general purpose technology

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The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

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We are, down to the biological, the anatomical level, a product of them. Stonework and fire were proto-general-purpose technologies, meaning they were pervasive, in turn enabling new inventions, goods, and organizational behaviors. General-purpose technologies ripple out over societies, across geographies, and throughout history. They open the doors of invention wide, enabling scores of downstream tools and processes. They are often built on some kind of general-purpose principle, whether the power of steam to do work or the information theory behind a computer’s binary code. The irony of general-purpose technologies is that, before long, they become invisible and we take them for granted.

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Welcome to the age of biomachines and biocomputers, where strands of DNA perform calculations and artificial cells are put to work. Where machines come alive. Welcome to the age of synthetic life. CHAPTER 6 THE WIDER WAVE Technological waves are bigger than just one or two general-purpose technologies. They are clusters of technologies arriving at around the same time, anchored by one or more general-purpose technologies but extending far beyond them. General-purpose technologies are accelerants. Invention sparks invention. Waves lay the ground for further scientific and technological experimentation, nudging open the doors of possibility. This in turn yields new tools and techniques, new areas of research—new domains of technology itself.

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See Timothy F. Bresnahan and Manuel Trajtenberg, “General Purpose Technologies ‘Engines of Growth’?,” (working paper, NBER, Aug. 1992), www.nber.org/​papers/​w4148. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT It had a pronounced impact on evolution Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (London: Profile Books, 2010). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT General-purpose technologies ripple Account taken from Richard Lipsey, Kenneth Carlaw, and Clifford Bekar, Economic Transformations: General Purpose Technologies and Long-Term Economic Growth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Avent

3D printing, Airbnb, American energy revolution, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, creative destruction, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, heat death of the universe, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, performance metric, pets.com, post-work, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, very high income, warehouse robotics, working-age population

A half-century later, American manufacturers used more than 10 million horsepower in operating their factories, the vast majority of which was generated by steam engines, and the American economy was overtaking Britain as the world’s leading industrial and technological power.6 Economic historians label things such as steam power as a ‘general purpose technology’: an advance that can be used to do things more effectively across many different facets of life. A steam engine could be hooked up to any production facility that previously relied on wind or water or animal power. It could be affixed to transport devices – boats, cars, train engines – to make them go farther, faster, with more horsepower. Steam could be used to boost productivity in all sorts of contexts and industries. It is the general-purpose technologies – such as steam and electricity – that generate economic revolutions.

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I’ll then zero in on the ways in which the abundance of labour is altering the operation of our economy – our cities, our financial markets and our trading patterns – in worrying ways. I’ll conclude with thoughts about how we are likely to try to manage the change, and where we can expect to have most and least success. 1 The Digital Revolution and the Abundance of Labour 1 The General-Purpose Technology Technological progress used to be something you could feel in your bones. It was the thing that was all around you, turning your world on its head. It was the sensation a young man might have felt when the arrival of mechanical harvesters made his labour on a farm in the countryside unnecessary, leading him to leave for the city, where giant steel-framed towers stretched upwards in what must have seemed like the very realization of the Tower of Babel, and where a rich man might occasionally zoom by in a wheeled vehicle that, astonishingly, powered itself along without the aid of horses.

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It is the general-purpose technologies – such as steam and electricity – that generate economic revolutions. And computing is a fantastically powerful general-purpose technology. Engineers tinkered with computing machines for millennia, but the pace of advance in mechanical computing truly picked up in the nineteenth century. Early computing innovation found its way into a loom invented by a Frenchman called Joseph Marie Jacquard, which used punch cards to ‘programme’ the loom to produce particular patterns in the fabric. In the early twentieth century, the vacuum tube (a light-bulb-like device in which an electrical current is transmitted from one electrode to another) became the guts of early electronic computers.

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines by William Davidow, Michael Malone

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, holacracy, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, license plate recognition, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, QWERTY keyboard, ransomware, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, Snapchat, speech recognition, streetcar suburb, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, trade route, Turing test, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, zero day, zero-sum game, Zipcar

While the Protestant Reformation sprang from the minds of men such as Martin Luther and John Calvin, it was catalyzed by the generalized use of printing, which made it possible for vernacular Bibles and tracts to be widely disseminated. The current rise of populism is a reaction to the technology-enabled substitutional equivalences that are driving the Autonomous Revolution. Still, the main focus of this book is on transformations that are driven by the rise of general-purpose technologies. In our definition, general-purpose technologies are ones that have broad effects on the economic and institutional structures of society. Among history’s most important are agriculture, writing and numbers, printing, electricity, mechanical power, and many forms of information technology. A significant lag often occurs between the introduction of a technology and the changes associated with it.

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Despite this difference, techno-optimists (including many economists) have argued that the ultimate impact of intelligent machines will be similar to those of past general-purpose technologies. We believe, however, that things will be different this time. The structural transformations unleashed by intelligent machines are already rendering many of the economic rules and social processes of the past obsolete. We will have to search for, and put into place, new rules to deal with the future. To understand what’s different, let’s take a closer look at two general-purpose technologies: the internal combustion engine and the semiconductor. As we all know, the impact of the internal combustion engine was particularly dramatic.

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Until 1500 CE, this described only about 10 percent of the world’s population.17 This is very much not the case today. TRUE PHASE CHANGE The period between ancient times and the Renaissance was more heavily influenced by idea- and belief-driven structural transformations than by general-purpose technologies. This is not to say that many important inventions weren’t developed during those years, but only to note that their effects did not create social phase changes. New forms did not emerge; the old rules continued to work pretty well. The future was nowhere near as discontinuous as it had been in the earlier epochs of the Agricultural Revolution, or as it is today.

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

Farmers, firemen and financiers might all have cause to call on a wheel. And a wheel could be used in every part of their trade. These wide-ranging inventions are known as ‘general purpose technologies’. They may displace other technologies and create the opportunity for a wide variety of complementary products – products and services that can only exist because of this one invention. Throughout history, general purpose technologies (GPTs) have transformed society beyond recognition. Electricity drastically altered the way factories work, and revolutionised our domestic lives. The printing press, which played a key role in the European Reformation and the scientific revolution, was much more than a set of pressure plates and cast metal type.

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And what can we all do, as policymakers, business leaders or citizens, to prevent the exponential gap eroding our societies? The structure of this book tries to make my answers as clear as possible. In the first part, I will explain what exponential technologies are and why they have come about. I argue that our age is defined by the emergence of several new ‘general purpose technologies’, each improving at an exponential rate. It’s a story that starts with computing – but also encompasses energy, biology and manufacturing. The breadth of this change means that we have entered a wholly new era of human society and economic organisation – what I call the ‘Exponential Age’.

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Gene engineering might be used to tamper with microorganisms, produce new screens for smartphones, or help us design precise medicines. And 3D printers let us create everything from precision car parts to new bodily organs. The rapid evolution of these technologies does not presage instantaneous change. The revolutionary effect of general purpose technologies may take time to materialise. Consider electricity. In the words of the leading economic historian James Bessen: ‘The first electrical generating stations opened in 1881, but electrification had little effect on economic productivity until the 1920s.’20 GPTs take a while to have meaningful effects – as new infrastructure is built, ways of working change, and companies train their employees in novel techniques.

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond by Chris Burniske, Jack Tatar

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset allocation, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Future Shock, general purpose technology, George Gilder, Google Hangouts, high net worth, hype cycle, information security, initial coin offering, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, litecoin, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, packet switching, passive investing, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, smart contracts, social web, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, two and twenty, Uber for X, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y2K

For example, instead of aiming to decentralize and democratize aspects of the existing financial services, Masters’s Digital Asset Holdings aims to assist existing financial services companies in adopting this new technology, thereby helping the incumbents fight back the rebels who seek to disrupt the status quo. BLOCKCHAINS AS A GENERAL PURPOSE TECHNOLOGY While we have our beliefs about the most exciting applications of blockchain technology, we don’t ascribe to an exclusive world view. Instead, we believe Bitcoin’s blockchain is one of the most important blockchains in existence, and that it has given birth to a new general purpose technology that goes beyond Bitcoin. General purpose technologies are pervasive, eventually affecting all consumers and companies. They improve over time in line with the deflationary progression of technology, and most important, they are a platform upon which future innovations are built.

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Disruptive technologies are also being invented at an accelerating rate. The trend is one we have been witnessing for millennia. For example, between AD 900 and 1900, a new general purpose technology was invented roughly every 100 years, with notable examples including the steam engine, automobile, and electricity. In the twentieth century, a new general purpose technology came into existence every 15 years, with familiar examples like computers, the Internet, and biotechnology. In the twenty-first century, general purpose technologies have come into existence every 4 years, with autonomous robotics and blockchain technology as two of the more recent examples.3 While disruptive technologies tend to unseat incumbents, there are examples of companies that have managed to reinvent themselves continually for decades.

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In January 2009, when Bitcoin was first released, it embodied the first working implementation of a blockchain the world had seen. Since then, people have downloaded the open-source software that is Bitcoin, studied its blockchain, and released different blockchains that go far beyond Bitcoin. Blockchain technology can now be thought of as a general purpose technology, on par with that of the steam engine, electricity, and machine learning. To quote a May 2016 article in Harvard Business Review by Don and Alex Tapscott: “The technology most likely to change the next decade of business is not the social web, big data, the cloud, robotics, or even artificial intelligence.

Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy by Erik Brynjolfsson

Abraham Maslow, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, business cycle, business process, call centre, combinatorial explosion, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, hiring and firing, income inequality, intangible asset, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, minimum wage unemployment, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Ray Kurzweil, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, self-driving car, shareholder value, Skype, the long tail, too big to fail, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

champion supercomputer, and high-quality instantaneous machine translation, then, can be seen as the first examples of the kinds of digital innovations we’ll see as we move further into the second half—into the phase where exponential growth yields jaw-dropping results. Computing the Economy: The Economic Power of General Purpose Technologies These results will be felt across virtually every task, job, and industry. Such versatility is a key feature of general purpose technologies (GPTs), a term economists assign to a small group of technological innovations so powerful that they interrupt and accelerate the normal march of economic progress. Steam power, electricity, and the internal combustion engine are examples of previous GPTs.

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This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour. —John Maynard Keynes, 1930 The individual technologies and the broader technological acceleration discussed in Chapter 2 are creating enormous value. There is no question that they increase productivity, and thus our collective wealth. But at the same time, the computer, like all general purpose technologies, requires parallel innovation in business models, organizational processes structures, institutions, and skills. These intangible assets, comprising both organizational and human capital, are often ignored on companies’ balance sheets and in the official GDP statistics, but they are no less essential than hardware and software.

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As they increase government transparency and accountability and give us new ways to assemble and make our voices heard, they benefit us as citizens. And as they put us in touch with ideas, knowledge, friends, and loved ones, they benefit us as human beings. So as we observe the opening up of the digital frontier, we are hugely optimistic. History has witnessed three industrial revolutions, each associated with a general purpose technology. The first, powered by steam, changed the world so much that according to historian Ian Morris, it “made mockery of all that had gone before.” It allowed huge and unprecedented increases in population, social development, and standards of living. The second, based on electricity, allowed these beneficial trends to continue and led to a sharp acceleration of productivity in the 20th century.

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

All of these problems have a single, little noticed root cause: We have been living off low-hanging fruit for at least three hundred years. . . . Yet during the last forty years, that low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau and the trees are more bare than we would like to think.6 General Purpose Technologies: The Ones That Really Matter Clearly, Gordon and Cowen see the invention of powerful technologies as central to economic progress. Indeed, there’s broad agreement among economic historians that some technologies are significant enough to accelerate the normal march of economic progress.

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Electricity gave a further boost to manufacturing by enabling individually powered machines. It also lit factories, office buildings, and warehouses and led to further innovations like air conditioning, which made previously sweltering workplaces pleasant. With their typical verbal flair, economists call innovations like steam power and electricity general purpose technologies (GPTs). Economic historian Gavin Wright offers a concise definition: “deep new ideas or techniques that have the potential for important impacts on many sectors of the economy.”7 “Impacts” here mean significant boosts to output due to large productivity gains. GPTs are important because they are economically significant—they interrupt and accelerate the normal march of economic progress.

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Are we alone in thinking that information and communication technology (ICT) belongs in the same category as steam and electricity? Are we the only ones who think, in short, that ICT is a GPT? Absolutely not. Most economic historians concur with the assessment that ICT meets all of the criteria given above, and so should join the club of general purpose technologies. In fact, in a list of all the candidates for this classification compiled by the economist Alexander Field, only steam power got more votes than ICT, which was tied with electricity as the second most commonly accepted GPT.9 If we are all in agreement, then why the debate over whether ICTs are ushering in a new golden age of innovation and growth?

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

If everybody becomes convinced that artificial-intelligence technologies are needed, then businesses will invest in artificial intelligence, even when there are alternative ways of organizing production that could be more beneficial. Similarly, if most researchers are working on a particular way of advancing machine intelligence, others may follow faithfully, or even blindly, in their footsteps. These issues become even more consequential when we are dealing with “general-purpose” technologies, such as electricity or computers. General-purpose technologies provide a platform on which myriad applications can be built and potentially generate benefits—but sometimes also costs—for many sectors and groups of people. These platforms also allow widely different trajectories of development. Electricity, for instance, was not just a cheaper source of energy; it also paved the way to new products, such as radios, household appliances, movies, and TVs.

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DOI:10.3386/w29772. Heldring, Leander, James Robinson, and Sebastian Vollmer. 2021b. “The Long-Run Impact of the Dissolution of the English Monasteries.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 136, no. 4: 2093‒2145. Helpman, Elhanan, and Manuel Trajtenberg. 1998. “Diffusion of General-Purpose Technologies.” In General-Purpose Technologies and Economic Growth, edited by Helpman, 85‒120. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Henrich, Joseph. 2016. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hesser, Leon. 2019.

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Advances in manufacturing based on electricity increased demand for raw materials and other industrial inputs, such as chemicals and fossil fuels, as well as retail and transport services. They also launched novel products, including new plastics, dyes, metals, and vehicles, that were then used in other industries. Electricity has also paved the way for much greater levels of pollution from manufacturing production. Although general-purpose technologies can be developed in many different ways, once a shared vision locks in a specific direction, it becomes difficult for people to break out of its hold and explore different trajectories that might be socially more beneficial. Most people affected by those decisions are not consulted. This creates a natural tendency for the direction of progress to be socially biased—in favor of powerful decision makers with dominant visions and against those without a voice.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

The history of writing is one of static methods and technology, stable for hundreds of years, spliced with moments – like the invention of paper, the codex or the printing press – of massive change. Inventions are species of human creation. Joel Mokyr divides them into what he calls macro-inventions and microinventions.17 The former are pathbreaking general purpose technologies whose impact is felt across sectors. They are enablers of further swathes of invention, wholesale productivity boosters. Meanwhile micro-inventions centre on everyday product improvements. They are cumulative, local, small scale and occupy the vast majority of what counts as invention, but nonetheless sometimes concatenations of the latter lead to the former.

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In parallel the price fell from $16 a barrel to just a dollar.11 The two technologies had a host of knock-on effects: buildings could be taller, and transport more efficient and powerful. Macro-inventions came fast. New chemicals from dyes to dynamite, aspirin to fertiliser were harnessed and mass produced. Electricity generation and the electricity network, a general purpose technology surely as significant as any in history, came of age; then advances were made in the manufacturing process itself, a total system exemplified by Fordism with its interchangeable parts and production line. Changes in food supply from the use of nitrates to refrigeration improved quality and length of life; and a revolution in communications media introduced a now familiar informational mix.

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In the nineteenth century a new agricultural technique or manufacturing technology could have a dramatic impact on an entire national economy. But today even the largest sectors and industries form just a small portion of the whole. Commensurately huge advances in, say, metallurgy, just don't have the same impact, and the sprawl and complexity of the economy means even the impact of general purpose technologies is diluted. As Anton Howes puts it: Innovation has, in a sense, been the victim of its own success. By creating ever more products, sprouting new industries, and diversifying them into myriad specialisms, we have shrunk the impact that any single improvement can have. When cotton was king, a handful of inventors might hope to affect the entire national textile industry in some way.

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

As Marx writes, with the steam engine a prime mover finally arrived, “whose power was entirely under man’s control, that was mobile and a means of locomotion, that was urban and not, like the water-wheels, rural, that permitted production to be concentrated in towns instead of, like the water-wheels, being scattered up and down the country.”20 But perhaps more importantly, its application was not confined to any single task or industry: unlike water power, it could be applied in land transportation as well. Like the computer and electricity, the steam engine was an example of what economists call a general purpose technology. In contrast to other significant technologies of the eighteenth century, which were pure engineering efforts, steam power was a spin-off of the scientific revolution, building on the discovery that the atmosphere has weight. With the steam engine, science first took center stage in technological development, and its importance only continued to grow.

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The available data suggest that a total of 2,400–2,500 steam engines were built in the eighteenth century.23 And the impact of steam on the overall economy was still very slight as late as 1830, as the economic historian Nicholas Crafts has shown.24 Though its productivity contribution accelerated thereafter, especially in the period 1850–70, the economic impacts of steam were modest relative to those of later general purpose technologies like electricity and computers. Many sectors, including agriculture and construction, were left largely untouched. Nor did steam power enter people’s homes. Similar to the economic benefits of electricity and computers, however, the productivity effects of steam were delayed. One reason is that adoption was slow because water power remained cheaper for a long time.

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It runs and warms our cars, it furnishes our light, it plates our metals, it runs our elevators, it electrocutes our criminals; and a thousand other things it performs for us with secrecy and dispatch in its silent and forceful way.3 Electricity and the internal combustion engine were the general purpose technologies of the century, not only affecting every aspect of industry but also transforming the lives of average citizens. One of the great coincidences in economic history is that Karl Benz’s successful trial of his gas engine on New Year’s Eve 1879 occurred just ten weeks after Thomas Edison’s invention of the electric light bulb.4 Thus, if the annus mirabilis of the Industrial Revolution was 1769, when Richard Arkwright and Watt both patented their defining inventions, 1879 can be seen as the symbolic beginning of the Second Industrial Revolution.

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society by Will Hutton

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cloud computing, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, discovery of the americas, discrete time, disinformation, diversification, double helix, Edward Glaeser, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, plutocrats, power law, price discrimination, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, unpaid internship, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, work culture , working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game, éminence grise

But the person above all who had most impact on this book was Philippe Schneider – continuing from where he left off on The Writing on the Wall. He researched every chapter. He commented on every draft, singling out rogue passages that required attention. He consecrated nearly two years of his life to the cause of a book that he and I hope might make a difference. He led me through the wilds of behavioural psychology, general purpose technologies and financial network theory. He worked indefatigably, sometimes late into the night, to find the key paper or text that would support the emerging narrative. And when I flagged he would be steadfastly there, patiently encouraging me to come up with another draft – never criticising as I missed deadline after deadline.

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Capitalism may have its roots in the collective acquisition of knowledge – usually facilitated by public investment in learning, research and universities – but it is driven by individuals who are ready to dare, acting at the frontiers of business and technological possibility. The great general purpose technologies that have changed the world – such as the railway, the internal combustion engine and the internet – are transformations driven by this fecund interaction between capitalist dynamism and ever-expanding knowledge. The actors at the mobilising centre of this process are the entrepreneurs.

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Robert Winston argues that this tool was the trigger that began human evolution: it enabled hunting, transformed diets and brain power, created communication and group skills – and set in train the iterative relationship that human beings have had with nature ever since.8 The flint hand axe was the first transformative technology. Innovation theorists identify so-called general-purpose technologies (GPTs) – generic technologies that through progressive improvement have had radical transformative impacts on entire economies and societies – as the principal drivers of wealth. If we take a very long view of human civilisation from its beginnings around 9000 BC to the middle of the fifteenth century AD, Homo sapiens gradually evolved from a system of hunter-gathering to agricultural communities settled in villages and towns.

The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth by Jeremy Rifkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, book value, borderless world, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, decarbonisation, digital rights, do well by doing good, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, failed state, general purpose technology, ghettoisation, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, impact investing, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Joseph Schumpeter, means of production, megacity, megaproject, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, prudent man rule, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, union organizing, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Without transport and logistics, we can’t move economic activity and social life. Together, these three operating systems make up what economists call a general-purpose technology platform (a society-wide infrastructure). New communication, energy, and mobility infrastructures also change society’s temporal/spatial orientation, business models, governing patterns, built environments, habitats, and narrative identity. * * * In the nineteenth century, steam-powered printing and the telegraph, abundant coal, and locomotives on national rail systems meshed in a common general-purpose technology platform to manage, power, and move society, giving rise to the First Industrial Revolution.

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Businesses are encouraged to introduce new technologies and other efficiencies that can reduce the marginal cost of producing and distributing their goods and services, enabling them to sell at a cheaper price, win over market share, and bring back sufficient profit to their investors. However, it never occurred to economists that one day there might exist a general-purpose technology platform so hyperefficient in the production and delivery of goods and services that it plunges the marginal cost of economic activity so low that profit margins shrink dramatically, undermining the capitalist business model. At extremely low marginal costs, markets become too slow and eventually irrelevant as business mechanisms.

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Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) electric vehicles autonomous (self-driving) electric vehicles charging stations for cost tipping point for and declining price of lithium batteries and employment and energy storage and government fuel economy standards and Green New Deal key initiatives investment in and Los Angeles’s Green New Deal and Mobility and Logistics Internet and peak oil consumption projected sales and sustainable community pilot projects tax incentives for electricity sector decoupling from fossil fuel industry and Great Disruption warning signs national smart grid See also coal; fossil fuel industry; natural gas; oil; solar and wind energy Employment Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) EnBW Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) energy service companies (ESCOs) business model and investment in Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure transition main feature of and peer assembly governance and performance contracting top ten ENIAC (first electronic computer) E.ON Eugster, Chris European Commission European Greens European Parliament European People’s Party–European Democrats (EPP–ED) European Union and building retrofits Central Bank climate-neutral 2050 game plan Committee of the Regions Energy Performance of Buildings Directive A Green New Deal (declaration) A Green New Deal for Europe (European Greens report) Green New Deal Group Green New Deal origins taxation in Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure in and Toward a Transatlantic Green New Deal (German Green Party manifesto) 20–20–20 mandate European United Left–Nordic Green Left (GUE–NGL) Exelon Utilities Facebook Farmers Insurance Group Federal Housing Administration (FHA) feed-in tariffs Fields, Mark financial sector Bank of America Bank of England and stranded assets See also investment; pension funds Financial Stability Board (FSB) First Industrial Revolution and building sector definition of and family and kinship and fossil fuels ideological consciousness of infrastructure of and Morrill Land-Grant Acts (1862) and railroads and wealth First Nations 5G broadband Internet Fleissig, Will Ford, Gerald Ford, Henry Ford Motor Company Ford Smart Mobility River Rouge plant (Detroit) and union membership Fortune 500 companies fossil fuel industry collapse of decoupling of building sector from decoupling of electricity sector from decoupling of ICT and telecommunications sector from decoupling of transportation sector from infrastructure post-tax subsidies for See also coal; natural gas; oil; stranded assets Franklin, Benjamin French Revolution Friedman, Milton fuel-cell vehicles. See also electric vehicles Gabriel, Sigmar Garcetti, Eric Gates, Bill Geis, Aurora Gen Z general-purpose technology platform (society-wide infrastructure) German Alliance for Work and the Environment Germany Autobahn building retrofit project Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party and coal distributed nature of green energies in feed-in tariff for green electricity Green Party and peer assembly governance model presidency of Council of the European Union Social Democratic Party (SPD) GI Bill Giannakopoulou, Elena Gillibrand, Kirsten Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy global warming and agriculture sector and building sector and ICT/communication sector mandates and protocols public opinion on and transportation sector globalization glocalization Google Sidewalk Labs Gore, Al Grand Duchy of Luxembourg (Green New Deal roadmap) Great Depression Great Disruption consequences of and feed-in tariffs four phases of energy transition signs of transitional moment and 20–20–20 mandate (European Union) Great Recession Green Bank Act of 2014 Green Bank Design Summit (2019, Paris) green banks Green Corps Green New Deal building retrofits carbon-farming techniques carbon tax data centers electric vehicles and charging stations elimination of fossil fuel subsidies energy storage technology equitable tax laws European origins of 5G broadband global interconnectivity and transparency Internet of Things investment in Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure transition just transition funds labor movement microgrids military expenditures national green bank national smart power organic and ecological agricultural practices and peer assembly governance public lands research and development service programs smart Third Industrial Revolution business development and Sunrise Movement supply chain circularity processes twenty-three key initiatives of Green New Deal (cont’d) and US Green Party US resolution water, sewer, and drainage systems Green New Deal: A Progressive Vision for Environmental Sustainability and Economic Stability (Data for Progress report) Green New Deal: Joined-Up Policies to Solve the Triple Crunch of the Credit Crisis, Climate Change and High Oil Prices (Green New Deal Group declaration) Green New Deal for Europe: Towards Green Modernisation in the Face of Crisis (European Greens report) Green New Deal roadmaps Grand Duchy of Luxembourg Hauts-de-France (formerly Nord-Pas-de-Calais) Metropolitan Region of Rotterdam and The Hague San Antonio Green Party (Germany) Green Party (US) Greenhalgh, Paul greenhouse gas emissions Greens–European Free Alliance (Greens/EFA) Haier Group Hanergy hard-to-abate sectors Harris, Kamala Hauts-de-France (Green New Deal roadmap) Heinrich Böll Foundation Homestead Acts Homo urbanus Horgan, John Hoyer, Steny Hsiang, Solomon human consciousness Hurricane Sandy hybrid economic system (sharing economy and provider/user networks) ICT and telecommunications sector and antitrust laws data centers decoupling from fossil fuel industry 5G broadband and Green New Deal key initiatives and Green New Deal transition infrastructure internet companies projected greenhouse emissions from and Second Industrial Revolution smartphones and tablets and vertically scaled monopolies ideological consciousness infrastructure American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) report card costs of deteriorating and substandard definition of First Industrial Revolution fossil fuel general-purpose technology platform (society-wide infrastructure) Internet of Things nuclear energy payoffs for improvements to and spending on public-private partnerships and ownership of Second Industrial Revolution Third Industrial Revolution distributed infrastructure Third Industrial Revolution laterally scaled infrastructure Third Industrial Revolution open-source infrastructure Trump administration’s plan and wealth workforce World Economic Forum’s rankings and World War II See also investment in Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure transition infrastructure academies Infrastructure Corps Intel Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) internet.

The Ages of Globalization by Jeffrey D. Sachs

Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, circular economy, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, Commentariolus, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, domestication of the camel, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, European colonialism, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, out of africa, packet switching, Pax Mongolica, precision agriculture, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rewilding, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

Total energy consumption rose by 37 percent in the first half of the eighteenth century, by 124 percent in the second half of the century, and by 255 percent in the first half of the nineteenth century. Note the high use of coal already in 1700–1709, before the steam engine. Most of this coal was likely used for home heating and cooking. Table 7.2 Energy Consumption (petajoules) Watt’s steam engine had applications across the economy. It was, in modern parlance, a general-purpose technology (GPT)—the kind of technology that finds applications across many sectors of the economy.5 With the steam engine, equipment of all kinds could be mechanized. Major applications came quickly in textiles production, with the mechanization of spinning and weaving and the introduction of large-scale factory production using steam power.

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Bourguignon, François and Christian Morrisson. “Inequality Among World Citizens: 1820–1992.” American Economic Review 92, no. 4 (2002): 727–44. Brauer, Ralph W. “The Camel and Its Role in Shaping Mideastern Nomad Societies.” Comparative Civilizations Review 28, no. 28 (1993): 47. Bresnahan, Timothy F., and Manuel Trajtenberg. “General Purpose Technologies ‘Engines of growth’?.” Journal of Econometrics 65, no. 1 (1995): 83–108. Broughton, Jack M. and Elic M. Weitzel, “Population Reconstructions for Humans and Megafauna Suggest Mixed Causes for North American Pleistocene Extinctions.” Nature Communications 9, no. 1 (2018): 5441. Browning, Sharon R., Brian L.

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Annual Review of Psychology 68, no. 1 (2017): 155–86. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010416-044201. Harris, W. V. Roman Power: A Thousand Years of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Helliwell, John F., Richard Layard, and Jeffrey D. Sachs, eds. The UN World Happiness Report 2019. New York: Sustainable Development Solutions Network: 2019. Helpman, Elhanan, ed. General Purpose Technologies and Economic Growth. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. Henn, B. M., L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, and M. W. Feldman. “The Great Human Expansion.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 44 (2012): 17758–64. Hershkovitz, Israel, Gerhard W. Weber, Rolf Quam, Mathieu Duval, Rainer Grün, Leslie Kinsley, Avner Ayalon, et al.

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Dava Sobel, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Doha Development Round, double helix, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental economics, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, full employment, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahbub ul Haq, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Max Levchin, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, open economy, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, post-Panamax, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, rent-seeking, reshoring, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, Snapchat, special economic zone, spice trade, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, zero day

Developmental forces today have raised the global population of healthy, brainy people to its highest level ever. Connective forces—in politics, trade, finance, population migration—have tangled human society together. These same forces have also impacted the spread of ideas. The volume, variety and richness of their flows through this tangle have exploded. New general-purpose technologies New general-purpose technologies have once again made mass communication cheap and abundant. Increased computing power has made the flow of ideas more diverse and abundant, and advanced the complexity of what we can say to each other. Thanks to the compound growth in computing power identified by Moore’s Law, the smartphone that fits in our pockets today is faster than the Cray-2 supercomputer—the world’s most powerful machine in 1990, which weighed in at 5,500 pounds and had a price tag of $35 million.41 Moore’s Law has brought the Internet to all our fingertips, but it has also taken us to the edge of the universe.

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New exchanges between civilizations, expanding trade and financial links, social mobility, urbanization and migration together created many more contact points between diverse people and their ways of life. Then and now, one of the best ways to push the limits of our present thinking is to meet people who think differently. The most direct catalyst of this enhanced flow of ideas was the new medium of print. The printing press was what today we would classify as a “general-purpose technology.”36 Unlike, say, the violin, whose arrival transformed music but affected little beyond that sphere, the press affected virtually every domain of activity. It multiplied the available body of knowledge and broadened the network of practitioners in every field. Among scholars, the medieval practice of writing letters to friends and holding local debates evolved into publishing booklets for wide distribution and critique.

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Among scholars, the medieval practice of writing letters to friends and holding local debates evolved into publishing booklets for wide distribution and critique. Engaging greater numbers of people brought a wider set of knowledge, experience and ideas to every important problem. Print helped distribute another general-purpose technology: mathematics. In 1494, Luca Pacioli printed his Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalità in Venice, and helped launch the mass adoption of arithmetic in Europe. Prior to print, it was mostly only learned elites who knew Hindu-Arabic numerals. Most math was still calculated with Roman numerals and an abacus, and the need for the latter piece of hardware meant most people couldn’t afford to do their own sums.

Red Flags: Why Xi's China Is in Jeopardy by George Magnus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business process, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, corporate governance, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, Malacca Straits, means of production, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old age dependency ratio, open economy, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, speech recognition, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade route, urban planning, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game

On the one hand, ambitious plans for leadership in artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies might be a game-changer for productivity growth. On the other hand, we don’t know if China’s digital authoritarianism is appropriate to harness fully what is most likely the world’s newest general-purpose technology. By the 2020s, we should know whether China is going in the right direction. Or, indeed, whether, despite everything, it is headed for a situation in which the rising share of global GDP and surging income per head stall or get trapped. Defining the trap The term ‘middle-income trap’ was coined in 2005 by two World Bank economists, Indermit Gill and Homi Kharas, who used it to describe economies that were being squeezed between low-wage and poorer competitors, and high-wage, richer innovators.

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The Soviet Union, for example, was no slouch when it came to science, space, engineering and research and development. Neither was ancient China. And yet, these were not enough. We should at least consider, therefore, how important robust institutions and governance are to realising sustained productivity improvements. And also just what so-called general purpose technologies entail, how they differ from run-of-the-mill innovation and invention, and whether they can fulfil their potential in a state- and target-driven model. Governance, institutions and Xi’s new authority China faces an important governance challenge. Some believe it is about whether the Communist Party system is strong enough to survive or derive continuous legitimacy, but its status and prestige are, for the foreseeable future at least, not in question.

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No one should think that China isn’t deadly serious about this, or that Chinese innovation nowadays is mostly about copying Western ideas more cheaply. China and the West both want to be tech leaders, and will probably have to settle for sharing the spoils. This is no ordinary tech race, though, and what sets it apart is that the ultimate prize is the full exploitation and commercialisation of what is almost certainly our newest general-purpose technology (GPT). Following in the footsteps of steam, railroads, electricity, the internal combustion engine and the internet, this GPT will also be distinguished not by big data or AI, specifically, but by the hundreds of other innovations and changes that they spawn in many other sectors, products and processes.

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be by Diane Coyle

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, choice architecture, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, congestion charging, constrained optimization, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, framing effect, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Google bus, haute cuisine, High speed trading, hockey-stick growth, Ida Tarbell, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low earth orbit, lump of labour, machine readable, market bubble, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, multi-sided market, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Network effects, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, payday loans, payment for order flow, Phillips curve, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, savings glut, school vouchers, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber for X, urban planning, winner-take-all economy, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, Y2K

The second is what makes policies effective in delivering progress in this non-linear, complex world, that is not amenable to simple causal explanations? What Counts as Progress in a Digital World? The story starts with digital technology. Its consequences are certainly not deterministic, but as a ‘general purpose technology’ used widely across the economy, it sparks innovation, changes behaviour, and forces reactions and significant adjustments in the economy and society. The growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) systems seems likely to accelerate this. The pervasive effects of the new technologies on economic and social life are driving a reassessment of the current framework for classifying and measuring the economy, especially the shorthand indicator of economic progress, GDP.

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The distinctive economic characteristics of digital technology mean that the way we think about economics itself has to change. Digital Is Different ‘Digital’ has become shorthand for ICTs or information and communication technologies. It is an example of what economists denote as a general purpose technology (Helpman 1998), which have the following features: They enable radical innovation in products and services and also in processes of production, initially in the innovating sector and gradually across a wider range of activities in the economy; They lead to a major re-organisation of the structure of the economy, because they change relative input costs dramatically; They require significant additional investment in other areas such as other forms of capital, infrastructure, organisation, skills, and so often start out very slowly, before eventually having dramatic economic and societal impacts.

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These were les trentes glorieuses, the thirty glorious years in Fourastié’s famous term (Fourastié 1979). Electricity in homes and factories became universal, access to cars spread with towns and cities built or rebuilt to accommodate them, while radio and cinema had their heyday. Electricity and the internal combustion engine are examples of general purpose technologies, technologies which can be used for a range of purposes and spread widely through the economy, with substantial economic and social effects. These technologies, invented in the late nineteenth century, delivered the growth and productivity of the mid-twentieth century. However, the thirty golden years contained the seeds of the next political economy cycle.

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything by Martin Ford

AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, call centre, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Googley, GPT-3, high-speed rail, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Ocado, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, post scarcity, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

For those of us who live in the developed world, there is virtually nothing that is not somehow touched by, or indeed made possible by, access to electric power. Electricity is probably the best—and certainly the most durable—example of a general-purpose technology: in other words, an innovation that scales across and transforms every aspect of the economy and society. Other general-purpose technologies include steam power, which produced the Industrial Revolution, but is now relegated to a few applications like nuclear power plants. The internal combustion engine was certainly transformative, but it’s now quite easy to imagine a future where gas and diesel engines are almost entirely displaced—likely by electric motors.

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The internal combustion engine was certainly transformative, but it’s now quite easy to imagine a future where gas and diesel engines are almost entirely displaced—likely by electric motors. In the absence of some dystopian catastrophe scenario, it’s almost impossible to imagine a future without electricity. It is, therefore, an extraordinarily bold claim to argue that artificial intelligence will evolve into a general-purpose technology of such scale and power that it can reasonably be compared to electricity. Nonetheless, there are good reasons to believe that this is the path we are on: AI, much like electricity, will eventually touch and transform virtually everything. Artificial intelligence is already impacting every sector of the economy, including agriculture, manufacturing, healthcare, finance, retail and virtually all other industries.

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Is AI just another example of a labor-saving innovation like the agricultural technology that transformed farming? Or is it something fundamentally different? My argument has been that AI is indeed different, and the reason is anchored in the core thesis of this book: that artificial intelligence is a systemic, general-purpose technology not unlike electricity, and it will therefore ultimately scale across and invade every aspect of our economy and society. Historically, labor market technological disruptions have tended to impact on a sector-by-sector basis. Agricultural mechanization destroyed millions of jobs, but a rising manufacturing sector was available to eventually absorb those workers.

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters by Diane Coyle

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, different worldview, disintermediation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Financial Instability Hypothesis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low skilled workers, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, megacity, Network effects, new economy, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, principal–agent problem, profit motive, purchasing power parity, railway mania, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, social contagion, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, web application, web of trust, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Economies have always depended on trust, but a successful modern economy in which the division of labor has become very highly specialized and every individual depends on a large and complex network of other people in many countries is profoundly more dependent on high levels of trust. New information technologies, from printing to the railways, the telegraph to the Internet, have (like new energy-related technologies and other examples of what the literature terms “general purpose” technologies) always resulted in profound social and economic changes. This comes about in many ways. The results are unpredictable and can take decades to achieve in full, but they are ultimately transformational. This was true of steam power, railways, and electrification. It is just as true now.

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For example, Paul David drew an analogy with electrification, which required new types of factory building and investment in electric networks, before the economic impact was large and widespread.15 Nicholas Crafts pointed out that although the estimates of the impact of modern ICTs on economic growth might appear small, they were much larger than the historical figures for the impact of steam, and few people would argue that had not been a profoundly important technology.16 However, steam, like electricity or the railways, had taken decades to have its full impact. Businesses didn’t invest in steam power until the older technologies ceased to be profitable, and often it was new businesses that adopted new technologies. Like any new “general purpose technology,” or in other words a technology with a wide range of applications, ICTs are reshaping the economy. Elsewhere, I’ve described this phenomenon as “weightlessness.”17 This is because advanced economies are shifting significantly toward the creation of value that is intangible, either in the form of services, or in the form of the innovations, design, creativity, or customization embedded in physical goods.

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Smart cards and electronic monitoring have made it feasible to exclude some drivers from the roads at certain times. In all of these examples, the role of government—the type of intervention needed—has changed. The new information and communications technologies have had a more profound effect on market economies, however. They form what economists refer to as a “general purpose technology” because they affect the organization of the economy in a wide-ranging way, like steam or electricity or rail in the past.20 One widespread effect has been to increase the scope of economies of scale, as there are many industries in which it is now possible to reach a much larger number of consumers at very little additional cost, thanks to the possibilities of online marketing and distribution.

The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths by Mariana Mazzucato

Apple II, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, circular economy, clean tech, computer age, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demand response, deskilling, dual-use technology, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, green transition, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, incomplete markets, information retrieval, intangible asset, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, linear model of innovation, natural language processing, new economy, offshore financial centre, Philip Mirowski, popular electronics, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart grid, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Figure 13 Origins of popular Apple products Figure 14 Global new investment in renewable energy (US$, billions) Figure 15 Government energy R&D spend as % GDP in 13 countries, 2007 Figure 16 Subsectors of venture capital within clean energy Figure 17 The global market for solar and wind power (US$, billions), 2000–2011 LIST OF ACRONYMS AEIC American Energy Innovation Council ARPA-E Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (US Department of Energy) ARRA American Recovery and Reinvestment Act ATP Advanced Technology Program BIS Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (UK) BNDES Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (Brazilian Development Bank) CBI Confederation of British Industries CBO Congressional Budget Office (UK) CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research, Geneva DARPA Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (USA) DECC Department of Energy and Climate Change (UK) DEMOS UK think tank DoD US Department of Defense DoE US Department of Energy DRAM Dynamic random-access memory EC European Commission, Brussels EPA Environmental Protection Agency (USA) EPRI Electric Power Research Institute FDA Food and Drug Administration (USA) FINNOV FINNOV EC FP7 project (www.finnov-fp7.eu) FIT Feed-in tariff GDP Gross domestic product GE General Electric GMR Giant magnetoresistance GPS Global positioning system GPT General purpose technology GW Gigawatt GWEC Global Wind Energy Council HM Treasury Her Majesty’s Treasury (UK) IP Intellectual property IPO Initial public offering on stock market IPR Intellectual property rights MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology MITI Ministry of International Trade and Industry (Japan) MRC Medical Research Council (UK) MW Megawatt NAS National Academy of Sciences (USA) NBER National Bureau of Economic Research (USA, non-profit) NESTA National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (UK) NIH National Institutes of Health (USA) NIST National Institute of Standards and Technology (USA) NME New molecular entity NNI National Nanotechnology Initiative (USA) NSF National Science Foundation (USA) NYT New York Times (USA) OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development OSTP Office of Science and Technology Policy (USA) OTA Office of Technology Assessment (USA) OTP Office of Tax Policy (USA) PhRMA Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (trade association) PIRC Public Interest Research Centre (USA, non-profit) PV Photovoltaic R&D Research and development S&P 500 Standard & Poor’s (S&P) stock market index, based on the market capitalizations of 500 leading companies publicly traded in the US SBIC Small Business Investment Company (USA) SBIR Small Business Innovation Research (USA) SITRA Suomen itsenäisyyden juhlarahasto (Finnish Innovation Fund) SMEs Small and medium enterprises SRI Stanford Research Institute (USA, non-profit) SST (American) Supersonic Transport project TFT Thin-film transistor TFP Total factor productivity TW Terawatt VC Venture capital WIPO World Intellectual Property Organization ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The book could not have been written without the intellectual stimulus and hard work of many colleagues and friends.

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By looking at examples of the State’s leading role in the development of Internet- and nanotechnology we will further develop our understanding of the link between R&D and growth, and the public–private divide. Not all innovations lead to economy-wide growth. Economy-wide growth is generally caused by new products or processes that have an impact on a wide variety of sectors in the economy, as was the case with the rise with electricity and computers. These are what macroeconomists call general purpose technologies (GPTs). GPTs are characterized by three core qualities: • They are pervasive in that they spread into many sectors. • They improve over time and should keep lowering the cost to their users. • They make it easier to spawn innovation through the invention and production of new products or processes (Helpman 1998).

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The National Nanotechnology Initiative The entrepreneurial role that the State can play to foster the development of new technologies, which provide the foundation for decades of economic growth, has most recently been seen in the development of nanotechnology in the US. The types of investments and strategic decisions that the State has made have gone beyond simply creating the right infrastructure, funding basic research, and setting rules and regulations (as in a simple ‘systems failure’ approach). Nanotechnology is very likely to be the next general purpose technology, having a pervasive effect on many different sectors and becoming the foundation of new economic growth. However, while this is commonly accepted now, in the 1990s it was not. Motoyama, Appelbaum and Parker (2011, 109–19) describe in detail how the US government has in fact been the lead visionary in dreaming up the possibility of a nanotech revolution – by making the ‘against all odds’ initial investments and by explicitly forming dynamic networks that bring together different public actors (universities, national labs, government agencies) and when available, the private sector, to kick start a major new revolution which many believe will be even more important than the computer revolution.

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, bike sharing, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Chrome, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, ImageNet competition, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, pattern recognition, pirate software, profit maximization, QR code, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, Solyndra, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

Some of them change how we perform a single task (typewriters), some of them eliminate the need for one kind of labor (calculators), and some of them disrupt a whole industry (the cotton gin). And then there are technological changes on an entirely different scale. The ramifications of these breakthroughs will cut across dozens of industries, with the potential to fundamentally alter economic processes and even social organization. These are what economists call general purpose technologies, or GPTs. In their landmark book The Second Machine Age, MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee described GPTs as the technologies that “really matter,” the ones that “interrupt and accelerate the normal march of economic progress.” Looking only at GPTs dramatically shrinks the number of data points available for evaluating technological change and job losses.

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Renren, 42–43 lean startup methodology, 44–45 Ma, Jack, and, 34–37 search habit divergence and, 37–38 Silicon Valley and, 22–25, 28, 30–34, 39–40, 49 Wang Xing and, 22–24, 26, 31, 32–33, 42, 46–49 War of a Thousand Groupons, 45–49 Zhou Hongyi and, 40–42 corporate oligarchy, 171 corporate research and proprietary technology, 91–92 corporate social responsibility, 216–17 craftsmanship, 229 credit industry, 10–11, 110, 112–13, 116 crime disruption, 75 Cultural Revolution in China, 33 Cybersecurity Law in China, 125 D Daimler, 135 data age of, 14, 18 AI algorithms and, 14, 17, 56, 138 AI-rich countries and, 168–69 businesses and, 110–11 China’s abundance of, 15, 16, 17, 50, 55–56, 73, 79 collection of, and privacy, 124–25 deep learning and, 14, 17, 19–20, 56 internet companies and, 107–8 medical diagnosis and, 114 from mobile payments, 77 neural networks and, 9 pattern-finding in, 10 private, 124–25 self-driving cars and, 131–32, 133 structured, 111–12 Deep Blue, 4, 5 deep learning AI revolution and, 5, 12–13, 25, 92, 94, 143 business AI and, 111 data and, 14, 17, 19–20, 56 Google and, 92 history of, 6–10 implementation of, 12–14, 86 machine perceptual abilities and, 166 next, 91–92, 94 pattern-finding and, 10–11, 13, 166–67 rapid progress of, 161 DeepMind AI in United Kingdom and, 169 AlphaGo and, 2, 11 AlphaGo Zero and, 90 Google and, 2, 11, 92 iFlyTek compared to, 105 publishing by, 91 reinforcement learning and, 143 Deng Xiaoping, 28 desktop computers, 96 Dianping (Yelp copycat), 48, 49, 71–72 Didi four waves of AI and, 106 going heavy, 72–73 self-driving cars and, 131 services using model of, 213–14 Uber and, 40, 68–69, 79, 137 Didi Chuxing, 68–69, 70 discovery to implementation, transition from, 13, 15 Disneyland replica in China, 31 Disruptor (Zhou), 42 DJI, 130–31 domestic workers, 130 drones, autonomous, 130–31, 136, 167–68 dual-teacher model, 122 dystopians vs. utopians, 140–44 E EachNet, 35 Eat24, 72 eBay, 35–37, 39 economy and AI, 144–73 competition and, 106 deep-learning breakthroughs and, 4–5 general purpose technologies (GPTs), 148–55 global economic inequality, 146, 168–70, 172 intelligent vs. physical automation, 167–68 job loss, two kinds of, 162–63 job losses, bottom line, 164–65 job loss studies, 157–61 jobs and inequality crisis, 145–47 machine learning as driver, 25, 84, 91, 94–95 monopolies, 20, 96, 168–69, 170–71 psychological crisis, 5, 21, 147, 173–74 risk of replacement, 155–57 science-fiction visions and, 144–45 techno-optimists and the Luddite fallacy, 147–48 unemployment.

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See wealth and class inequality See also business AI; human coexistence with AI Edison, Thomas, 13, 86 education employment and, 205 OMO-powered, 121–24 revamping, 228–29 social investment stipend and, 221–22 Einstein, Albert, 103 electrification, compared to AI, 13–15, 25, 50, 86, 149–50, 152, 154, 228 Element AI, 111 engineering bottlenecks, 158 enterprise software, 111–12 Estonia, 137 European Union, 124–25, 229 expertise to data, transition from, 14, 15, 56 expert systems, 7–8 F F5 Future Store, 163 Face++, 90, 117 Facebook Cambridge Analytica and, 107–8, 125 Chinese companies compared to, 28 Chinese researchers at, 90 cloning of, 22–23, 24, 31, 32–33 deep-learning experts and, 11 as dominant AI player, 83, 91 Face++ and, 90 global markets and, 137 iFlyTek compared to, 105 innovation mentality at, 33 monopoly of social networks, 170 resistance to product modifications, 34 split with Messenger, 70 Tencent compared to, 109 top researchers at, 93 U.S. digital world dominance and, 2 Facebook AI Research, 91 facial recognition AI chips and, 96 Apple’s iPhone X and, 117 Chinese investment in, 99 device security and, 117 education, AI-powered, and, 122 Face++ and, 90, 117 mobile payments and, 118 privacy and, 124 public transportation and, 84 fake news detection, 109 Fanfou (Twitter clone), 23, 46 Fermi, Enrico, 85, 103 financial crisis (2008), 46, 100, 165, 205 financial sector, 111, 112–13, 116 Fink, Larry, 215–16 Fo Guang Shan monastery, 187, 218–20 “Folding Beijing” (Hao), 144–45, 172, 230 food delivery, 69, 72, 79 Forbidden City, 29 Ford, 135 Ford, Martin, 165 4th Paradigm, 111 four waves of AI, 104–39 autonomous AI, 105–6, 128–36 business AI, 105–6, 110–17 economic divides and, 145 global markets and, 136–38 internet AI, 105–6, 107–10 perception AI, 105–6, 117–28 France, 20, 169 freemium revenue model, 36 Frey, Carl Benedikt, 158 Friendster, 22 G Gates, Bill, 33 general AI, 10, 13 General Data Protection Regulation, 124–25 general purpose technologies (GPTs), 148–55 gig economy, 164 global AI markets, 136–38 global AI story, 226–32 AI future without AI race, 227–28 global wisdom for AI age, 228–29 hearts and minds, 231–32 writing, 230 global economic inequality, 146, 168–70 globalization, 150 GMI (guaranteed minimum income), 206–7 Go (game), 1–2, 4, 5, 167 going light vs. going heavy, 71–73, 76–77, 209 Google AI chips and, 96 AlphaGo and, 1, 2, 11 Baidu compared to, 37, 38, 109 China at time of founding of, 33 Chinese entrepreneurs compared to, 24–25 Chinese market and, 39 data captured by, 77 as dominant AI player, 83, 91, 93–94 elite expertise at, 138–39 Europe’s fining of, 229 Face++ and, 90 global markets and, 137 grid approach and, 95 iFlyTek compared to, 105 innovation mentality at, 33 internet AI and, 107, 109 mobile payments and, 75 monopoly of search engines, 170 vs. other technology companies, 92–94 resistance to product modifications, 34 self-driving cars and, 131–32, 135 TensorFlow, 95, 228 top researchers at, 93 U.S. digital world dominance and, 2 See also DeepMind Google Brain, 45 Google China, 29–30, 31–32, 37–38, 41, 52, 57 Google Wallet, 75, 76 GPTs (general purpose technologies), 148–55 Grab, 137 great decoupling, 150, 170, 202 grid approach, 94–95 “Gross National Happiness,” 229 ground-up disruptions and job threats, 162–63, 164 Groupon, 23, 24, 45–46, 47–48, 49 Grubhub, 72 guaranteed minimum income (GMI), 206–7 guiding funds, 63, 64, 98–99 Guo Hong, 51–52, 56, 61–62, 63, 64, 68 H Hall of Ancestor Worship, 29–30 Hangzhou, China, 75, 94, 99 Hao Jingfang, 144–46, 168, 172, 230 Harari, Yuval N., 172 hardware innovation, 125–28 Hassabis, Demis, 141 Hawking, Stephen, 141 healthcare, 103, 113–15, 116, 195, 211–13.

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, bond market vigilante , business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, data science, debt deflation, deep learning, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Freestyle chess, full employment, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, High speed trading, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large language model, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, McJob, moral hazard, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, optical character recognition, passive income, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, precision agriculture, price mechanism, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, reshoring, RFID, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological singularity, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

The first is that IT has evolved into a true general-purpose technology. There are very few aspects of our daily lives, and especially of the operation of businesses and organizations of all sizes, that are not significantly influenced by or even highly dependent on information technology. Computers, networks, and the Internet are now irretrievably integrated into our economic, social, and financial systems. IT is everywhere, and it’s difficult to even imagine life without it. Many observers have compared information technology to electricity, the other transformative general-purpose technology that came into widespread use in the first half of the twentieth century.

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As machines take on that routine, predictable work, workers will face an unprecedented challenge as they attempt to adapt. In the past, automation technology has tended to be relatively specialized and to disrupt one employment sector at a time, with workers then switching to a new emerging industry. The situation today is quite different. Information technology is a truly general-purpose technology, and its impact will occur across the board. Virtually every industry in existence is likely to become less labor-intensive as new technology is assimilated into business models—and that transition could happen quite rapidly. At the same time, the new industries that emerge will nearly always incorporate powerful labor-saving technology right from their inception.

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., 2, 3, 5, 21n industrial robots, 1–5, 10–11 inflation, relation between wages and productivity and, 38n informal economy, 77–78 information technology, xvi acceleration of, 52, 63–65 characteristics of, 69–73 cloud computing and jobs in, 106 cognitive capability of, 72, 73 comparative advantage and, 73–75 compared to electrification, 72–73, 176 disruption of higher education and, 139–144 economic trends and, 58–61 financial sector growth and, 56–57 funding of basic research for, 80–81 as general-purpose technology, 72 health care sector and, 145–147 lack of broad-based progress and, 64–65 moral questions regarding, 79–81 S-curves, 68, 69–70 winner-take-all distribution and, 75–79 See also artificial intelligence (AI); Moore’s Law infrastructure, investment in public, 276 innovation, 1–8, 51–58, 65 In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State (Murray), 262–263 In-Q-Tel, 85 Inside Higher Ed (website), 136 Instagram, 175, 176 Institute of Medicine, 149 Intel, 70n intelligence machine, 72, 75, 80 replication of, 75 super-intelligence, 236, 236n Intelligent Information Laboratory (Northwestern University), 84 intelligent vending machines and kiosks, 17–19 International Federation of Robotics, 3 International Labour Organisation, 181 International Monetary Fund, 214, 215 International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS), 69 Internet beginning of, 52 big data and, 86 corporations spawned by, 75–76 effect on thinking ability, 254 income opportunities and, 76 medical resources on, 148 winner-take-all distribution and, 75–79 Internet sector, 76–78 investment in labor-savings technology, 227–228 in public infrastructure, 276 recessions and, 227 iPad/iPod, 17–18, 179 iPhone, 79, 161 iRobot, 5 I-Sur project, 154–155 Italy, 41, 221 ITRS.

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb

Abraham Wald, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Air France Flight 447, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Black Swan, blockchain, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, fulfillment center, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, high net worth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, information retrieval, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Bostrom, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, profit maximization, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Levy, strong AI, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Robert Solow, a Nobel laureate economist, lamented, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”1 From this challenge came an interesting business movement called “reengineering.” In 1993, Michael Hammer and James Champy, in their book Reengineering the Corporation, argued that to use the new general-purpose technology—computers—businesses needed to step back from their processes and outline the objective they wanted to achieve. Businesses then needed to study their work flow and identify the tasks required to achieve their objective and only then consider whether computers had a role in those tasks. One of Hammer and Champy’s favorite examples was the dilemma Ford faced in the 1980s, not with making cars but with paying everyone.2 In North America, its accounts payable department employed five hundred people, and Ford hoped that by spending big on computers, it could reduce that number by 20 percent.

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Once again, a shared database powered by an enterprise computer system improved decision making, reduced handling, and dramatically improved productivity. In the end, one person had authority over an application, with processing falling to between four hours and a few days. Like classical computing, AI is a general-purpose technology. It has the potential to affect every decision, because prediction is a key input to decision making. Hence, no manager is going to achieve large gains in productivity by just “throwing some AI” at a problem or into an existing process. Instead, AI is the type of technology that requires rethinking processes in the same way that Hammer and Champy did.

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Even Andy Grove, who famously quipped that “only the paranoid survive,” would have to admit that you would’ve been pretty darn paranoid to have foreseen how far and wide the smartphone would reach into some very traditional industries. The recent developments in AI and machine learning have convinced us that this innovation is on par with the great, transformative technologies of the past: electricity, cars, plastics, the microchip, the internet, and the smartphone. From economic history, we know how these general-purpose technologies diffuse and transform. We also realize how hard it is to forecast when, where, and how the most disruptive changes will take place. At the same time, we have learned what to look for, how to be ahead of the curve, and when a new technology is likely to transition from something interesting to something transformative.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

This explains why Siemens has spent $4 billion acquiring smart manufacturing capabilities to build its industrial platform MindSphere, and why General Electric is working to build its own platform, called ‘Predix’. ‘It’s winner takes all,’ General Electric’s chief digital officer said recently. The same rule will apply to many of the AI techniques I discussed in the last chapter. AI is what’s known as a ‘general purpose’ technology, meaning it can be applied in a wide variety of contexts. Although the specific application is very different, driverless vehicles like Stefan’s Starsky trucks use similar techniques of data extraction and analysis as AI-powered crime-prediction technology or CV analysis. Google’s DeepMind, for example, doesn’t just win at Go – it is currently pioneering exciting new medical research and has already dramatically cut the energy bills at Google’s huge data centres by using deep learning to optimise the air conditioning systems.6 There are countervailing tendencies, of course – some experts have got together to develop ‘open source’ AI which is more transparent and, hopefully, carefully designed, but the direction of progress is clear – just follow the money.

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If Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, Montesquieu – each in their own way architects of modern democracy – were transported to 2018, they’d be dazzled by our smart phones, planes, bitcoins, hospitals, emojis and rocket launchers. They’d also be amazed to discover that we still run our democracies in the same way as in the days of carts and horses, muskets and candles. Each phase of democracy should be a product of its time – its genius is that it can change. Like artificial intelligence, democracy is a ‘general purpose’ technology. Ancient Athenians could manage face-to-face city-level democracy. Once society became too large and complex, representative democracy emerged as a way to keep it working. The mass party and the mass taxation systems of democracy were then layered on top when industrialism and mass suffrage arrived.

The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future by Jeff Booth

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, deliberate practice, digital twin, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late fees, low interest rates, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, Milgram experiment, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, OpenAI, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, software as a service, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, zero-sum game

In fact, many of the breakthroughs in artificial intelligence were created by Canadian researchers who continued working in the space through AI’s dark winter of the ’80s and ’90s. One of the speakers at the conference was Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England. Carney explained that artificial intelligence is an example of a general purpose technology—by which he meant a technology that can affect an entire economy and drastically alter society. He compared it to electrification of the world in the early twentieth century. He explained how economies went through dramatic changes because many jobs were eliminated by electricity, and workers needed to be retrained for new jobs that hadn’t existed before.

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He showed how, as electrification intensified, economies at first suffered and lost jobs, but then increasingly flourished as the new technology created new industries and countless new jobs for the transitioned workers. While sitting in the audience, I couldn’t help thinking that, while Carney was right about electricity being a general purpose technology, the analogous optimistic outlook for AI sounded like something that he wanted to be true, rather than something that had a high probability of actually coming true. Equating artificial intelligence to electricity was a bad comparison for a number of important reasons. Firstly, electricity wasn’t an exponential technology.

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, business logic, business process, Chris Urmson, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, crowdsourcing, demographic transition, distributed generation, DIY culture, driverless car, Eben Moglen, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, general purpose technology, global supply chain, global village, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, mirror neurons, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, phenotype, planetary scale, price discrimination, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, RFID, Richard Stallman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search inside the book, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social web, software as a service, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Gunpowder blew up the knightly class, the compass discovered the world market and founded the colonies, and the printing press was the instrument of Protestantism and the regeneration of science in general; the most powerful lever for creating the intellectual prerequisites.10 Neither Smith nor Marx seemed to understand, however, that the print revolution and water and wind power were indispensable to each other and that together they created a general-purpose technology platform for an economic paradigm shift that changed the European social and political landscape. The water mill was known in antiquity and experimented with in Rome. Yet the technology never developed sufficiently to challenge human slavery as a power source. New technological innovations, beginning in the tenth and eleventh centuries in Europe, catapulted water power to the center of economic life.

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They found that it is “the increasing thermodynamic efficiency with which energy and raw materials are converted into useful work” that accounts for most of the rest of the gains in productivity and growth in industrial economies. In other words, “energy” is the missing factor.4 A deeper look into the First and Second Industrial Revolutions reveals that the leaps in productivity and growth were made possible by the communication/energy matrix and accompanying infrastructure that comprised the general-purpose technology platform that firms connected to. For example, Henry Ford could not have enjoyed the dramatic advances in efficiency and productivity brought on by electrical power tools on the factory floor without an electricity grid. Nor could businesses reap the efficiencies and productivity gains of large, vertically integrated operations without the telegraph and, later, the telephone providing them with instant communication, both upstream to suppliers and downstream to distributors, as well as instant access to chains of command in their internal and external operations.

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Common sense, yes, but it was lost in the fury that followed President Obama’s remarks, in a country where the prevailing myth is that all economic success is a result of entrepreneurial acumen alone and that government involvement is always a deterrent to growth. Public infrastructure is, for the most part, paid for or subsidized by taxes and overseen and regulated by the government, be it on the local, state, or national level. The general-purpose technology infrastructure of the Second Industrial Revolution provided the productive potential for a dramatic increase in growth in the twentieth century. Between 1900 and 1929, the United States built out an incipient Second Industrial Revolution infrastructure—the electricity grid, telecommunications network, road system, oil and gas pipelines, water and sewer systems, and public school systems.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Engineers, designers, and architects are combining computational design, additive manufacturing, materials engineering, and synthetic biology to pioneer a symbiosis between microorganisms, our bodies, the products we consume, and even the buildings we inhabit.58 The technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution once again have the possibility to greatly enhance global wealth. That is because they are likely to turn into general-purpose technologies (GPTs) such as electricity and the internal combustion engine before them. The most powerful of these GPTs is likely to be artificial intelligence, or AI, according to economists such as Eric Brynjolfsson.59 Already, major tech companies from countries such as China are using AI applications to leapfrog the leading companies from the US.

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See Asian Tigers Fourth Industrial Revolution, 18, 45, 68, 71, 116, 122, 125, 142–145, 161–162, 177, 186, 201, 208, 212, 213, 237, 239 The Fourth Industrial Revolution (Schwab), 116 Foxconn (Taiwan), 59 France Compagnie de Suez join stock company of, 103 First Industrial Revolution spreading to, 131 La France Insoumise populist party of, 81 vote for right-wing populist parties (2000, 2017–2019), 84fig Yellow Vests (Gilets Jaunes) protests of, 86–87, 195 Youth for Climate movement (2017), 86 La France Insoumise (France), 81 The Freelance Isn't Free Law (New York), 243 Freelancers Union (New York), 242–243 Freelancing work, 237–238, 240–243 Freund, Caroline, 138 Frey, Carl, 116, 135 Frick Coke Company, 132 Frick, Henry, 132 Fridays for Climate strikes (2018), 149, 250 Friedman, Milton, 14, 136, 175, 205, 209 Friedrichshafen (Germany), 4–5, 6–7, 8–9, 251 Fukuyama, Francis, 15, 112 “The Future of Employment” study (2013), 116 G G7 countries, social compact breaking down in, 110–111 Gama, Vasco da, 97 Garikipati, Supriya, 224 Gates, Bill, 132 Gazivoda, Tin, 195 GDP (gross domestic product) China's increased total debt–to–GDP ratio, 62 COVID crisis impact on public debt and, 19 description and function of, 9, 24 emerging markets (2002–2019), 64–65fig formula for calculating, 24 New Zealand's COVID-19 response and impact on, 222–223 New Zealand's focus on social issues instead of, 234–236 post-World War II low level of, 105 private sector percentage of China's, 172 Simon Kuznets' warning on progress measured by, 21–25, 34, 46, 53 Singapore (1965–2019), 123–125 stakeholder model going beyond profits and, 189–193 trade globalization measured by percentage of, 16 See also GNI (gross national income); GNP (gross national product) GDP growth declining rates since the 1960s, 25–28 differentiating between global, national, and regional, 27–28 singular focus of policymaking on, 25 as “war-time metric,” 25 Gender pay equity, 243 Gender representation advocacy of, 243–244 Ireland's experiment in, 194 as stakeholder model issue, 188–189 General Data Protection Regulation (European Union), 212 General-purpose technologies (GPTs), 143 Generation Z workers, 240 German reunification, 17, 78 Germany Berlin Wall (1961–1989) dividing, 75–77, 88, 89 Christian–Democrats (CDU) political party of, 78, 79 erosion of the political center in, 80–90 extreme views replacing Volksparteien, 80, 83 female-led government leadership during COVID-19 pandemic in, 224 First Industrial Revolution spreading to, 131 following the First World War, 4 growing populism and polarizing politics (2020) in, 79, 87–88 Hartmann machine works (Chemnitz, Kingdom of Saxony), 103fig integration of East and West, 17, 78 lowering debt burden through economic growth, 31 neo-Nazi elements protesting COVID-19 responses, 87 reconstruction of post-war economy and society, 3, 7–11, 251 social reforms (1880s) in, 133 Social–Democrats (SPD) political party of, 78, 80–81 stakeholder concept adopted in, 174 “Stunde Null” (or “Zero Hour”) [May 8, 1945] ending the war, 5 vote for right-wing populist parties (2000, 2017–2019), 84fig well-managed COVID crisis response in, 79 See also East Germany; West Germany Ghana, 27, 70 Gig workers, 187–188, 237–238, 240–243 Gig Workers Rising (California), 241 Gig worker strike (2019), 187 Gig Workers United (California), 241 The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (Twain and Warner), 133 Gini coefficient of China/India, 37fig–38, 226 Global Competitiveness Index (World Economic Forum), 189, 190 Global debt population pyramid and repayment of, 30 problem of rising, 28–31 what is included in, 28 Global economic growth ASEAN nations, 63–66, 67fig “the Asian Century,” 70–71fig Chinese economy impacting, 63–66, 70–72 declining productivity growth impact on, 33–34 Elephant Curve of Global Inequality and Growth graph, 137–138fig foundations of the post-war, 4–7 India, 66, 67–69 low GDP growth impact on, 25–28 low-interest rates and low inflation impact on, 31–33 post-World War II expansion of the, 3, 7–11, 251 rising debt impact on, 28–31 the tumultuous 1970s and 1980s, 11–15 Global economic order Davos Manifesto (1973) on new direction for, 13–14, 88, 213 impact of income inequality on the, 36–41 impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the, 108 requirements of a post-COVID world and, 251 SARS–CoV–2 vaccines development and possible “Great Reset” of, 248 understanding the foundations of post-war, 4–7 Global financial crisis (2007–2009), 18, 34, 112–113, 122 Global Footprint Network (GFN), 19, 48fig–49 Global Infrastructure Hub, 32 Globalists, The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Slobodian), 181 Globalization adverse effects of, 107, 110–114 current state of, 108–114 description and implications of, 16 early beginnings and spice routes history of, 99–108 economic decline beginning in 2007, 18–19 GDP measure of trade, 16 New York Times op–ed (Schwab) on, 85 as political ideology, 108 reasons for embracing, 114 success stories from Indonesia, 93–99 three conditions required for positive, 109–110 YouGov–Bertelsmann poll (2018) on, 97 Globalization 4.0, 106–108 Globalization conditions balanced political leadership, 109–110 when functioning as social compact, 109, 110–111 when technology is congruent with economic and societal advantages, 110 Globalization history Age of Discovery (15th to 18th century), 100–102 first wave (19th century–1914), 102–105 globalization 4.0, 106–108 lessons learned from, 108–114 second and third wave (20th century), 105–106 Silk Road and spice routes, 99–102 Global population.

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See also specific country Subsidiarity principle, 181–183 Suez Canal, 103, 200 Sustainable Development Goals (UN), 189, 206, 207, 250 Swabia (Germany), 4, 8, 19, 251 Sweden COVID-19 pandemic response by, 220 stakeholder concept adopted in, 174 vote for right-wing populist parties (2000, 2017–2019), 84fig Swiss Federation, 181 Switzerland continued trust in public institutions in, 196 history of direct democracy in, 195 precious stones/metals imported to China through, 64 T Tabula rasa, 237 Taiwan, 59, 98 See also Asian Tigers Tanzania, 70 TaskRabbit (US), 237 Tata Consulting Services (TCS) [India], 68 Tata Steel (India), 141 Taxation French Yellow Vests (Gilets Jaunes) protests over, 86–87 high Danish rate of, 119 OECD's efforts to create fair global tax rules for Internet, 212 San Francisco's Proposition C proposing tax to help the homeless, 212–213 Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics prosperity pillar on, 214, 249 Teacher Corps, 135 Tech Mahindra [India], 68 Technological disruption changing business landscape, 126–129 Dansk Metal's industrial robots, 115, 117 labor market and challenge of automation, 115–126 Singapore job displacement due to, 125–126 steam engine as, 102, 116, 130–131 See also Digital economy Technological revolutions First Industrial Revolution (19th century), 56, 71, 108, 116, 119, 130–134, 135, 161 First Technological Revolution, 45fig–46 Second Industrial Revolution (1945–early 1970s), 8, 18, 45fig, 105–106, 116, 119, 134–136, 204 Third Industrial Revolution, 15, 45, 116, 137–142 Fourth Industrial Revolution, 18, 45, 68, 71, 116, 122, 125, 142–145, 161–162, 177, 186, 201, 208, 212, 213, 237, 239 Technologies artificial intelligence (AI), 143–144, 145, 161 automation, 115–126 China's “maker movement” of tech start-ups, 55 climate change and technological process, 161–162 connective, 177, 225, 227–228 cryptocurrencies, 161 Dansk Metal's industrial robots working with employees, 115 general-purpose technologies (GPTs), 143 Internet and digital connectivity, 225, 227–228, 232 Internet of Things, 18, 72, 161 Kuznets Wave on income inequality fluctuation and, 45fig–46 shaping positive vs. negative applications of, 144–145 Shenzhen (China) known for homegrown tech companies, 55, 57–61 tech unicorns of ASEAN nations, 66, 67fig workers who oppose automation, 115–116 The Technology Trap (Frey), 116, 135 Tech unicorns (ASEAN nations), 66, 67fig Tencent (US), 55, 60, 143 Tesla (US), 201 Tett, Gillian, 216 Thailand economic recession (1997) in, 97–98 predicted economic growth (2020–2021) in, 65–66 rubber exports to China, 64 Thaker, Jagadish, 223 Thatcher, Margaret, 122 Theodul Glacier, 51 Thiel, Peter, 208–209 Third Industrial Revolution, 15, 45, 116, 137–142 Thompson, Nicholas, 128 3D printing, 107, 108, 116 Thunberg, Greta, 52–53, 86, 147–150, 168, 250 ThyssenKrupp, 141 Tik Tok, 61 TIME Magazine, 172 Tindall, Stephen, 221 Tokopedia (Indonesia), 97 Total (France), 95 “Trade in the Digital Era” report (2019) [OECD], 107 Traveloka (Indonesia), 97 Treaty of Versailles (1919), 5–6 Trente Glorieuses, 110 Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity (Rushkoff), 210 Trust loss of trust in public institutions, 196 rebuilding of public trust in business sector, 210–212 Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management, 225–226 Tuberculosis sanatorium treatments, 11 Twain, Mark, 133 21st century stakeholder capitalism.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Engineers, designers, and architects are combining computational design, additive manufacturing, materials engineering, and synthetic biology to pioneer a symbiosis between microorganisms, our bodies, the products we consume, and even the buildings we inhabit.58 The technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution once again have the possibility to greatly enhance global wealth. That is because they are likely to turn into general-purpose technologies (GPTs) such as electricity and the internal combustion engine before them. The most powerful of these GPTs is likely to be artificial intelligence, or AI, according to economists such as Eric Brynjolfsson.59 Already, major tech companies from countries such as China are using AI applications to leapfrog the leading companies from the US.

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See Asian Tigers Fourth Industrial Revolution, 18, 45, 68, 71, 116, 122, 125, 142–145, 161–162, 177, 186, 201, 208, 212, 213, 237, 239 The Fourth Industrial Revolution (Schwab), 116 Foxconn (Taiwan), 59 France Compagnie de Suez join stock company of, 103 First Industrial Revolution spreading to, 131 La France Insoumise populist party of, 81 vote for right-wing populist parties (2000, 2017–2019), 84fig Yellow Vests (Gilets Jaunes) protests of, 86–87, 195 Youth for Climate movement (2017), 86 La France Insoumise (France), 81 The Freelance Isn't Free Law (New York), 243 Freelancers Union (New York), 242–243 Freelancing work, 237–238, 240–243 Freund, Caroline, 138 Frey, Carl, 116, 135 Frick Coke Company, 132 Frick, Henry, 132 Fridays for Climate strikes (2018), 149, 250 Friedman, Milton, 14, 136, 175, 205, 209 Friedrichshafen (Germany), 4–5, 6–7, 8–9, 251 Fukuyama, Francis, 15, 112 “The Future of Employment” study (2013), 116 G G7 countries, social compact breaking down in, 110–111 Gama, Vasco da, 97 Garikipati, Supriya, 224 Gates, Bill, 132 Gazivoda, Tin, 195 GDP (gross domestic product) China's increased total debt–to–GDP ratio, 62 COVID crisis impact on public debt and, 19 description and function of, 9, 24 emerging markets (2002–2019), 64–65fig formula for calculating, 24 New Zealand's COVID-19 response and impact on, 222–223 New Zealand's focus on social issues instead of, 234–236 post-World War II low level of, 105 private sector percentage of China's, 172 Simon Kuznets' warning on progress measured by, 21–25, 34, 46, 53 Singapore (1965–2019), 123–125 stakeholder model going beyond profits and, 189–193 trade globalization measured by percentage of, 16 See also GNI (gross national income); GNP (gross national product) GDP growth declining rates since the 1960s, 25–28 differentiating between global, national, and regional, 27–28 singular focus of policymaking on, 25 as “war-time metric,” 25 Gender pay equity, 243 Gender representation advocacy of, 243–244 Ireland's experiment in, 194 as stakeholder model issue, 188–189 General Data Protection Regulation (European Union), 212 General-purpose technologies (GPTs), 143 Generation Z workers, 240 German reunification, 17, 78 Germany Berlin Wall (1961–1989) dividing, 75–77, 88, 89 Christian–Democrats (CDU) political party of, 78, 79 erosion of the political center in, 80–90 extreme views replacing Volksparteien, 80, 83 female-led government leadership during COVID-19 pandemic in, 224 First Industrial Revolution spreading to, 131 following the First World War, 4 growing populism and polarizing politics (2020) in, 79, 87–88 Hartmann machine works (Chemnitz, Kingdom of Saxony), 103fig integration of East and West, 17, 78 lowering debt burden through economic growth, 31 neo-Nazi elements protesting COVID-19 responses, 87 reconstruction of post-war economy and society, 3, 7–11, 251 social reforms (1880s) in, 133 Social–Democrats (SPD) political party of, 78, 80–81 stakeholder concept adopted in, 174 “Stunde Null” (or “Zero Hour”) [May 8, 1945] ending the war, 5 vote for right-wing populist parties (2000, 2017–2019), 84fig well-managed COVID crisis response in, 79 See also East Germany; West Germany Ghana, 27, 70 Gig workers, 187–188, 237–238, 240–243 Gig Workers Rising (California), 241 Gig worker strike (2019), 187 Gig Workers United (California), 241 The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (Twain and Warner), 133 Gini coefficient of China/India, 37fig–38, 226 Global Competitiveness Index (World Economic Forum), 189, 190 Global debt population pyramid and repayment of, 30 problem of rising, 28–31 what is included in, 28 Global economic growth ASEAN nations, 63–66, 67fig “the Asian Century,” 70–71fig Chinese economy impacting, 63–66, 70–72 declining productivity growth impact on, 33–34 Elephant Curve of Global Inequality and Growth graph, 137–138fig foundations of the post-war, 4–7 India, 66, 67–69 low GDP growth impact on, 25–28 low-interest rates and low inflation impact on, 31–33 post-World War II expansion of the, 3, 7–11, 251 rising debt impact on, 28–31 the tumultuous 1970s and 1980s, 11–15 Global economic order Davos Manifesto (1973) on new direction for, 13–14, 88, 213 impact of income inequality on the, 36–41 impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the, 108 requirements of a post-COVID world and, 251 SARS–CoV–2 vaccines development and possible “Great Reset” of, 248 understanding the foundations of post-war, 4–7 Global financial crisis (2007–2009), 18, 34, 112–113, 122 Global Footprint Network (GFN), 19, 48fig–49 Global Infrastructure Hub, 32 Globalists, The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Slobodian), 181 Globalization adverse effects of, 107, 110–114 current state of, 108–114 description and implications of, 16 early beginnings and spice routes history of, 99–108 economic decline beginning in 2007, 18–19 GDP measure of trade, 16 New York Times op–ed (Schwab) on, 85 as political ideology, 108 reasons for embracing, 114 success stories from Indonesia, 93–99 three conditions required for positive, 109–110 YouGov–Bertelsmann poll (2018) on, 97 Globalization 4.0, 106–108 Globalization conditions balanced political leadership, 109–110 when functioning as social compact, 109, 110–111 when technology is congruent with economic and societal advantages, 110 Globalization history Age of Discovery (15th to 18th century), 100–102 first wave (19th century–1914), 102–105 globalization 4.0, 106–108 lessons learned from, 108–114 second and third wave (20th century), 105–106 Silk Road and spice routes, 99–102 Global population.

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See also specific country Subsidiarity principle, 181–183 Suez Canal, 103, 200 Sustainable Development Goals (UN), 189, 206, 207, 250 Swabia (Germany), 4, 8, 19, 251 Sweden COVID-19 pandemic response by, 220 stakeholder concept adopted in, 174 vote for right-wing populist parties (2000, 2017–2019), 84fig Swiss Federation, 181 Switzerland continued trust in public institutions in, 196 history of direct democracy in, 195 precious stones/metals imported to China through, 64 T Tabula rasa, 237 Taiwan, 59, 98 See also Asian Tigers Tanzania, 70 TaskRabbit (US), 237 Tata Consulting Services (TCS) [India], 68 Tata Steel (India), 141 Taxation French Yellow Vests (Gilets Jaunes) protests over, 86–87 high Danish rate of, 119 OECD's efforts to create fair global tax rules for Internet, 212 San Francisco's Proposition C proposing tax to help the homeless, 212–213 Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics prosperity pillar on, 214, 249 Teacher Corps, 135 Tech Mahindra [India], 68 Technological disruption changing business landscape, 126–129 Dansk Metal's industrial robots, 115, 117 labor market and challenge of automation, 115–126 Singapore job displacement due to, 125–126 steam engine as, 102, 116, 130–131 See also Digital economy Technological revolutions First Industrial Revolution (19th century), 56, 71, 108, 116, 119, 130–134, 135, 161 First Technological Revolution, 45fig–46 Second Industrial Revolution (1945–early 1970s), 8, 18, 45fig, 105–106, 116, 119, 134–136, 204 Third Industrial Revolution, 15, 45, 116, 137–142 Fourth Industrial Revolution, 18, 45, 68, 71, 116, 122, 125, 142–145, 161–162, 177, 186, 201, 208, 212, 213, 237, 239 Technologies artificial intelligence (AI), 143–144, 145, 161 automation, 115–126 China's “maker movement” of tech start-ups, 55 climate change and technological process, 161–162 connective, 177, 225, 227–228 cryptocurrencies, 161 Dansk Metal's industrial robots working with employees, 115 general-purpose technologies (GPTs), 143 Internet and digital connectivity, 225, 227–228, 232 Internet of Things, 18, 72, 161 Kuznets Wave on income inequality fluctuation and, 45fig–46 shaping positive vs. negative applications of, 144–145 Shenzhen (China) known for homegrown tech companies, 55, 57–61 tech unicorns of ASEAN nations, 66, 67fig workers who oppose automation, 115–116 The Technology Trap (Frey), 116, 135 Tech unicorns (ASEAN nations), 66, 67fig Tencent (US), 55, 60, 143 Tesla (US), 201 Tett, Gillian, 216 Thailand economic recession (1997) in, 97–98 predicted economic growth (2020–2021) in, 65–66 rubber exports to China, 64 Thaker, Jagadish, 223 Thatcher, Margaret, 122 Theodul Glacier, 51 Thiel, Peter, 208–209 Third Industrial Revolution, 15, 45, 116, 137–142 Thompson, Nicholas, 128 3D printing, 107, 108, 116 Thunberg, Greta, 52–53, 86, 147–150, 168, 250 ThyssenKrupp, 141 Tik Tok, 61 TIME Magazine, 172 Tindall, Stephen, 221 Tokopedia (Indonesia), 97 Total (France), 95 “Trade in the Digital Era” report (2019) [OECD], 107 Traveloka (Indonesia), 97 Treaty of Versailles (1919), 5–6 Trente Glorieuses, 110 Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity (Rushkoff), 210 Trust loss of trust in public institutions, 196 rebuilding of public trust in business sector, 210–212 Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management, 225–226 Tuberculosis sanatorium treatments, 11 Twain, Mark, 133 21st century stakeholder capitalism.

Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019) by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, anti-work, antiwork, artificial general intelligence, asset light, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, business cycle, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data is the new oil, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disintermediation, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, job polarisation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off grid, pattern recognition, post-work, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, wealth creators, working poor

And as companies with extensive data extraction are the most likely to benefit from the virtuous cycle, it means a further consolidation of power, data and resources in the hands of the few companies that already dominate the platform economy. This is all the more important because AI is a general purpose technology.10 AI’s impact will be felt across the economy—so those who control AI, who can actually do AI, are going to have major power and influence in the economy. For instance, for economic impacts we might think about Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud building up AI that they can rent out to other businesses that are too data-poor to build their own AI.

…

Retrieved from http://social.techcrunch.com/2015/03/03/ in-the-age-of-disintermediation-the-battle-is-all-for-the-customer-interface/ Jourdan, A., & Ruwitch, J. (2016, February 18). Uber Losing $1 Billion a Year to Compete in China. Reuters. Retrieved from http://www.reuters.com/article/uber-china-idUSKCN0VR1M9 Jovanovic, B., & Rousseau, P. L. (2005). General Purpose Technologies. Working Paper (National Bureau of Economic Research, January 2005). Retrieved from http://www.nber.org/papers/w11093 Kosoff, M. (2017, November 9). Why the ‘Sharing Economy’ Keeps Getting Sued. Vanity Fair. Retrieved from https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/11/ postmates-worker-classification-lawsuit Levine, D., & Somerville, H. (2016, May 10).

Architects of Intelligence by Martin Ford

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flash crash, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, information retrieval, job automation, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, means of production, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, phenotype, Productivity paradox, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working-age population, workplace surveillance , zero-sum game, Zipcar

Major media organizations increasingly rely on automated journalism to turn raw data into coherent news stories that are virtually indistinguishable from those written by human journalists. The list goes on and on, and it is becoming evident that AI is poised to become one of the most important forces shaping our world. Unlike more specialized innovations, artificial intelligence is becoming a true general-purpose technology. In other words, it is evolving into a utility—not unlike electricity—that is likely to ultimately scale across every industry, every sector of our economy, and nearly every aspect of science, society and culture. The demonstrated power of artificial intelligence has, in the last few years, led to massive media exposure and commentary.

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YANN LECUN: I’m not an economist, but I’m obviously interested in those questions, too. I’ve talked to a bunch of economists, and I’ve attended a number of conferences with a whole bunch of very famous economists who were discussing those very questions. First of all, what they say is that AI is what they call a general-purpose technology or GPT for short. What that means is that it’s a piece of technology that will diffuse into all corners of the economy and transform pretty much how we do everything. I’m not saying this; they are saying this. If I was saying this, I would sound self-serving or arrogant, and I would not repeat it unless I had heard it from other people who know what they’re talking about.

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DEMIS HASSABIS: From the beginning, we were an AGI company, and we were very clear about that. Our mission statement of solving intelligence was there from the beginning. As you can imagine, trying to pitch that to standard venture capitalists was quite hard. Our thesis was that because what we were building was a general-purpose technology, if you could build it powerfully enough, general enough, and capable enough, then there should be hundreds of amazing applications for it. You’d be inundated with incoming possibilities and opportunities, but you would require a large amount of upfront research first from a group of very talented people that we’d need to get together.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

Our account in part I of this book of the great inventions distinguishes between the original invention and the subsidiary subinventions made possible by the initial invention. The two most important inventions of the late nineteenth century were electric light and power and the internal combustion engine, and these are often described as a “General Purpose Technology” (GPT) that can lead to the creation of many subinventions.37 Subinventions made possible by electricity as a GPT are such fundamental drivers of productivity as elevators; electric hand and machine tools; electric streetcars, elevated trains, and underground subways; the whole host of consumer appliances starting with the electric iron and vacuum cleaner and followed by the refrigerator, washing machine, clothes dryer, dishwasher, and many others; and, finally, air conditioning, which arrived in movie theaters in the 1920s, in some office buildings in the 1930s, and in the American home in the 1950s and 1960s.

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Part of the decline in population growth was, of course, the result of delayed fertility due to the difficult economic circumstances of the Depression years and the absence of men during the war years of 1942–45. 35. For more on overbuilding in the 1920s, see R. A. Gordon (1974). 36. The classic statement of this explanation of reduced inequality during 1940–70 is presented by Goldin and Margo (1992). 37. The phrase “general-purpose technology” was introduced in Bresnahan and Trajtenberg (1995), and the role of subsidiary and complementary inventions is further examined in the introductory chapter of Bresnahan and Gordon (1997). 38. Abbot (1932, pp. 17–18). 39. The authors provide numerous examples of inventions that long preceded the commercial introduction, taking most of their dates from Mensch (1979).

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“What Retirees Do All Day: Here’s How Retirees Are Using Their Leisure Time,” U.S. News and World Report, July 2, pp. 1–2. Bresnahan, Timothy F., and Gordon, Robert J., eds. (1997). The Economics of New Goods, Studies in Income and Wealth, vol. 58. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press for NBER. Bresnahan, Timothy F., and Trajtenberg, Manual. (1995). “General Purpose Technologies: ‘Engines of Growth’?” Journal of Econometrics 65, no. 1 (January): 83–108. Brinkley, Garland L. (1997). “The Decline in Southern Agricultural Output, 1860–1880,” Journal of Economic History 57, no. 1 (March): 116–38. Brody, David. (1960). Steelworkers in America: The Nonunion Era. New York: Harper Torchbooks.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, computer vision, CRISPR, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, dematerialisation, DIY culture, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gregor Mendel, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, land reform, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, low earth orbit, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, means of production, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, off grid, pattern recognition, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, post scarcity, post-work, price mechanism, price stability, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, profit motive, race to the bottom, rewilding, RFID, rising living standards, Robert Solow, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, SoftBank, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, working-age population

While there had been an energy revolution in medieval Europe, centred around the vertical windmill, this was unevenly distributed and far from exercising a regional, let alone global, impact. Yet all of that changed over the next 150 years. Increasingly efficient engines powered by fossil fuels untied economic production from organic labour and unreliable forms of renewable energy. The general-purpose technology on which this was based was steam power, the first commercial application of which was Thomas Newcomen’s 1712 atmospheric engine. And yet it wasn’t until the closing decades of the century that capturing the power of steam proved transformational. While the steam engine was not a new creation, an improved version designed by James Watt turned it from a tool of marginal use to the focal point of what became the Industrial Revolution.

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Information Unbound: The Third Disruption This tendency to perpetually innovate as a result of competition, to constantly supplant work performed by humans and maximise productivity, would ultimately lead to a Third Disruption, one whose fullest conclusions are no less dizzying than the two which preceded it. This Third Disruption has already started, with evidence of its arrival all around us. As with the Second Disruption its basis is a general-purpose technology: the modern transistor and integrated circuit, contemporary analogues to Watt’s steam engine over two centuries ago. While the Second Disruption was marked by a relative freedom from scarcity in motive power – coal and oil rather than muscle and wind moving wheels, pulleys, ships, people and goods – the defining feature of the Third Disruption is ever-greater abundance in information.

The Long Good Buy: Analysing Cycles in Markets by Peter Oppenheimer

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computer age, credit crunch, data science, debt deflation, decarbonisation, diversification, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, equity risk premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, household responsibility system, housing crisis, index fund, invention of the printing press, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kondratiev cycle, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Live Aid, low interest rates, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, private sector deleveraging, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, railway mania, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, stocks for the long run, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, tulip mania, yield curve

Power from the ground up: Japan's land bubble. The Harvard Business Review [online]. Available at https://hbr.org/1990/05/power-from-the-ground-up-japans-land-bubble David, P. A., and Wright, G. (2001). General purpose technologies and productivity surges: Historical reflections on the future of the ICT revolution. Economic Challenges of the 21st Century in Historical Perspective, Oxford, UK. Available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23742678_General_Purpose_Technologies_and_Productivity_Surges_Historical_Reflections_on_the_Future_of_the_ICT_Revolution Dhaoui, A., Bourouis, S., and Boyacioglu, M. A. (2013). The impact of investor psychology on stock markets: Evidence from France.

Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

The world is just beginning to grapple with the implications of a technology that could herald another industrial revolution. AI is not a discrete technology, like railroads or airplanes. It is a general-purpose enabling technology, like electricity, computers, or the internal combustion engine, with many applications. Those earlier general-purpose technologies brought sweeping economic, social, and political changes. Likewise, the scale of potential change from artificial intelligence is staggering. By one estimate, nearly half of all tasks currently being done in the U.S. economy could be outsourced to automation using existing technology. Wired magazine cofounder Kevin Kelly has argued that “[AI] will enliven inert objects, much as electricity did more than a century ago.

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Nuclear weapons have awesome destructive power, but translating that power into political outcomes is hardly straightforward. Threats to use nuclear weapons are rarely seen as credible except in the most extreme cases. AI is in many ways the opposite of nuclear technology. AI technology is widely available, proliferates rapidly, and has a multitude of uses. Many experts have suggested that AI, like earlier general-purpose technologies, could cause changes on the scale of another industrial revolution. The first and second industrial revolutions saw nations rise and fall on the world stage based on how rapidly and effectively they adopted industrial technology. By the time the second industrial revolution ended in the early twentieth century, the world order and even the key building blocks of national power had been transformed.

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While the moon was a clear physical destination, a visible landmark in the sky for all to see, the space race had no true destination. It was a competition to stay ahead in an emerging technology, with implications for economic and military power. The unfolding geopolitical competition in AI is similar. Despite loose talk by both defense leaders and AI researchers about an “AI arms race,” AI is not a weapon. It is a general-purpose technology much like electricity. There will no doubt be military applications of AI, but the bigger national advantage is likely to be found in adopting AI across society overall by increasing efficiencies, health care outcomes, economic growth, and other indicators of national well-being. Additionally, by increasing productivity, technological advancements have a compounding effect on economic growth and, by extension, national power.

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book value, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, congestion charging, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, Diane Coyle, Dominic Cummings, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, equity risk premium, Erik Brynjolfsson, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, facts on the ground, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gentrification, Goodhart's law, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, market design, Martin Wolf, megacity, mittelstand, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shock, patent troll, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, price discrimination, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, remote working, rent-seeking, replication crisis, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skeuomorphism, social distancing, superstar cities, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, urban planning, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, work culture , X Prize, Y2K

Richard Nelson made this point forcefully in 1994, when he pointed out that new technologies often have their own institutional requirements.36 For example, the deployment of radio relied on institutions to regulate spectrum and content; the rise of the motorcar depended on institutions that governed everything from road safety to fuel supply to land use; the commercialisation of electricity was based on institutions ranging from how electricians were trained and exchanged knowledge to technical standards for the production and transmission of electrical power. This old idea has been given a new lease on life in tech-policy debates that focus on the concept of tech-governance fit, the idea that certain forms of government are particularly well suited to certain general-purpose technologies. Looking at institutions at the wrong granularity can lead to mistaken diagnoses about what is wrong in an economy. As Elinor Ostrom observed, “The institutional analyst faces a major challenge in identifying the appropriate level of analysis relevant to addressing a particular puzzle.”37 This warning suggests that we should be open to the possibility that when the mode of production in the economy changes, its institutional needs do too.

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DP15207. https://cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=15207. Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McAfee. 2014. The Second Machine Age. New York: W. W. Norton. Brynjolfsson, Erik, Daniel Rock, and Chad Syverson. 2021. “The Productivity J-Curve: How Intangibles Complement General Purpose Technologies.” American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 13 (1): 333–72. Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission. 2020. Living with Beauty: Promoting Health, Well Being and Sustainable Growth. January. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/861832/Living_with_beauty_BBBBC_report.pdf.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, Technology at Work: The Future of Innovation and Employment (Citi – Global Perspectives and Solutions, 2015), pp. 25–6, pdf available at ir.citi.com. 22.Wassily Leontief, ‘National Perspectives: The Definition of Problems and Opportunities’, in The Long-Term Impact of Technology on Employment and Unemployment, a National Academy of Engineering symposium (1983). 23.There is some evidence for this currently happening, with businesses reporting difficulties in finding skilled workers and rising wage disparities within occupations between the most and least skilled. Bessen, ‘Toil and Technology’, p. 19. 24.Boyan Jovanovic and Peter L. Rousseau, General Purpose Technologies, Working Paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, January 2005, at nber.org; George Terbough, The Automation Hysteria: An Appraisal of the Alarmist View of the Technological Revolution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), pp. 54–5; Aaron Benanav and Endnotes, ‘Misery and Debt’, in Endnotes 2: Misery and the Value Form (London: Endnotes, 2010), p. 31. 25.Barry Eichengreen, Secular Stagnation: The Long View (Working Paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, January 2015), p. 5, pdf available at nber.org. 26.Kalyan Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism (New Delhi: Routledge India, 2013), p. 55.

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ILO, World Employment and Social Outlook: The Changing Nature of Jobs (Geneva: International Labour Organization, 2015), pp. 19, 23. 40.Bank of International Settlements, Annual Report, 2013/2014 (Basel: Bank for International Settlements, 2014), at bis.org, pp. 58–60; Robert Gordon, ‘US Productivity Growth: The Slowdown Has Returned After a Temporary Revival’, International Productivity Monitor 25 (2013); David Autor, ‘Roundtable: The Future of Jobs’, presented at the The Future of Work in the Age of the Machine, Hamilton Project, Washington, DC, 19 February 2015, at hamiltonproject.org. 41.Susantu Basu and John Fernald, Information and Communications Technology as a General-Purpose Technology: Evidence from U.S. Industry Data (San Francisco: Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Working Paper, 2006), p. 17, pdf available at frbsf.org. 42.However, emerging research suggests industrial robots have already contributed around 16 per cent of recent labour productivity growth. Georg Graetz and Guy Michaels, Robots at Work (London: Centre for Economic Performance, 2015), p. 21, pdf available at events.crei.cat. 43.Frey and Osborne, Technology at Work, p. 40. 44.Frey and Osborne, Future of Employment, p. 38; Stuart Elliott, ‘Anticipating a Luddite Revival’, Issues in Science and Technology 30: 3 (2014), at issues.org. 45.The standard Marxist response to full automation is to point to its ‘objective’ limits by arguing that capitalism will never eliminate its source of surplus value (i.e. labour).

The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 by David Edgerton

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, British Empire, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, creative destruction, deglobalization, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, global village, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, means of production, megacity, microcredit, Neil Armstrong, new economy, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the long tail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning

For others a third industrial revolution, of which the ‘warning signs’ appeared in the 1940s, was based on nuclear energy and electronically controlled automation.5 In the Soviet Union the idea of a ‘Scientific–Technical Revolution’, centred on automation, became Communist party doctrine from the mid-1960s.6 More recently, analysts have tended to highlight what they see as a radical transition from an industrial society to a post-industrial, or information, society brought about through the actions of the digital computer and the internet. In this context, some economists have developed the idea that economic history has been shaped by a very few ‘general-purpose technologies’. The central ones are successively steam power, electricity and now information and communication technologies (ICT). How seriously should we take these claims for these technologies, and for their significance in these particular periods? The answer is that such accounts, for all that they reflect what we think we know, are not as well founded as might be supposed.

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The answer is that such accounts, for all that they reflect what we think we know, are not as well founded as might be supposed. They are clearly innovation-centric in their chronology, implying that the impact of the technologies comes with innovation and early use. That is not the only problem. What is the basis for the choice of the general-purpose technologies, and how solidly does it rest? Why the steam engine, for example? Why not the heat engine, ranging from the reciprocating steam engine to petrol and diesel engines, to the gas and steam turbines? Similarly, what does electricity mean? It clearly includes lighting and traction, and perhaps industrial uses.

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism by Arun Sundararajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Burning Man, call centre, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, distributed ledger, driverless car, Eben Moglen, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, gig economy, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, job automation, job-hopping, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, peer-to-peer rental, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

In 2007, my colleague Vasant Dhar and I published a research article for our academic peers in which we attempted to explain what fundamental forces had been shaping the evolution of the digital economy, what consequences these forces might have, and what this told us about the anticipated business and societal implications of information technologies.5 At their core, we argued, what distinguished digital technologies from the other past revolutionary general-purpose technologies were three invariant factors that, over four decades, had defined the evolution of the technology and explained a wide variety of its consequences; these forces serve as foundations for thinking about what to expect from digital technologies in the future, and also explain some of the more visible digital determinants of the sharing economy. Three Fundamental Forces Let’s begin with these three fundamental forces that distinguish digital technologies from the other economy-shaping “general purpose” technologies that preceded them. The first is the rendering of things as information and, in particular, representing that information digitally.

Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth by Michael Jacobs, Mariana Mazzucato

Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, collaborative economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Detroit bankruptcy, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, facts on the ground, fiat currency, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, systems thinking, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, vertical integration, very high income

But our current information era is only halfway through its diffusion path. If history is a guide, it has twenty to thirty years of deployment ahead. We have indeed witnessed a rash of new products and increasingly changing consumption patterns over the past two decades due to the widespread installation of these ‘general purpose’ technologies, yet their capacity to transform every single industry and activity is only in its early stages. There is a huge potential for innovation that is technologically feasible but still risky and uncertain in terms of markets and profitability. What is lacking is a direction that responds appropriately to the current contextual conditions and the specific wide-ranging innovation potential now installed.

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From a technological point of view, such product categories do not constitute a synergistic system, just as automobiles and plastics alone would not have been enough in the last technological revolution: they do not lead to sufficient technical convergence in equipment, engineering, skills or suppliers.24 Rather, ‘green’ is one of the possible directions of stimulus for deployment of the general purpose technologies of ICT across every industry and sector in which challenges brought by globalisation and environmental degradation turn from obstacles to solutions. Thus, green growth should be seen as a ‘mission-oriented’ pathway to promote a major switch in production patterns and lifestyles, creating new sources of employment and well-being.

AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee, Chen Qiufan

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, active measures, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital map, digital rights, digital twin, Elon Musk, fake news, fault tolerance, future of work, Future Shock, game design, general purpose technology, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, language acquisition, low earth orbit, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, mirror neurons, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, OpenAI, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, smart transportation, Snapchat, social distancing, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, trolley problem, Turing test, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game

First, I’ll describe quantum computing, which I believe has an 80-percent chance of working by 2041. And if that happens, it may have a greater impact on humanity than AI. It is truly general-purpose technology (like the steam engine, electricity, computing, and AI) that can help us dramatically improve science and understand nature. Quantum computing promises immense beneficial impact to humanity, as all general-purpose technologies have offered in the past. Quantum computers will be a great accelerator of AI, and quantum computing has the potential to revolutionize machine learning and solve problems that were once viewed as impossible.

Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age by Cory Doctorow, Amanda Palmer, Neil Gaiman

Airbnb, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Brewster Kahle, cloud computing, Dean Kamen, Edward Snowden, game design, general purpose technology, Internet Archive, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, MITM: man-in-the-middle, optical character recognition, plutocrats, pre–internet, profit maximization, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Streisand effect, technological determinism, transfer pricing, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy

Why make a special-purpose chip that can only tell the time or play an MP3, when there’s an off-the-shelf alternative that can do all that and more, available at a fraction of the cost? I love my digital appliances—my mobile phone, my bedside clock, the router that runs my home broadband, the waterproof music player I use when I swim. But the availability of general-purpose technology has tempted some companies into digital-lock territory, and that’s where it starts to go sour. Take home broadband routers. Many companies would like to offer different models of the same router, with varying features—the basic model that does just WiFi, a more deluxe version that can also serve as a voice-over-IP telephone, and a top-of-the-range version that can do the kind of sophisticated routing tricks used by major corporations and universities to manage enormous, complex networks.

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Occasional oil shocks such as the one in the 1970s represented a fundamental threat to America’s way of life and promoted lots of talk about kicking the oil habit. As soon as the oil price declined, Americans returned to their earlier habits. The 1880s saw the introduction of two revolutionary new technologies, electric power and the internal combustion engine. Economists call these “general purpose technologies” because they are great inventions in their own right that lead inexorably to lots of smaller inventions that, taken together, completely change the tenor of life. Electricity was such a powerful new technology that contemporaries regarded it as a variety of magic. It can be generated easily and transmitted long distances with minimal leakage, and without smoke or fumes.

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Michael Faraday, also an Englishman, produced the first electric generator, a copper disk that rotated between the poles of a horseshoe magnet, in 1831. A German, Karl Benz, developed the first internal combustion engine on New Year’s Eve, 1879, a mere ten weeks after Edison unveiled his electric light, and produced the first motorcar six years later, in 1885. But America can certainly claim to have democratized these general-purpose technologies more successfully than any other country. America’s genius lay in three things that are rather more subtle than invention: making innovations more user friendly; producing companies that can commercialize these innovations; and developing techniques for running these companies successfully.

Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All by Costas Lapavitsas

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, false flag, financial deregulation, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, Flash crash, full employment, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, global village, High speed trading, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market bubble, means of production, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, open economy, pensions crisis, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Simon Kuznets, special drawing rights, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, union organizing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

There is an evident overlap with the parallel, and even earlier, debate on the impact of new technology on productivity growth, summed up below; see, for instance, Paul A. David, ‘The Dynamo and the Computer’, American Economic Review 80:2, 1990; Timothy Bresnahan and Manuel Trajtenberg, ‘General Purpose Technologies: “Engines of Growth?” ’, NBER Working Paper No. 4148, 1992; and Roy Radner, ‘The Organization of Decentralized Information Processing’, Econometrica 61:5, 1993. 8 Within the Marxist tradition, labour process theory – going back at least to Harry Braverman (Labor and Monopoly Capital, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974) – has examined the balance between labour and capital at the workplace to establish changing patterns of exploitation and loss of skill for labour.

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Brenner, Robert, ‘What Is Good for Goldman Sachs: The Origins of the Current Crisis’, new introduction to 2009 edition of Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulance, London: Verso. Brenner, Robert, and Mark Glick, ‘The Regulation Approach: Theory and History’, New Left Review 188, 1991, pp. 45–119. Bresnahan, Timothy, and Manuel Trajtenberg, ‘General Purpose Technologies: “Engines of Growth?” ’, NBER Working Paper No. 4148, National Bureau of Economic Research, 1992. Bresnahan, Timothy, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Loren Hitt, ‘Information Technology, Workplace Organization, and the Demand for Skilled Labor: Firm-Level Evidence’, Quarterly Journal of Economics 117:1, 2002, pp. 339–76.

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

Between 1902 and 1929, the amount of electricity used in the US rose 16-fold while the nominal price fell 60%.28 Factories were redesigned because of electricity; each machine could have its own power supply rather than rely on an elaborate system of belts and pulleys from a central power unit. Streets became much more brightly lit. Electricity was a “general purpose technology” in that it made many new devices and activities possible. Our houses became full of gadgets, both labour-saving (washing machines and irons) and entertaining (record players and TVs). Skyscrapers became possible as electric-powered lifts allowed people to get to the highest floors. One of the great stories of the first half of the 20th century was the electrification of large parts of the developed world.

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Apple allowed other companies to create applications to use on the iPhone. The more apps that were created, the more appealing an iPhone became for consumers. And as the number of iPhone users grew, the greater the incentive to create new apps. Chips with everything Some innovations are “general purpose technologies” that can be adapted to a wide range of uses: steam engines, the internal combustion exchange and electric power are three examples. In the modern era, the most striking example has been the computer. The computer’s origins can be traced back to Charles Babbage, one of a great tradition of Victorian gentleman inventors.

Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cognitive load, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, general purpose technology, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine readable, Metcalfe's law, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, new economy, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, patent troll, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Sand Hill Road, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social software, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine

Think of the global freak-out caused by the relatively trivial advent of peer-to-peer file-sharing tools: Universities are wiretapping their campuses and disciplining computer science students for writing legitimate, general purpose software; grandmothers and twelve-year-olds are losing their life savings; privacy and due process have sailed out the window without so much as a by-your-leave. Even P2P's worst enemies admit that this is a general-purpose technology with good and bad uses, but when new tech comes along it often engenders a response that countenances punishing an infinite number of innocent people to get at the guilty. What's going to happen when the new technology paradigm isn't song-swapping, but transcendent super-intelligence? Will the reactionary forces be justified in razing the whole ecosystem to eliminate a few parasites who are doing negative things with the new tools?

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, brain emulation, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, different worldview, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, epigenetics, fear of failure, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hallucination problem, Hans Moravec, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, machine translation, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, nuclear winter, operational security, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, prediction markets, price stability, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, search costs, social graph, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trolley problem, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Likewise, it is conceivable that a specialized engineering AI could be built that has the technology research superpower while completely lacking skills in other areas. This is more plausible if there exists some particular technological domain such that virtuosity within that domain would be sufficient for the generation of an overwhelmingly superior general-purpose technology. For instance, one could imagine a specialized AI adept at simulating molecular systems and at inventing nanomolecular designs that realize a wide range of important capabilities (such as computers or weapons systems with futuristic performance characteristics) described by the user only at a fairly high level of abstraction.7 Such an AI might also be able to produce a detailed blueprint for how to bootstrap from existing technology (such as biotechnology and protein engineering) to the constructor capabilities needed for high-throughput atomically precise manufacturing that would allow inexpensive fabrication of a much wider range of nanomechanical structures.8 However, it might turn out to be the case that an engineering AI could not truly possess the technological research superpower without also possessing advanced skills in areas outside of technology—a wide range of intellectual faculties might be needed to understand how to interpret user requests, how to model a design’s behavior in real-world applications, how to deal with unanticipated bugs and malfunctions, how to procure the materials and inputs needed for construction, and so forth.9 Table 8 Superpowers: some strategically relevant tasks and corresponding skill sets Task Skill set Strategic relevance Intelligence amplification AI programming, cognitive enhancement research, social epistemology development, etc

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For instance, if the first wave of machine superintelligence is emulation-based, then a second surge might result when the emulations now doing the research succeed in developing effective self-improving artificial intelligence.35 (Alternatively, a second transition might be triggered by a breakthrough in nanotechnology or some other military or general-purpose technology as yet unenvisaged.) The pace of development after the initial transition would be extremely rapid. Even a short gap between the leading power and its closest competitor could therefore plausibly result in a decisive strategic advantage for the leading power during a second transition.

An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford Delong

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, ASML, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, industrial research laboratory, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, occupational segregation, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, Stanislav Petrov, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, surveillance capitalism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, TSMC, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Yom Kippur War

My late teacher David Landes’s The Unbound Prometheus accomplished this task for Europe from 1750 to 1965, and it remains a classic. And Robert Gordon has written a new classic covering the United States since 1870 in the same vein.4 But right here and now it is, I think, appropriate to bring some features of these technologies to center stage. Consider the idea of General Purpose Technologies (GPTs): those technologies where advances change, if not everything, nearly everything, as they ramify across sector upon sector.5 Steam power in the early 1800s was the first. Early machine tools—embodying in their design and construction so much technological knowledge about how to shape materials—in the mid-1800s were the second.

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Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1969; Robert S. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S Standard of Living since the Civil War, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. 5. Elhanan Helpman, General Purpose Technologies and Economic Growth, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. 6. Paul E. Ceruzzi, Computing: A Concise History, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. 7. Gordon Moore, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” Electronics 38, no. 8 (April 1965), available at Intel, https://newsroom.intel.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2018/05/moores-law-electronics.pdf. 8.

The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power by Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer, David B. Yoffie

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, general purpose technology, gig economy, Google Chrome, GPS: selective availability, Greyball, independent contractor, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Metcalfe’s law, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Network effects, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, web application, zero-sum game

IBM was trying to turn its Watson AI technology into a new consulting service as well as an innovation platform by building partnerships with application developers at companies and universities, especially for health care applications.40 General Electric opened up its Predix operating system to other firms, encouraging them to build products and services for the Internet of things.41 (We explore this case in Chapter 5.) We also have some open general-purpose technologies emerging as potentially new innovation platforms. Blockchain is a good example. This was once associated with Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency (also a kind of transaction platform technology). Various firms were starting to use blockchain software to track different types of transactions over the Internet, including shipments of food as well as transfers of money and confidential documents.42 Third, managers and entrepreneurs in many more industries probably need to give serious thought to combining innovation and transaction functions—adopting a hybrid strategy.

The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality by Oded Galor

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andrei Shleifer, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, COVID-19, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, income per capita, intermodal, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, means of production, out of africa, phenotype, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Scramble for Africa, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Walter Mischel, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey

Roebroeks, Wil, and Paola Villa, ‘On the earliest evidence for habitual use of fire in Europe’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 13 (2011): 5209–14. Romer, Paul M., ‘Endogenous Technological Change’, Journal of Political Economy 98, no. 5, Part 2 (1990): S71–102. Rosenberg, N., and M. Trajtenberg, ‘A General-Purpose Technology at Work: The Corliss Steam Engine in the Late-Nineteenth-Century United States’, The Journal of Economic History 64, no. 1 (2004): 61–99. Roser, Max, Hannah Ritchie and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, ‘Life Expectancy’, Our World in Data (2019). Roser, Max, Hannah Ritchie and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, ‘World Population Growth’, Our World in Data (2019).

Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy by Dani Rodrik

3D printing, airline deregulation, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global value chain, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, open immigration, Pareto efficiency, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, price stability, public intellectual, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Economists recognize the importance of technological innovation and have made it the centerpiece of their models of long-term growth. In political-economy models, by contrast, the working assumption is that there is no room for discovery. Many political innovations are likely to remain ephemeral, inconsequential, or soon forgotten. But some, as with general-purpose technology, may prove substantial and durable. Think of political parties, independence of judiciary, or indeed democracy. Technological change need not make everyone better off. Similarly, policy innovation could leave the nonelites worse off. Some ideas could be bad from the standpoint of society at large and yet gain currency: imagine elites successfully persuading nonelites that they should work harder in this life so they can have redemption in the next, or (closer to home) that an extremely low rate of capital taxation actually benefits them.

Net Zero: How We Stop Causing Climate Change by Dieter Helm

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boris Johnson, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, congestion charging, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demand response, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, electricity market, Extinction Rebellion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jevons paradox, lockdown, market design, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, North Sea oil, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, planetary scale, precautionary principle, price mechanism, quantitative easing, remote working, reshoring, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, systems thinking, Thomas Malthus

Although there are some very promising lines of research, it is in the nature of technological change that it will surprise. The coming of modern communications technology has been a surprise in my lifetime, and a transformational one which is yet to fully play itself out. As with other major general-purpose technologies, it is not only a revolution in itself, but also revolutionises everything it comes into contact with, often over many decades. Electricity was like that, as was the internal combustion engine. Both took a century to have their full impacts. Digitalisation is likely to be the same. Surprises should not stop us channelling R&D funding into those areas which look promising.

The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy by Aaron Perzanowski, Jason Schultz

3D printing, Airbnb, anti-communist, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, cloud computing, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, general purpose technology, gentrification, George Akerlof, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Open Library, Paradox of Choice, peer-to-peer, price discrimination, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software as a service, software patent, software studies, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, winner-take-all economy

According to the Court’s decision, “the business of supplying the equipment that makes such copying feasible should not be stifled simply because the equipment is used by some individuals to make unauthorized reproductions.” The Sony decision, while it benefitted device makers most directly, more subtly vindicated the personal property interests of consumers. It protected their right to acquire general-purpose technology, even if it could be used to infringe. It reaffirmed that we can use the devices we own in non-infringing ways despite the objections of copyright holders. And it protected our living rooms from the kind of surveillance and supervision that would be necessary to police the private use of property.

Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

These were accompanied by calls for more collaboration between AI practitioners and the social scientists who study them. Such pleas reproduce the problematic fixation on “AI” that benefits corporations and the national security state, even if they desperately try to invert its valence (“AI for social justice” rather than “AI for war”). Since AI isn’t the general-purpose technology experts present it as but a technology of whiteness, the attempted inversion becomes another justification for AI’s expert industry and its initiatives. Such proposals flow from the sociological frame with which academics often approach AI, computing, and the sciences generally. This frame’s attempt to show there are no boundaries remaining—between the social and technical or the natural and cultural—has produced a picture of a world made up of actors, networks, and devices.

The Road to Conscious Machines by Michael Wooldridge

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, factory automation, fake news, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, Minecraft, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, P = NP, P vs NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics

In inverse reinforcement learning, we instead get to see ‘ideal’ behaviour (what a person would do); the challenge is then to figure out what the relevant rewards are for the AI software.20 In short, the idea is to look at human behaviour as our model for desirable behaviour. Chapter 8 How Things Might Actually Go Wrong Although I am a sceptic with respect to the possibility of an imminent Singularity, that doesn’t mean that I believe we have nothing to fear from AI. After all, AI is a general-purpose technology: its applications are limited only by our imagination. All such technologies have unintended consequences, being felt decades or even centuries into the future; and all such technologies have the potential for abuse. Our anonymous prehistoric ancestors who first harnessed fire should surely be forgiven for not anticipating the climactic changes that would result from burning fossil fuels.

Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization by K. Eric Drexler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Bill Joy: nanobots, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, double helix, failed state, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Higgs boson, industrial robot, iterative process, Large Hadron Collider, Mars Rover, means of production, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nick Bostrom, performance metric, radical decentralization, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Thomas Malthus, V2 rocket, Vannevar Bush, Vision Fund, zero-sum game

Relying too much on analogies to past events will suggest familiar but unrealistic consequences while omitting a new, unfamiliar range of potential responses. Once again, the ongoing revolution in information technologies offers analogies. Both the Information Revolution and the APM Revolution bring in their wake unprecedented ranges of capabilities based on a general-purpose technology, and each in its sphere brings a kind of radical abundance. We’ve seen the emergence of a gift economy in digital products such as software, text, images, and video; the natural course of events would see this pattern extend to APM product-design files, leading (aside from the cost of input materials) to a gift economy in physical objects (but within what mandated constraints?).

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

Moreover, its impact is likely to be felt right across the economy. Some technological improvements are specific to particular sectors or narrow aspects of production and have only limited impact on the wider scheme of things. But every so often a development occurs that unleashes a technology with general applicability. We call these general-purpose technologies (GPTs). The steam engine was a GPT and AI promises to be one, too. That is why I have thought it appropriate to refer to the decades ahead of us as “the AI economy.” Robots and AI promise to have a major impact on productivity because in some areas they can replace humans altogether and in others they can greatly increase their output per hour or improve the quality and reliability of what they do.

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future by Alec Ross

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, clean water, collective bargaining, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, dumpster diving, employer provided health coverage, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mortgage tax deduction, natural language processing, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, special economic zone, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, working poor

But the arms control regime of the 20th century largely does not apply to the national security technologies of the 21st century. One of the main reasons is that digital tools like AI are more difficult to categorize than traditional defense technologies. Fighter jets and warships are used for one thing: the projection and exercise of military power. But artificial intelligence is a general-purpose technology with both national security applications and completely benign commercial uses. A computer vision algorithm can be trained to spot enemy combatants on a battlefield, but it can also be used to tag friends in social media posts and power self-driving cars. AI takes on the values and intentions of its human masters.

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

Solow also revealed: ‘I always thought that the main difference the computer made in my office was that before the computer my secretary used to work for me, and afterward I worked for my secretary.’7 Solow’s scepticism reflects one view that the ICT revolution would not generate as much economy-wide productivity improvement as the earlier Industrial Revolution that introduced general purpose technologies such as the steam engine during Adam Smith’s era, or the Second Industrial Revolution that saw the introduction of railways and electrification during the period lasting from the late nineteenth century until the First World War. Others disagree and expect that productivity will improve once these new ICT and digital technologies become truly embedded into work practices and businesses.

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

Solow also revealed: ‘I always thought that the main difference the computer made in my office was that before the computer my secretary used to work for me, and afterward I worked for my secretary.’7 Solow’s scepticism reflects one view that the ICT revolution would not generate as much economy-wide productivity improvement as the earlier Industrial Revolution that introduced general purpose technologies such as the steam engine during Adam Smith’s era, or the Second Industrial Revolution that saw the introduction of railways and electrification during the period lasting from the late nineteenth century until the First World War. Others disagree and expect that productivity will improve once these new ICT and digital technologies become truly embedded into work practices and businesses.

Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again by Eric Topol

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, bioinformatics, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital twin, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, fault tolerance, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Santayana, Google Glasses, ImageNet competition, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, move 37, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, post-truth, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, techlash, TED Talk, text mining, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, War on Poverty, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population

The deeper the network, by number of layers, the more complexity it can draw out of the input image. At the top layer, the neurons have now fully differentiated the features and are ready for output—predicting what the chest X-ray shows, based on its training.23 DNNs, with this structural backbone, can functionally be regarded as a general-utility, or a general-purpose, technology, much like the steam engine or electricity.24 And, much like those technologies, these neural networks can be applied to all sorts of problems. Before medicine, these networks were applied principally to four major areas: games, images, voice and speech, and driverless cars. Each has lessons for us as we explore what deep learning can do for medicine.

The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age by Robert Wachter

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cognitive load, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, Google Glasses, human-factors engineering, hype cycle, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lifelogging, Marc Benioff, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, pets.com, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Hendricks, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra

As the economist Paul Krugman has observed, while productivity isn’t everything, it is almost everything, because it is what ultimately determines the financial vitality of a business and the living standards of a country. While specific technologies—a new jet engine, say, or a solar panel—can improve productivity, since the Industrial Revolution the technologies associated with the greatest productivity bumps have been so-called general-purpose technologies—technologies that transformed multiple industries and laid the groundwork for many new applications. The best-known examples are the steam engine and electricity, and so it’s fair to say that such technologies don’t come around very often, perhaps every 50 to 100 years. Information technology falls into the same category—in fact, in The Second Machine Age, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee call IT “the most general purpose of all.”

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

FOUR HORSEMEN OF IRRESPONSIBILITY Thanks to long-standing campaigns to limit liability, there will be widespread resistance to such duties. AI also poses new barriers to accountability—and not just in medicine. Futurists envision AIs that effectively act of their own accord, without direction or control by their developers (or any other person). How, the challenge goes, can the creators or owners of such general-purpose technology anticipate all the potential legal problems that their AI might generate or encounter? No one wants to hold Microsoft responsible for ransom notes written as an MS Word document, which is a blank slate. Nor are parents responsible for the crimes of their adult children, who are independent entities.

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

Kehoe, The Transition to a New Economy after the Second Industrial Revolution, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Research Department Working Paper 606 (July 2001), http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.147.7979#x0026;rep=rep1#x0026;type=pdf. 21 “the need for organizational”: Paul A. David and Gavin Wright, General Purpose Technologies and Surges in Productivity: Historical Reflections on the Future of the ICT Revolution, University of Oxford Discussion Papers in Economic and Social History 31 (September 1999), 12, http://sites-final.uclouvain.be/econ/DW/DOCTORALWS2004/bruno/adoption/david%20wright.pdf. 22 more than 300 such trusts: John Moody, The Truth about Trusts: A Description and Analysis of the American Trust Movement (New York: Moody, 1904), 467, https://archive.org/details/truthabouttrust01moodgoog. 22 “ ‘limping’ units”: Shaw Livermore, “The Success of Industrial Mergers,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 50, no. 1 (1935): 68–96. 23 A study by economist Richard Caves: Richard E.

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra