reading-test data at the non-profit where I work. If you’re regularly analysing… Read More »Resources: Python (pandas) for Data Analysis
This is an extract from a much longer article by Dan Wang. His point about the learning-doing feedback loop applies to just about everything, of… Read More »Technology (21): Dan Wang on Technology as Process and Learning by Doing
Software Eats the World means… … that any product or service in any field that can become a software product will become a software product.… Read More »Technology (20): Software Eats the World (again)
This is a crossover post with the Literacy as Technology thread – I’ll weave some of these ideas in there in the coming days. Kevin… Read More »Technology (19): Kevin Kelly on technological transitions as informational revolutions
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
I would think that one of the things that is coming… is the death of distance. We are basically no longer having to use airplanes… Read More »Joel Mokyr on the death of distance (2013 edition)