invention of the printing press

80 results back to index


The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting by Anne Trubek

computer age, crowdsourcing, Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, lateral thinking, Norman Mailer, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Steven Pinker, the long tail, Whole Earth Catalog

What was to them a new technology, writing, was associated—linguistically, at least—to an older one, drawing, which they had previously done on pottery.* Deciding to use clay for a writing surface was ingenious. As a result, many more examples of Sumerian writing have survived than more recent writing done by ancient Greeks, Romans, medieval Europeans, and even, proportionately, writing done after the invention of the printing press. If the Greeks had written on clay, the Library of Alexandria would have survived the flames. (Egyptian papyrus, the second oldest writing surface, has also lasted better than many forms that came after it because of the Egyptians’ practice of burying documents in sealed containers.) We have a glut of cuneiform but a paucity of cuneiform readers—only a few hundred in the world—so only a fraction of the discovered tablets have been translated.

At first, the idea that a script could be political or the basis of judgment might seem absurd, but we make similar, if lower-stakes, associations between how letters are formed and the person forming them now. Consider how many perceive people who use the Comic Sans font or the hipster cool of Helvetica. European scripts, from the fall of Rome to the invention of the printing press, were not neutral; they carried great symbolic power. The first medieval script was borrowed from Rome. The Romans wrote only in capitalis, whether on an obelisk, building, or scroll. The most famous example of this all-capital letter script is Trajan’s Column, with its symmetrical and geometric letters.

Gothic compresses letters more tightly together. It is more illegible than most scripts, signaling the Church’s return to the diversity and localization of the pre-Carolingian period. Gothic is more of a family of scripts than a singular hand; dozens of variations were used across Europe until the invention of the printing press. Italian scribes were never enamored with Gothic, which did not have the same reach as Carolingian minuscule (Petrarch found Gothic script to be “as though it had been designed … for something other than reading” 3), and in the fifteenth century a new script—clearer, and simpler, and more legible to many—was developed (or, according to some, invented by one man, Poggio Bracciolini).4 This script was humanist, a fairly faithful reinvention of Carolingian minuscule, itself a reinvention of capitalis.


pages: 497 words: 123,778

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It by Yascha Mounk

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, basic income, battle of ideas, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, clean water, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, critical race theory, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Herbert Marcuse, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, investor state dispute settlement, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rutger Bregman, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

In generation after generation, so the charge goes, some leading thinkers have fallen prey to “chronocentricism,” or the erroneous belief that their own moment in time is somehow central to the history of mankind.5 Might the widespread belief that a recent invention like Twitter or Facebook represents a fundamental shift in human history not suffer from the same cognitive bias? It’s important to be on guard against chronocentrism. But it’s also difficult to deny that there are some real parallels between the invention of digital technology and the invention of the printing press: like the press, the advent of the internet and of social media fundamentally transformed the structural conditions of communication. In the five hundred years since the invention of the printing press, the cost and the speed of one-to-many communication fell significantly, even as its content and geographical reach expanded radically. By 1992, it was possible to beam the sound and the sight of an event to billions of television viewers around the world in an instant.

Technological limits on the spread of the written word thus helped to enforce political and religious orthodoxy: with the dissemination of ideas firmly in the hands of priests and potentates, it was comparatively easy to quell political dissent and religious heresy. This helps to explain what made the invention of the printing press so momentous. When Johannes Gutenberg first found a way to create a master plate for each page that could be copied many times over at vastly lower cost and incomprehensibly greater speed, he radically changed the structural conditions of communication. Soon, “one-to-many” communication would be within the reach of a significant number of people for the first time in human history: somebody with access to the relevant technology and the requisite capital could now impart their ideas to thousands of people, all at the same time.1 Gutenberg’s contemporaries were quick to grasp the revolutionary implications of the printing press—and many of them were full of hope for the marvels it would bring forth.

And as dissenting voices gained the ability to communicate with would-be followers, so did their ability to instigate violent political revolts. In a word, the printing press spread death as well as literacy, instability, and chaos alongside emancipation. Over the last years, a slew of writers have compared the invention of digital technology—and especially of social media—to the invention of the printing press. In Clay Shirky’s words, “you used to have to own a radio tower or television tower or printing press. Now all you have to have is access to an Internet café or a public library, and you can put your thoughts out in public.”3 Heather Brooke makes much the same point even more concisely: “Our printing press,” she wrote, “is the Internet.


pages: 137 words: 35,041

Free Speech And Why It Matters by Andrew Doyle

Ayatollah Khomeini, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, defund the police, disinformation, fake news, Herbert Marcuse, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of the printing press, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, microaggression, Overton Window, plutocrats, Silicon Valley, Streisand effect, zero-sum game

Later, during the Roman Empire, the right to free speech in matters of politics was rarely extended beyond the Senate, although anyone familiar with Shakespeare will know that the plebeians could find ways to make their voices heard. The Catholic Church of the Middle Ages put an end to such privileges, ensuring that speech rights were the singular prerogative of men in authority. It wasn’t until the invention of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century and the subsequent spread of a new humanistic culture that freedom of expression was able to enjoy a resurgence in Europe. With the rediscovery of the literature of antiquity, and its sudden promulgation through the new printing technology, came the rebirth of parrhesia.

Debates surrounding these issues are complicated, and perspectives vary depending on whether these monuments are deemed to be celebratory in nature or remnants of a history that we would be unwise to forget. But wherever one stands on the issue, it is important to note that the totalitarian mindset has always been revisionist in nature, so we are right to be cautious about where such actions might eventually lead. The Internet is a revolution of the written word to rival the invention of the printing press, enabling our ideas to reach a far wider audience than ever before. But as this new means of expression has proliferated, we face unprecedented threats that would see our liberties rescinded. A combination of state censorship, hostility to press freedom, cancel culture, big tech interference, media complacency, and a substantial proportion of the public that has lost trust in its fellow citizens, has created the conditions within which authoritarian alternatives can germinate.


pages: 222 words: 74,587

Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929 by Markus Krajewski, Peter Krapp

Apollo 11, business process, Charles Babbage, continuation of politics by other means, double entry bookkeeping, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gödel, Escher, Bach, index card, Index librorum prohibitorum, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jacques de Vaucanson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge worker, means of production, new economy, paper trading, Turing machine, work culture

And finally, it is even possible to cut books up to save oneself the trouble of copying.27 Behind this order of paper slips that guarantees mobility and rearrangement, one can recognize the same economy of signs that a century earlier contributes to a major paradigmatic shift. Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press not only forges most obviously associations of typesetting, steel models, pouring mechanisms for individual letter types, special alloys, and composing sticks for setting lines of type.28 As a marginal yet indispensable aid, a new tool for filing and storing of the individual pieces of type is introduced: the type case.

By 1897, the universal register already contains about 1 million entries; by July 1, 1903, there are 6,269,750, and by 1914, more than 11 million slips of paper.40 With an annual increase of approximately 500,000 entries, estimates see the project covering the “entire book production since the invention of the printing press,” anticipating the end of this gigantic enterprise after another ten years.41 It is no coincidence that the development of the Bibliographia Universalis is reminiscent of Konrad Gessner’s efforts. As a method for the production of index cards “by cutting and pasting bibliographical aids,” it undoubtedly harks back to this origin and bears a striking resemblance to its parameters even 350 years later—despite the improved copying procedures and printing methods, paper quality, and cutting devices that were developed in the meantime.42 Following emphatic recommendations by the bibliographical institute in Brussels, the doctrine of basing data collections on semantic arrangements sorted with decimal figures is slowly adopted in business applications and, with some delay, also by the Prussian administration.


pages: 243 words: 65,374

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

A. Roger Ekirch, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, big-box store, British Empire, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Hans Lippershey, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jacquard loom, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Live Aid, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, Murano, Venice glass, planetary scale, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, techno-determinism, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, walkable city, women in the workforce

But the general population—the vast majority of them illiterate—had almost no occasion to discern tiny shapes like letterforms as part of their daily routine. People were farsighted; they just didn’t have any real reason to notice that they were farsighted. And so spectacles remained rare and expensive objects. The earliest image of a monk with glasses, 1342 What changed all of that, of course, was Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in the 1440s. You could fill a small library with the amount of historical scholarship that has been published documenting the impact of the printing press, the creation of what Marshall McLuhan famously called “the Gutenberg galaxy.” Literacy rates rose dramatically; subversive scientific and religious theories routed around the official channels of orthodox belief; popular amusements like the novel and printed pornography became commonplace.

What those events happen to be is a murkier but fascinating question. I have tried to sketch a few answers here. Lenses, for instance, emerged out of several distinct developments: glassmaking expertise, particularly as cultivated on Murano; the adoption of glass “orbs” that helped monks read their scrolls later in life; the invention of the printing press, which created a surge in demand for spectacles. (And, of course, the basic physical properties of silicon dioxide itself.) We can’t know for certain the full extent of these influences, and no doubt some influences are too subtle for us to detect after so many years, like starlight from remote suns.


pages: 259 words: 73,193

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection by Michael Harris

4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Burning Man, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Google Glasses, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, moral panic, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, pre–internet, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social web, Steve Jobs, technological solutionism, TED Talk, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, traumatic brain injury, Turing test

But it may be worth noting here that most Coursera students are not from developing countries. At present, Africa makes up 3.6 percent of the students, while more than a third come from North America and a further third hail from Europe. Neil Postman, the pioneering technology critic, argues in Technopoly that “school was an invention of the printing press and must stand or fall on the issue of how much importance the printed word has.” By this measure, Coursera and its ilk are a kind of necessity, a rearrangement of education that’s inevitable as our means of communication changes. “For four hundred years schoolteachers have been part of the knowledge monopoly created by printing,” continues Postman, “and they are now witnessing the breakup of that monopoly.”

Latest numbers show Coursera hosts: “A Triple Milestone,” Coursera Blog for October 23, 2013, accessed January 17, 2014, http://blog.coursera.org/post/64907189712/a-triple-milestone-107-partners-532-courses-5-2. “We don’t educate people as others wished”: Max Chafkin, “Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun, Godfather of Free Online Education, Changes Course,” Fast Company, accessed December 2, 2013, http://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastian-thrun-uphill-climb. “school was an invention of the printing press”: Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1993), 10. Marshall McLuhan argues that whenever we amplify: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, (Berkeley, Calif.: Ginkgo Press, 2003), 63–70. “Welcome to a world through glass”: “What It Does—Google Glass,” accessed September 5, 2013, http://www.google.com/glass/start/what-it-does/.


pages: 333 words: 76,990

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

That said, many of the characteristics of the current digital technology revolution share similarities with historical examples of other periods of rapid technological innovation, which help to contextualise the trends that we are seeing in the current cycle. The Printing Press and the First Great Data Revolution One of the earliest and most important waves of technology that revolutionised the way in which the world's economies operated, and how people worked and communicated, was triggered by the invention of the printing press in 1454. This technology fuelled an explosion of information (analogous to the data explosion of recent years), sowing the seeds for the Age of Enlightenment and many other life-changing technologies (or ‘killer applications’ as they are often referred to in a contemporary setting). Before the printing press, information was handwritten (manuscripts) and its production, and access to it, was tightly controlled by the Church.

The Railway Revolution and Connected Infrastructure Other parallels with the current wave of innovations can be found in the Industrial Revolution, when technology was again at the heart of growth. Many of these technologies developed from each other and even relied on each other, just as smartphones today rely on the internet, and vice versa. The network effect of innovation proved pivotal both following the invention of the printing press and during the railway revolution. During the Industrial Revolution, much of the opportunity was spurred by the extraordinary success and growth of railways. In 1830, England had 98 miles of railway track; by 1840 this had grown to about 1,500 miles, and by 1849 about 6,000 miles of track linked all of its major cities.3 Cheap money and a new (revolutionary) technology attracted a surge in investment, which, in turn, had knock-on effects for the growth in the number of factories, urbanisation and the emergence of new retail markets, all of which was not an obvious consequence at the time.


pages: 248 words: 73,689

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

The fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans undoubtedly played a role, triggering a great migration of Greek scholars to university cities such as Bologna and Padua, bringing with them the canon of ancient philosophy and science that had been lost with the fall of Rome.47 Also important was the invention of the printing press, which revolutionized access to ideas. Before, knowledge had been locked away in handwritten manuscripts, many of which were kept in monasteries, out of reach of ordinary citizens. With the printing press, books and pamphlets in local languages suddenly became widely available. But while the collapse of the Byzantine Empire and the invention of the printing press helped propel the Renaissance, Europe’s intellectual revival was already gaining momentum by the time these things happened.


pages: 294 words: 82,438

Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World by Donald Sull, Kathleen M. Eisenhardt

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Apollo 13, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, complexity theory, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, diversification, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, machine translation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, Network effects, obamacare, Paul Graham, performance metric, price anchoring, RAND corporation, risk/return, Saturday Night Live, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Startup school, statistical model, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Wall-E, web application, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Capital has followed trade, and in the past few decades the correlation between countries’ stock markets has more than doubled, while banks’ exposure to debt beyond their home markets has nearly tripled. And of course the Internet has revolutionized interconnectedness in a way comparable only to the invention of the printing press or perhaps even the development of writing itself. It is easy to forget that Google is still a teenager, and Facebook is in elementary school. Weaver argued that simple and uncertain problems have largely been solved, and that the greatest challenges of the future would be problems of complexity.

Beginning in the late 1400s, Europeans began to explore and colonize the Americas, the Pacific Islands, and Asia. Within a few decades, the economies, societies, and politics of European states were densely interwoven with those of exotic lands unknown just a few decades earlier. The invention of the printing press—the Internet of the Middle Ages—increased the speed and volume of information linking formerly isolated corners of the world. Fewer than 5 million manuscripts were produced in the 1400s—all of them written by hand. Over 217 million were printed in the following century, during which time the price of a book fell by two-thirds.


pages: 297 words: 103,910

Free culture: how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity by Lawrence Lessig

Brewster Kahle, Cass Sunstein, content marketing, creative destruction, digital divide, Free Software Foundation, future of journalism, George Akerlof, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, Joi Ito, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Louis Daguerre, machine readable, new economy, prediction markets, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, software patent, synthetic biology, transaction costs

So we're at a turning point in our history. Universal access is the goal. And the opportunity of leading a different life, based on this, is … thrilling. It could be one of the things humankind would be most proud of. Up there with the Library of Alexandria, putting a man on the moon, and the invention of the printing press. Kahle is not the only librarian. The Internet Archive is not the only archive. But Kahle and the Internet Archive suggest what the future of libraries or archives could be. When the commercial life of creative property ends, I don't know. But it does. And whenever it does, Kahle and his archive hint at a world where this knowledge, and culture, remains perpetually available.

As one author describes Howard Armstrong's struggle to enable FM radio, An almost unlimited number of FM stations was possible in the shortwaves, thus ending the unnatural restrictions imposed on radio in the crowded longwaves. If FM were freely developed, the number of stations would be limited only by economics and competition rather than by technical restrictions… . Armstrong likened the situation that had grown up in radio to that following the invention of the printing press, when governments and ruling interests attempted to control this new instrument of mass communications by imposing restrictive licenses on it. This tyranny was broken only when it became possible for men freely to acquire printing presses and freely to run them. FM in this sense was as great an invention as the printing presses, for it gave radio the opportunity to strike off its shackles.[168] This potential for FM radio was never realized—not because Armstrong was wrong about the technology, but because he underestimated the power of "vested interests, habits, customs and legislation"[169] to retard the growth of this competing technology.


Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Data-Driven World by Jevin D. West, Carl T. Bergstrom

airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Wiles, Anthropocene, autism spectrum disorder, bitcoin, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, content marketing, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, deepfake, delayed gratification, disinformation, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental economics, fake news, Ford Model T, Goodhart's law, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, invention of the printing press, John Markoff, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, Lyft, machine translation, meta-analysis, new economy, nowcasting, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, Pluto: dwarf planet, publication bias, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, Socratic dialogue, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, stem cell, superintelligent machines, systematic bias, tech bro, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, When a measure becomes a target

We will consider these issues in turn. THE BROTHEL OF THE PRINTING PRESS Pity the soul who hopes to hold back a revolution in information technology. Priest and scribe Filippo de Strata lived through one such revolution. In 1474, he railed against the damage wrought by the invention of the printing press. Printers, de Strata argued, “shamelessly print, at a negligible price, material which may, alas, inflame impressionable youths, while a true writer dies of hunger….” By massively lowering the cost of manufacturing books, the printing press was bound to reduce the value and authority of text.

All of this fluff and glitter does more than just dumb down the national conversation: It opens the door for bullshit. The unvarnished truth is no longer good enough. Straight-up information cannot compete in this new marketplace. PARTISANSHIP, PERSONALIZATION, AND POLARIZATION Much as the invention of the printing press allowed for a more diverse array of books, the advent of cable television allowed people to select specialized media outlets that closely reflected their views. Prior to 1987, the Fairness Doctrine of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) strived to ensure balanced coverage of controversial issues in news programming.


pages: 103 words: 32,131

Program Or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age by Douglas Rushkoff

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, big-box store, citizen journalism, cloud computing, digital map, East Village, financial innovation, Firefox, Future Shock, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, invention of the printing press, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, mirror neurons, peer-to-peer, public intellectual, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, WikiLeaks

The Axial Age invention of the twenty-two-letter alphabet did not lead to a society of literate Israelite readers, but a society of hearers, who would gather in the town square to listen to the Torah scroll read to them by a rabbi. Yes, it was better than being ignorant slaves, but it was a result far short of the medium’s real potential. Likewise, the invention of the printing press in the Renaissance led not to a society of writers but one of readers; except for a few cases, access to the presses was reserved, by force, for the use of those already in power. Broadcast radio and television were really just extensions of the printing press: expensive, one-to-many media that promote the mass distribution of the stories and ideas of a small elite at the center.


pages: 413 words: 106,479

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch

4chan, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, citation needed, context collapse, Day of the Dead, DeepMind, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Firefox, Flynn Effect, Google Hangouts, Ian Bogost, Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, lolcat, machine translation, moral panic, multicultural london english, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, off-the-grid, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social bookmarking, social web, SoftBank, Steven Pinker, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, the strength of weak ties, Twitter Arab Spring, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine

When grammarians decided that the scribal, pause-based punctuation needed to be reformed under the model of Latin grammar, they may have been able to change the practices of schoolteachers and editors, but they never wholly held dominion over private letters, handwritten signs, or notes left on the kitchen table. In the future, the era of writing between the invention of the printing press and the internet may come to be seen as an anomaly—an era when there arose a significant gap between how easy it was to be a writer versus a reader. An era when we collectively stopped paying attention to the informal, unedited side of writing and let typography become static and disembodied.

Our modern, Western notion that authorship should be solo and original is comparatively young and culturally bound, dating back only to after we had the ability to make faithful and exact copies at a mass scale. Copyright started evolving into its modern form in the centuries after the invention of the printing press made copying easy. In other words, we’ve had the right to adapt longer than we’ve had the right to prevent copying. I’m grateful for copyright and solo authorship: it’s what allows me, and all the other authors I’ve loved, to make any kind of living. But let’s not pretend that professionalized creativity is the only kind of creativity.


pages: 196 words: 54,339

Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, clockwork universe, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, digital capitalism, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, gig economy, Google bus, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, invisible hand, iterative process, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, new economy, patient HM, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, theory of mind, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

The clock tower in medieval Europe supported the hourly wages and time-is-money ethos of the Industrial Age. It’s another way that our prevailing technologies serve as role models for human attitudes and behaviors. Particular media environments promote particular sorts of societies. The invention of the printing press changed our relationship to text and ideas by creating a sense of uniformity, while encouraging generic production and wide distribution. The television environment aided corporations in their effort to make America into a consumer culture, by helping people visualize the role of new products in their lives.


pages: 190 words: 56,531

Where We Are: The State of Britain Now by Roger Scruton

bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Corn Laws, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Fellow of the Royal Society, fixed income, garden city movement, George Akerlof, housing crisis, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, old-boy network, open borders, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, sceptred isle, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, web of trust

Yet more important than those factors has been the revolution in information technology. Information has always been an economic force, and attempts to own it and to exclude others from using it are as old as society. The grant of royal patents was the Tudor style of taxation, and copyright laws have, since the invention of the printing press, made texts the property of the one who first composes them. But the attempt to hang on to your intellectual property can achieve at most only a short-term success. Words, ideas and inventions can be used again and again without depreciation; they can be copied ad infinitum and they will leak from every vessel designed to contain them, to become part of the intellectual capital of mankind.


pages: 487 words: 147,238

American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers by Nancy Jo Sales

4chan, access to a mobile phone, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, dark pattern, digital divide, East Village, Edward Snowden, feminist movement, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, impulse control, invention of the printing press, James Bridle, jitney, Kodak vs Instagram, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, San Francisco homelessness, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, The Chicago School, women in the workforce

April Alliston, a professor of comparative literature at Princeton who specializes in gender studies and has taught classes on the history of porn, points out that technological advances are often accompanied by a surge in the production and consumption of pornography. “Historically, a spike in interest in pornography is also associated with advancement in women’s rights,” Alliston says. “What happened at the time of the invention of the printing press was very similar to what’s happening now with the Internet. With the printing press you had porn suddenly made available through technology. At the same time you had women getting more rights; there was more literacy and freedom for women.” She goes on, “Historians talk about how pornography, as we understand it today, was invented in the era of the printing press in response to widespread cultural anxieties that women could gain more knowledge through reading.

A logical first step in changing the culture of Silicon Valley would be hiring and promoting more women in their own industry. Finally, I think girls need to read. Which they already do; but they need to read more. Early in this book I reported on my conversation with April Alliston, the Princeton professor who talked about how it was with the invention of the printing press that we first saw porn in its modern form. Porn was a reaction to women reading, to becoming more educated and informed. It was meant to degrade women and distract them from becoming educated, in the view of some historians, as a way to keep them from becoming empowered. And so for girls now to model themselves in the image of pornography, one could argue, is for them to embrace their own disempowerment.


pages: 204 words: 61,491

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman, Jeff Riggenbach Ph.

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, classic study, disinformation, global village, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of the printing press, Lewis Mumford, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, the medium is the message

It giveth and taketh away, although not quite in equal measure. Media change does not necessarily result in equilibrium. It sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it is the other way around. We must be careful in praising or condemning because the future may hold surprises for us. The invention of the printing press itself is a paradigmatic example. Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration. Typography created prose but made poetry into an exotic and elitist form of expression. Typography made modern science possible but transformed religious sensibility into mere superstition.


pages: 254 words: 61,387

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World by Yancey Strickler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, Adam Curtis, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dutch auction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, global supply chain, Hacker News, housing crisis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Nash: game theory, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, Mr. Money Mustache, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, offshore financial centre, Parker Conrad, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, white flight, Zenefits

Medicine went from a “fantasy of a science,” as historian David Wootton puts it, into an actual science. How did it happen? There were three driving forces, ones that are often present in times of great progress. First is technology, and not just medical technology. The transformation of health began with the invention of the printing press, which allowed physicians to easily compare techniques and outcomes. The printing press was followed by a long line of technologies, including the microscope, the stethoscope, the data table (for sharing experiment results), anesthesia, the computer, and other tools to help us better observe and influence the body’s processes.


pages: 606 words: 157,120

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

These days there’s so much anxiety in so many industries that Shirky, using his bad cop/good cop routine, provides just the right mix of flagellation and counseling. But something else makes his style of rupture talk so appealing. Oddly enough, it’s his clever use of history—in a debate that is traditionally ahistorical—in order to establish some kind of equivalence between the invention of the printing press and the advent of “the Internet.” And it’s not just fake history of East Germany, which is actually just rational-choice theory in disguise. References to the printing press are also ubiquitous in Shirky’s writings. He dedicates several pages of his Cognitive Surplus to drawing an explicit analogy between Gutenberg’s invention and the proliferation of social media.

Neither Jarvis nor Shirky is a historian, so in discussing the impact of the printing press—which they think is comparable to the impact of “the Internet”—both turn to the same source: Elizabeth Eisenstein’s landmark two-volume study The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, first published in 1979. Without understanding the limitations of Eisenstein’s highly disputed account of the “revolution” that followed the invention of the printing press, it’s impossible to make sense of contemporary claims for the significance of “the Internet,” not least because the stability that her account lends to “the Internet” makes her a favorite source of Internet optimists and pessimists alike (Nicholas Carr draws on Eisenstein’s work in The Shallows).


pages: 245 words: 64,288

Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy by Pistono, Federico

3D printing, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, future of work, gamification, George Santayana, global village, Google Chrome, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, illegal immigration, income inequality, information retrieval, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, longitudinal study, means of production, Narrative Science, natural language processing, new economy, Occupy movement, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, post scarcity, QR code, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, Rodney Brooks, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, slashdot, smart cities, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, technological singularity, TED Talk, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce

What required dozens of hours of painful research, often through non-interactive and quite unattractive books, is now available in seconds, often in videos, lectures, and conferences held by the most amazing thinkers of our time. A poor kid in Uganda has access to more knowledge than the president of the United States did 30 years ago. Such a dramatic change has no precedent in human history. The invention of the printing press is a pallid, almost insignificant event in comparison. Today, it is possible to receive a world-class education, where the best teachers, coming from the most prestigious universities in the world, teach any subject, for free. This is such a mind blowing and revolutionary thought that I am surprised so few people are aware of it.


pages: 202 words: 64,725

Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett, Dave Evans

David Brooks, fail fast, fear of failure, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, impact investing, invention of the printing press, iterative process, knowledge worker, market design, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, TED Talk

This book will help you make that change, but not by sitting around trying to decide what that change is going to be. We’re going to help you think like a designer and build your future, prototype by prototype. We’re going to help you approach your own life design challenges with the same kind of curiosity and the same kind of creativity that resulted in the invention of the printing press, the lightbulb, and the Internet. Our focus is mainly on jobs and careers, because, let’s face it, we spend most of the hours of our days, and the days of our lives, at work. Work can be a daily source of enormous joy and meaning, or it can be an endless grind and waste of hours spent trying to white-knuckle our way through the misery of it all until the weekend comes.


pages: 257 words: 64,285

The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport: Second Edition by David Levinson, Kevin Krizek

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, bike sharing, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, collaborative consumption, commoditize, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, dematerialisation, driverless car, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, Google Hangouts, high-speed rail, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the printing press, jitney, John Markoff, labor-force participation, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Lyft, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Network effects, Occam's razor, oil shock, place-making, pneumatic tube, post-work, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, tacit knowledge, techno-determinism, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The future is already here, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, Zipcar

In contrast with the home grown digitization of music, Amazon eventually took the next step and started to completely dematerialize books, by demanding eBooks from publishers, so that the entire product could be delivered over the Internet. In contrast, while there is copyright-violating sharing of ebooks, it is not the same order of magnitude as music.144 Consider the purchase of something as straightforward as a book—a product that has only recently endured considerable change since Gutenberg's 15th century invention of the printing press. I go to a physical store. I provide the clerk a $10 bill in exchange for a book. I return home. I go to the store and purchase a virtual good such as an a gift card. I return home, scan the gift card with a camera built into my computer. The virtual good (e.g., book) is available to me, via several formats.


pages: 281 words: 72,885

Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World by Mark Miodownik

3D printing, active measures, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, California gold rush, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, liquidity trap, New Urbanism, stem cell, trade route

Other cultures achieved something similar with the concertina format—forming a stack by repeatedly folding one continuous sheet of paper in on itself—but the advantage of the codex, with its individual pages, is that many scribes could work on the same book at the same time, and after the invention of the printing press many copies of the same book could be created at the same time. As biology had already discovered, the speedy copying of information is the most effective way of preserving it. The Bible is said to be one of the first books created in this new format, one that suited preachers of Christianity because it allowed them to locate the text relevant to their purpose using page numbers instead of laboriously searching through a whole scroll.


pages: 263 words: 75,610

Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger

digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, full text search, George Akerlof, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, information trail, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, John Markoff, Joi Ito, lifelogging, moveable type in China, Network effects, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, power law, RFID, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systematic bias, The Market for Lemons, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Vannevar Bush, Yochai Benkler

By the end of the sixteenth century, Europe had been flooded with printed books and pamphlets promising access to God, furthering religious and political propaganda, chronicling scientific discoveries, reviving Greek and Roman classics, and providing diversion and amusement. An important shift had taken place: external memory had become mass-produced. Yet, fundamentally remembering remained expensive. Of course, through the invention of the printing press labor costs had come down dramatically, and as the Catholic Church was losing its grip over the written word, demand for books increased substantially. But as printing moved from scribes fashioning individual copies to publishers printing hundreds or thousands of them, the cost of an individual book failed to decrease by much, because books were printed on paper, and the cost of this critical resource remained high—for centuries.


pages: 317 words: 76,169

The Perfect House: A Journey With Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio by Witold Rybczynski

A Pattern Language, financial independence, Frank Gehry, functional programming, invention of the printing press, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Murano, Venice glass, trade route

A medieval copy of the Vitruvian manuscript had come to light in 1415, and had long been studied by scholars in hand-copied form, but it was not until 1521 that an Italian translation—with added illustrations—became widely available as a printed book. Palladio was born only about fifty years after the invention of the printing press, and he was fortunate to live near Venice, one of the great European centers of the new printing industry. (The first Italian translation of Leon Battista Alberti’s important architectural treatise Of Built Things, which had been written in Latin, would be published in Venice in 1546.)


pages: 275 words: 84,980

Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand to Money That Understands Us (Perspectives) by David Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, creative destruction, credit crunch, cross-border payments, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, index card, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Irish bank strikes, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, land bank, large denomination, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, Northern Rock, Pingit, prediction markets, price stability, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social graph, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, technoutopianism, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, wage slave, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons

The distributed ledger technology of the tally had been used to convert a means for deferred payment into a store of value and then into a means of exchange, and the sticks remained in widespread use for hundreds of years. The Bank of England, being a sensible and conservative institution naturally suspicious of new technologies, continued to use wooden tally sticks until 1826: some 500 years after the invention of double-entry bookkeeping and 400 years after Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. At this time, the Bank came up with a wonderful British compromise: they would switch to paper but they would keep the tallies as a backup (who knew whether the whole ‘printing’ thing would work out, after all) until the last person who knew how to use them had died. Medieval tally sticks.


pages: 383 words: 81,118

Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms by David S. Evans, Richard Schmalensee

Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Andy Rubin, big-box store, business process, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disruptive innovation, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Lyft, M-Pesa, market friction, market microstructure, Max Levchin, mobile money, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Wayback Machine, winner-take-all economy

Merchants, meanwhile, often developed sufficient trust in each other, through repeated dealing, that they were willing to extend credit. One merchant, for example, sold four pieces of cloth to two other merchants who agreed to pay their debt, on demand, at any one of sixteen fairs held during a particular month in the next year.9 Now let’s move forward another several centuries. The invention of the printing press with movable type by Gutenberg around 1440 led to the explosive growth of the media business, including newspapers. Before 1800, print newspapers had begun to publish classified ads. These ran the gamut from ads for people looking for marriage, to ads for people looking to rent a room, to ads for medical wares or even haberdashery or drapery.10 According to a history of advertising by the industry publication Advertising Age, “[b]y 1800 most English and American newspapers were not only supported by advertising but were the primary medium carrying it.”11 At first, newspapers didn’t impose any structure on the classifieds, so it was hard to find things.


pages: 290 words: 87,084

Branded Beauty by Mark Tungate

augmented reality, Berlin Wall, call centre, corporate social responsibility, double helix, East Village, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, haute couture, independent contractor, invention of the printing press, joint-stock company, liberal capitalism, placebo effect, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, stem cell

Sheer headscarves or decorative headbands drew attention to this desirable feature. Remaining hair was worn long and occasionally braided, ornamented with strands of gold and pearls. Yet the demands of modesty meant that married women covered their hair with scarves or bonnets: medieval beauty was a mass of contradictions. As Dominique Paquet observes, the invention of the printing press in the 15th century enabled the wider diffusion of beauty remedies. One of the most influential documenters of such knowledge was Caterina Sforza, Countess of Forlì, a powerful Renaissance noblewoman who dabbled in alchemy. Between 1492 and 1509 she wrote Gli Experimenti, a veritable beauty manual for Renaissance women.


pages: 266 words: 87,411

The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed by Carl Honore

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 13, Atul Gawande, Broken windows theory, call centre, carbon credits, Checklist Manifesto, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, drone strike, Enrique Peñalosa, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, game design, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, index card, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, lone genius, medical malpractice, microcredit, Netflix Prize, no-fly zone, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, retail therapy, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty

In one of his notebooks, da Vinci wrote: “Like a kingdom divided, which rushes to its doom, the mind that engages in subjects of too great variety becomes confused and weakened.” Today there is simply too much for one person to know. According to a Google survey, the number of book titles published since the invention of the printing press now stands at 130 million. Yet the Renaissance ideal is far from a busted flush. It just has to move with the times. In a hyper-specialized, highly complex world, the best way to recreate the mishmash of expertise once found in a single person is to bring various people together. And that is why collaboration is often a key ingredient of the Slow Fix.


pages: 333 words: 86,628

The Virtue of Nationalism by Yoram Hazony

Berlin Wall, British Empire, conceptual framework, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, invention of the printing press, Mahatma Gandhi, Peace of Westphalia, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Steven Pinker, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Torches of Freedom, urban planning, Westphalian system

It was the presence of the Hebrew Bible in the Christian canon that shaped the peculiar history of French Catholicism, which took on a national character modeled on the biblical Davidic kingdom and stubbornly resisted the control of popes and emperors. It shaped, as well, the unique national-religious traditions of the English, Poles, and Czechs well before the Reformation.21 Thus when Protestantism emerged in the sixteenth century, along with the invention of the printing press and the widespread circulation of the Bible translated into the languages of the nations, the new call for freedom to interpret Scripture without the authority of the Catholic Church did not affect religious doctrine alone. Especially under the influence of Old Testament–oriented thinkers such as Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin, Protestantism embraced and quickly became tied to the unique national traditions of peoples chafing against ideas and institutions that they regarded as foreign to them.


pages: 304 words: 82,395

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, Kenneth Cukier

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Swan, book scanning, book value, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, data science, double entry bookkeeping, Eratosthenes, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, hype cycle, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, obamacare, optical character recognition, PageRank, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, post-materialism, random walk, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systematic bias, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

We can compare writing styles and gain insights into authorship disputes. Datafication also makes plagiarism in academic works much easier to discover; as a result, a number of European politicians, including a German defense minister, have been forced to resign. An estimated 130 million unique books have been published since the invention of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century. By 2012, seven years after Google began its book project, it had scanned over 20 million titles, more than 15 percent of the world’s written heritage—a substantial chunk. This has sparked a new academic discipline called “Culturomics”: computational lexicology that tries to understand human behavior and cultural trends through the quantitative analysis of texts.


pages: 304 words: 80,143

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

Saugat Adhikari, “Top 10 Ancient Roman Inventions,” Ancient History Lists, April 29, 2019, https://www.ancienthistorylists.com/rome-history/top-10-ancient-roman-inventions/ (accessed June 26, 2019). 19. “Printing Press,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press (accessed June 26, 2019). 20. “FC74: The Invention of the Printing Press and Its Effects,” The Flow of History, http://www.flowofhistory.com/units/west/11/FC74 (accessed June 26, 2019). 21. Jeremy M. Norman, ed., From Gutenberg to the Internet (Novato, Calif.: historyofscience.com, 2005), 29. 22. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 19. 23.


pages: 312 words: 84,421

This Chair Rocks: A Manifiesto Against Ageism by Ashton Applewhite

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Downton Abbey, fixed income, follow your passion, ghettoisation, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Naomi Klein, obamacare, old age dependency ratio, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, stem cell, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning, white picket fence, women in the workforce

It wasn’t always like this In most prehistoric and agrarian societies, the few people who lived to old age were esteemed as teachers and custodians of culture. Religion gave older men power. History was a living thing passed down across generations. This oral tradition took a serious hit with the invention of the printing press, when books became alternative repositories of knowledge. As long as old age remained relatively rare, though, olders retained social standing as possessors of valuable skills and information. The young United States was a gerontocracy, which served the older men who held the reins; younger citizens had to age into positions of authority.


pages: 295 words: 87,204

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

AltaVista, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, failed state, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Indoor air pollution, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, Minecraft, multiplanetary species, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, open economy, passive income, Paul Graham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, planned obsolescence, precariat, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sam Bankman-Fried, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Virgin Galactic, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey, X Prize, you are the product, zero-sum game

Sheryl Gay Stolberg, ‘Bernie Sanders, now a millionaire, pledges to release tax returns by Monday’, The New York Times, 9 April 2019. 5. William D. Nordhaus, ‘Schumpeterian profits in the American economy: Theory and measurement’, NBER Working Paper no.10433, 2004. 6. Compare with Frédéric Bastiat’s reasoning on the invention of the printing press, Bastiat 1964, pp.37f. 7. Donald Boudreaux, Globalization, Greenwood Press, 2008, p.32f. 8. Not Gates any more. Jeff Bezos beat him a few years back, then it was Elon Musk and now it is Bernard Arnault. It changes very fast depending on the temporary stock prices of the companies the super-rich founded, so I’ll continue to use Gates as an example for a while. 9.


pages: 426 words: 83,128

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

Abrupt institutional and cultural changes that cannot be traced to deeper origins have undoubtedly played a role in the development of societies, as exemplified by the divergence of North and South Korea in recent decades. Indeed, random or accidental developments could have produced a delay centuries long in the invention of the printing press, prompted the Chinese imperial navy to explore the Americas, sparked the Industrial Revolution in Holland rather than Britain, or thwarted the Meiji Restoration in nineteenth-century Japan. But while sudden institutional and cultural shifts have affected the growth process over the course of decades or centuries, they are very unlikely to have been at the core of the progression of the journey of humanity as a whole, or the ultimate factors that governed the divergence in the wealth of nations.


Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks by Keith Houston

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, classic study, computer age, cuban missile crisis, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, means of production, Multics, packet switching, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, trade route, wikimedia commons

Notable here are (1) Pompeian graffiti; (8) an insular majuscule ampersand from the seventh-century Book of Kells, and (13) an eighth-century Merovingian ampersand, already recognizable as the modern ampersand form. In its serried ranks of ampersands, Tschichold’s paper traces the dozens of forms in which the sign appeared until the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century led to the fittest among them being embossed permanently in metal. Each of the main families of type that have arisen since then—roman, italic, and blackletter—now boasts its own unique version. So-called roman type—the familiar upright letterforms used almost universally to set long-form texts such as books, newspapers, and websites—brings with it the most regular and recognizable ampersand (&).


pages: 740 words: 217,139

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Day of the Dead, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, endogenous growth, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, John Perry Barlow, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, means of production, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Scramble for Africa, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), spice trade, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

But economic life in Han Dynasty China resembled the world described by Thomas Malthus in his Essay on the Principle of Population much more than the world that has existed since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution of the last two hundred years.6 Today, we expect increases in labor productivity (output per person) as the result of technological innovation and change. But before 1800, productivity gains were much more episodic. The invention of agriculture, the use of irrigation, the invention of the printing press, gunpowder, and long-distance sailing ships all led to productivity gains,7 but between them there were prolonged periods when population growth increased and per capita income fell. Many agrarian societies were operating at the frontier of their technological production possibilities, where further investment would not yield higher output.

There were many roots to this revolution in ideas. The notion that all human beings are equal in dignity or worth despite their evident natural and social differences is a Christian one, but it was not regarded by the medieval church as something to be implemented in the here and now. The Protestant Reformation, combined with the invention of the printing press, empowered individuals to read the Bible and find their way to faith without the interposition of intermediaries like the church. This reinforced the growing willingness of Europeans to question established authority that had started with recovery of the classics during the late medieval period and the Renaissance.


pages: 322 words: 88,197

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Book of Ingenious Devices, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, colonial exploitation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, game design, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, HyperCard, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Minecraft, moral panic, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, Necker cube, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pets.com, placebo effect, pneumatic tube, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, SimCity, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, talking drums, the built environment, The Great Good Place, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Wunderkammern

All those defining experiences exist, in part, because natural selection didn’t find it necessary to perceive still images accurately at rates above twelve frames a second—and because hundreds of inventors, tinkering with the prototypes of cinema over the centuries, were smart enough to take that imperfection and turn it into art. — Art is the aftershock of technological plates shifting. Sometimes the aftershock is slow in arriving. It took the novel about three hundred years to evolve into its modern form after the invention of the printing press. The television equivalent of the novel—the complex serialized drama of The Wire or Breaking Bad—took as long as seventy years to develop, depending on where you date its origins. Sometimes the aftershocks roll in quickly: rock ’n’ roll emerged almost instantaneously after the invention of the electric guitar.


Monte Carlo Simulation and Finance by Don L. McLeish

algorithmic bias, Black-Scholes formula, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, discrete time, distributed generation, finite state, frictionless, frictionless market, implied volatility, incomplete markets, invention of the printing press, martingale, p-value, random walk, risk free rate, Sharpe ratio, short selling, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, survivorship bias, the market place, transaction costs, value at risk, Wiener process, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

This requires hedges against a whole litany of disadvantageous moves of the market such as increases in the cost of borrowing, decreases in the value of assets held, changes in a foreign currency exchange rates, etc. The advanced theory of finance, like many areas where advanced mathematics plays an important part, is undergoing a revolution aided and abetted by the computer and the proliferation of powerful simulation and symbolic mathematical tools. This is the mathematical equivalent of the invention of the printing press. The numerical and computational power once reserved for the most highly trained mathematicians, scientists or engineers is now available to any competent programmer. One of the first hurdles faced before adopting stochastic or random models in finance is the recognition that for all practical purposes, the prices of equities in an efficient market are random variables, that is while they may show some dependence on fiscal and economic processes and policies, they have a component of randomness that makes them unpredictable.


pages: 294 words: 96,661

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity by Byron Reese

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, basic income, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cognitive bias, computer age, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, dark matter, DeepMind, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, estate planning, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, full employment, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Moravec's paradox, Nick Bostrom, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, OpenAI, pattern recognition, profit motive, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

As I’ve already pointed out, we had to have, among other things, imagination, a sense of time, and writing. In addition, we needed much more; to that list we might well add a low-cost way to distribute knowledge, widespread literacy, the rule of law, nonconfiscatory taxation, individual liberty, and a culture that promoted risk taking. The invention of the printing press, and its widespread use, increased literacy and the free flow of information. This was the main catalyst that launched our modern world way back in the seventeenth century. And, perhaps, modernity got an unexpected boost from something else that happened in Europe at the same time: the replacement of beer by the newly introduced coffee as the beverage one sipped on all day.


pages: 313 words: 95,077

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky

Andrew Keen, Andy Carvin, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, bioinformatics, Brewster Kahle, c2.com, Charles Lindbergh, commons-based peer production, crowdsourcing, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, hiring and firing, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Kuiper Belt, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Merlin Mann, Metcalfe’s law, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Picturephone, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, prediction markets, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, Yochai Benkler, Yogi Berra

The fundamental tension in the pro-freedom argument is in understanding when freedom can be acceptably limited, within a framework that assumes that the bias should be toward increasing freedom. The basic tenet here is that the unforeseeable effects of freer communication will benefit society, as with the unanticipated rise of an international community of scientists and mathematicians after the invention of the printing press. Even the pro-freedom argument, though, risks overstating the degree of control we have over the change in group capabilities. To ask the question “Should we allow the spread of these social tools?” presumes that there is something we could do about it were the answer “No.” This hypothesis is suspect, precisely because of the kind of changes involved.


pages: 319 words: 90,965

The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere by Kevin Carey

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon-based life, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, declining real wages, deliberate practice, discrete time, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, informal economy, invention of the printing press, inventory management, John Markoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, Network effects, open borders, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush

The medieval university worked in this way for the next few centuries, expanding to more locations in Europe and beyond. It was not always the center of intellectual life—the great artists and scholars of the Renaissance did not work at universities—but it continued to grow, adapting to the last great information technology revolution in higher education before the current one: Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century. This was not the first time that teachers had been confronted with new learning technology. Millennia before, another invention had upset those wedded to traditional teaching methods: the written word. In the Phaedrus, Socrates tells the story of a conversation between two gods, Theuth and Thamus.


pages: 290 words: 94,968

Writing on the Wall: Social Media - the First 2,000 Years by Tom Standage

An Inconvenient Truth, Bill Duvall, British Empire, Dunbar number, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Evgeny Morozov, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, New Journalism, packet switching, place-making, Republic of Letters, sexual politics, social intelligence, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, yellow journalism

The Times had established a reputation for being first with the news from war-ravaged Europe, often learning of developments before the British government itself. So it was not unusual for Walter to delay the printing of the paper to allow the latest reports from Europe to be included at the last minute. Four centuries had passed since the invention of the printing press, but the Times, like other newspapers, was printed using hand presses that had changed very little since Gutenberg’s time. The frame that secured the press and the screw mechanism that pressed the type onto the paper were, by the early nineteenth century, both made of metal rather than wood, but otherwise the design would have looked familiar to a printer from the fifteenth century.


pages: 302 words: 92,206

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World by Gaia Vince

3D printing, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, charter city, circular economy, clean water, colonial exploitation, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, global pandemic, Global Witness, green new deal, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, job automation, joint-stock company, Kim Stanley Robinson, labour mobility, load shedding, lockdown, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, megacity, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, old age dependency ratio, open borders, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, place-making, planetary scale, plyscraper, polynesian navigation, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game, Zipcar

To measure the options a person’s income represents we have to compare their income with the prices of the goods and services that they want. We have to look at the ratio between income and prices. This is something the data service Our World in Data does exceptionally well. Over time, for instance, the price of a book fell in Europe relative to income, particularly in the decades immediately following the invention of the printing press in the sixteenth century, which massively increased the pace and scale of publishing productivity from the labour of individual scribes to an industrialized process. That made a book more affordable, from the price equivalent of months of wages to mere hours. And this productivity then drove further economic growth, in paper production, literacy and learning, for example. 11.


pages: 317 words: 101,074

The Road Ahead by Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold, Peter Rinearson

Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Donald Knuth, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, glass ceiling, global village, informal economy, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, medical malpractice, Mitch Kapor, new economy, packet switching, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, SimCity, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture

The information highway will be largely friction free, a theme I will explore further in chapter 8. This lack of friction in information distribution is incredibly important. It will empower more authors, because very little of the customer's dollar will be used to pay for distribution. Gutenberg's invention of the printing press brought about the first real shift in distribution friction—it allowed information on any subject to be distributed quickly and relatively cheaply. The printing press created a mass medium because it offered low-friction duplication. The proliferation of books motivated the general public to read and write, but once people had the skills there were many other things that could be done with the written word.


pages: 299 words: 98,943

Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization by Stephen Cave

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, back-to-the-land, clean water, double helix, George Santayana, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, life extension, planetary scale, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, stem cell, technoutopianism, the scientific method

Today opportunities for symbolic reproduction are no longer available only to pharaohs and emperors. We are each reproduced in hundreds of baby photos, holiday snaps and home videos. Indeed, with the digital revolution, we are now living through the greatest opening of the cultural sphere since the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century. It has never been easier to leave an impression in the shared space of symbols: with the minimum of computing power and know-how, it can be achieved in minutes. At the start of 2011, there were 158 million blogs (personal Web pages that are—in theory at least—updated regularly with the views of the blogger), with tens of thousands more being added every day.


pages: 327 words: 103,336

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, East Village, easy for humans, difficult for computers, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, Future Shock, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herman Kahn, high batting average, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, industrial cluster, interest rate swap, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, oil shock, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, prediction markets, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, school choice, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, urban planning, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

Once again, we care about things that matter, yet it is precisely these larger, more significant predictions about the future that pose the greatest difficulties. BLACK SWANS AND OTHER “EVENTS” Nowhere is this problem of predicting the things that matter more acute than for what former derivatives trader and gadfly of the financial industry Nassim Taleb calls black swans, meaning events that—like the invention of the printing press, the storming of the Bastille, and the attacks on the World Trade Center—happen rarely but carry great import when they do.15 But what makes an event a black swan? This is where matters get confusing. We tend to speak about events as if they are separate and distinct, and can be assigned a level of importance in the way that we describe natural events such as earthquakes, avalanches, and storms by their magnitude or size.


Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age by Alex Wright

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, barriers to entry, British Empire, business climate, business intelligence, Cape to Cairo, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Babbage, Computer Lib, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, linked data, Livingstone, I presume, lone genius, machine readable, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norman Mailer, out of africa, packet switching, pneumatic tube, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog

“Cut out everything you have copied with a pair of scissors,” he wrote, then “arrange the slips as you desire.”1 Using this technique, Gessner culled material from a wide range of sources—personal notes and observations, passages from books (cutting them out rather than copying them by hand, as a time-saving technique), recipes, printers’ catalogs, letters from friends, and so on—then collected the contents into a series of works that he published as new books.2 The most famous of these was his Bibliotheca Universalis, a prodigious volume encompassing some 10,000 titles by 3,000 different authors and purporting to catalog every known book.3 Gessner’s collection may seem modest by contemporary standards—the Library of Congress now adds about 10,000 items to its collection every day4—but in 1545 that number constituted an appreciable chunk of the available supply of recorded knowledge. At the time, the Vatican Library—then the largest library in all of Europe—housed fewer than 5,000 volumes. Gessner was scarcely alone in his urge to tackle the problem of information overload. In the years following Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, the volume of printed material grew at 20 Conrad Gessner’s Bibliotheca Universalis (1545). C ATA L O G I N G T H E WO R L D an astonishing clip. By 1500, just fifty years after the introduction of movable type, European printers had turned out an estimated 20 million copies of between 15,000 and 20,000 individual titles.


pages: 299 words: 19,560

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities by Howard P. Segal

1960s counterculture, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, complexity theory, David Brooks, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, deskilling, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, Future Shock, G4S, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, intentional community, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nikolai Kondratiev, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, pneumatic tube, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog

Meanwhile, the upbeat content of messages and programs marking the opening or expansion of those transportation and communications systems was viewed as reinforcing the technology–democracy ties.7 Equally significantly, as historian Ann Blair has detailed in her pathbreaking Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (2010), the assumption that “information overload” is a purely late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century challenge is historical nonsense. Once Gutenberg’s fifteenth-century invention of the printing press became a fact of European life, at least for the educated elite, thousands of books became available for reading and possible purchase, and the initial rejoicing at such abundant intellectual riches eventually turned to despair. Blair quotes Erasmus, the eminent humanist of the early sixteenth century, asking whether there is “anywhere on earth exempt from these swarms of new books”?


pages: 400 words: 99,489

The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World by Sarah Stewart Johnson

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Astronomia nova, back-to-the-land, Beryl Markham, classic study, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, data science, Drosophila, Elon Musk, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mercator projection, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ronald Reagan, scientific mainstream, sensible shoes, Suez canal 1869

She tended to the slides for decades after his death, carrying those small slips of glass with her wherever she moved, from lab to lab, until she entered assisted living a couple of years ago. And, of course, there is a copy of Elements, that crowning achievement, that bygone idea. The edition I couldn’t resist buying—one of the thousand editions printed since the invention of the printing press—happened to have one of the great paintings of the Romantic Era silkscreened on its cover. All the mathematics is bound by the portrait of a person standing on a precipice, caught in the wind, at once towering over the clouds and at the same time swallowed by nothingness. This box contains the “traces of human events” that Herodotus spoke of.


The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do by Erik J. Larson

AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, Boeing 737 MAX, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Georg Cantor, Higgs boson, hive mind, ImageNet competition, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, retrograde motion, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yochai Benkler

We do not put it in place like theory. Instead, we accrete technological developments one on top of the other, seemingly endlessly. The acceleration of the evolution of technology means simply that the time between major technological innovations keeps shrinking, historically, so that the gap between, say, the invention of the printing press and the arrival of the computer is very large compared to, say, the gap between the computer and the internet. The merger of science and technology is thus complicated, and the very word technoscience suggests that, as ­things pro­g ress, science ­w ill ­settle and technology w ­ ill continue to evolve—­and to evolve, as Kurzweil puts it, exponentially.


pages: 300 words: 99,410

Why the Dutch Are Different: A Journey Into the Hidden Heart of the Netherlands: From Amsterdam to Zwarte Piet, the Acclaimed Guide to Travel in Holland by Ben Coates

Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, British Empire, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, company town, drug harm reduction, Easter island, failed state, financial innovation, glass ceiling, invention of the printing press, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, megacity, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, short selling, spice trade, starchitect, trade route, urban sprawl, work culture

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, these old certainties began to crumble. In 1517, the German priest Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of a church in the German city of Wittenberg, rejecting the corruption of the Catholic religious authorities. Aided by the invention of the printing press, Luther’s ‘protest’ against the Roman Catholic Church spread quickly across Europe, leading to the creation of a new ‘Protestant’ church. In the Low Countries, Luther’s ideas gained a wide following. Groups supporting the Protestant movement were bolstered by the arrival of refugees from other countries.


pages: 385 words: 111,113

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

In recent years as new technologies like the smartphone, Facebook, Angry Birds, Snapchat and WeChat emerged, they became mass-market propositions 30 to 50 times faster than technologies such as the aeroplane or telephone. We live in extraordinary, accelerated times. Technology adoption and innovation has a compounding effect on the way we live when viewed over the long term. As we invent new technologies, they accelerate our ability to invent or create yet newer technologies. The invention of the printing press allowed more people to become educated and allowed knowledge to be distributed as never before. The invention of the integrated circuit (IC) not only allowed us to mass-produce consumer electronics and microchips, but also allowed us to rapidly improve design and fabrication methods for subsequent generations of computers and devices.


pages: 416 words: 108,370

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, always be closing, augmented reality, Clayton Christensen, data science, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, hindsight bias, hype cycle, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, information trail, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Roose, Kodak vs Instagram, linear programming, lock screen, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, subscription business, TED Talk, telemarketer, the medium is the message, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, women in the workforce

Literacy rates in European countries like France did not cross 50 percent until the 1800s, and half of the world could not read and write as late as 1960. The true democratization of written language required a technology to cheaply distribute written words. But another 4,500 years passed between the first sign of hieroglyphics and the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg. The printing press, too, caused a scandal. Monk scribes were aghast about the thing, owing at least partly to the fact that it competed with their monopoly of producing books. In the pamphlet In Praise of Scribes, the fifteenth-century abbot Johannes Trithemius wrote, “He who ceases from zeal for writing because of printing is no true lover of the Scriptures.”


pages: 363 words: 109,374

50 Psychology Classics by Tom Butler-Bowdon

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, corporate governance, delayed gratification, fear of failure, feminist movement, global village, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lateral thinking, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, Necker cube, Paradox of Choice, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Things came to a head when, in October 1517, he nailed a document—the famous “95 Theses”—to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg (a usual place for posting public notices), outlining the areas where the Church had to reform. The document was a bombshell, but might never have had the impact it did were it not for the recent invention of the printing press, which enabled this and Luther’s later writings to be spread far and wide. Anyone, from peasant to prince, who had a gripe with the status quo now had a focus. Luther became a celebrity, and his rebellion sparked off the Protestant Reformation. Erikson’s interpretation Rebellion is usually manifested in one’s younger years, but Luther was 34 by the time he properly spoke out against the Church.


pages: 394 words: 108,215

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, California gold rush, card file, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, different worldview, digital divide, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, punch-card reader, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, union organizing, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Coupled with an early and profound understanding of the implication of the scaling principle, he also took an important step beyond Engelbart’s notion of personal-computer-as-vehicle. He conceived of personal computing as an entirely new medium. In thinking about the computer in this way, he remembered reading about the insight of Aldus Manutius, who some forty years after the invention of the printing press established the dimensions of the modern book by understanding that it must be small enough to fit into a saddlebag. The obvious twentieth-century analogy was that a modern computer should be no larger than a notebook. It was a powerful notion, one that was originally apprehended only by a handful of people, people like Kay and Sid Fernbach, the Livermore labs’ supercomputing guru.


pages: 364 words: 99,897

The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

The explosion in data creation is a very recent occurrence, and from its inception, data storage has grown exponentially. For millennia, record keeping meant clay tablets, papyrus scrolls, or parchment and vellum made from animal skin. The first modern paper, made from wood or grass pulp, was a big advance; but the first major milestone in the mass production of data came with the invention of the printing press. In the first 50 years after the first printing press appeared, 8 million books were printed—more than all the books produced by European scribes in the prior millennium. With the successive inventions of telegraph, telephone, radio, television, and computers, the amount of data in the world grew rapidly during the 20th century.


pages: 477 words: 106,069

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker

butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, Douglas Hofstadter, feminist movement, functional fixedness, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, index card, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, language acquisition, lolcat, McMansion, meta-analysis, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, profit maximization, quantitative easing, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, short selling, Steven Pinker, the market place, theory of mind, Turing machine

.—1889 Unless the present progress of change [is] arrested … there can be no doubt that, in another century, the dialect of the Americans will become utterly unintelligible to an Englishman.—1833 Our language (I mean the English) is degenerating very fast. … I begin to fear that it will be impossible to check it.—1785 Complaints about the decline of language go at least as far back as the invention of the printing press. Soon after William Caxton set up the first one in England in 1478, he lamented, “And certaynly our langage now vsed veryeth ferre from what whiche was vsed and spoken when I was borne.” Indeed, moral panic about the decline of writing may be as old as writing itself: Non Sequitur © 2011 Wiley Ink, Inc.


pages: 387 words: 111,096

Enigma by Robert Harris

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Columbine, index card, invention of the printing press, sensible shoes, Turing machine

The beams of torches glistened on the wet tarmac. Atwood conducted them past the mansion and the arboretum and through the main gate. Discussing work outside the hut was forbidden and Atwood, purely to annoy Pinker, was declaiming on the suicide of Virginia Woolf, which he held to be the greatest day for English letters since the invention of the printing press. 'I c-c-can't believe you mmm-mmm-mmm . . .' When Pinker snagged himself on a word, his whole body seemed to shake with the effort of trying to get himself free. Above his bow-tie, his face bloomed scarlet in the torchlight. They stopped and waited patiently for him. 'Mmm-mmm . . .' 'Mean that?'


Life Is Simple by Johnjoe McFadden

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Astronomia nova, Bayesian statistics, Brownian motion, Commentariolus, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, COVID-19, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, horn antenna, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, lockdown, music of the spheres, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Plato's cave, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, William of Occam

There is no reason to believe that Leonardo had any special access to the ideas and philosophy of the via moderna in the fifteenth century so it is likely that thousands of other scholars were familiar with Occam’s razor and the science that it inspired. Yet it remains a puzzle how the advances of the via moderna had been transmitted through the centuries before the invention of the printing press. Subsequent research has uncovered two main routes, one for each of the two great cultural revolutions of the late Middle Ages. The southern route to the Renaissance Seventy-two years before Leonardo was born, on a night sometime around 1380, one of Florence’s greatest musicians and composers, Francesco Landini (c.1325–97), was having a dream.


pages: 467 words: 114,570

Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science by Jim Al-Khalili

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Book of Ingenious Devices, colonial rule, Commentariolus, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eratosthenes, Henri Poincaré, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, retrograde motion, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, time dilation, trade route, William of Occam

This revolutionary new way of learning about the world, as exemplified by the work of Copernicus and Galileo, focusing on empirical evidence rather than on the Aristotelian ‘final cause’, was, we now know, already well established in the tenth and eleventh centuries by al-Rāzi, Ibn al-Haytham and al-Bīrūni. There were many factors in the European Renaissance that undoubtedly influenced the rate of scientific progress, such as the invention of the printing press, which allowed the transmission of new ideas far more rapidly than before, just as the paper mill had done for the Abbāsids. Other, later, inventions such as the telescope and microscope revolutionized astronomy, biology and medicine. Between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries we do indeed see a marked drop in the sheer volume of original scientific output across the Islamic world.


pages: 437 words: 113,173

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

The artists who crafted these feats of genius five hundred years ago did not inhabit some magical age of universal beauty, but rather a tumultuous moment—marked by historic milestones and discoveries, yes, but also wrenching upheaval. Their world was tangling together in a way it had never done before, thanks to Gutenberg’s recent invention of the printing press (1450s), Columbus’s discovery of the New World (1492) and Vasco da Gama’s discovery of a sea route to Asia’s riches (1497). And humanity’s fortunes were changing, in some ways radically. The Black Death had tapered off, Europe’s population was recovering, and public health, wealth and education were all rising.


pages: 408 words: 114,719

The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began by Stephen Greenblatt

Albert Einstein, Bonfire of the Vanities, classic study, complexity theory, Eratosthenes, George Santayana, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, work culture

The high price, at a time when life was cheap, suggests both how important and how difficult it was for monasteries to obtain the books that they needed in order to enforce the reading rule. Even the most celebrated monastic libraries of the Middle Ages were tiny in comparison with the libraries of antiquity or those that existed in Baghdad or Cairo. To assemble a modest number of books, in the long centuries before the invention of the printing press forever changed the equation, meant the eventual establishment of what were called scriptoria, workshops where monks would be trained to sit for long hours making copies. At first the copying was probably done in an improvised setting in the cloister, where, even if the cold sometimes stiffened the fingers, at least the light would be good.


pages: 352 words: 120,202

Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology by Howard Rheingold

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bletchley Park, card file, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Hacker Ethic, heat death of the universe, Howard Rheingold, human-factors engineering, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, popular electronics, post-industrial society, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The Home Computer Revolution, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture

Chapter Nine: The Loneliness of a Long-Distance Thinker Harry Truman was President and Sputnik was a word that only Russian language experts knew when Doug Engelbart first thought about displaying words and images on radar screens, storing them in computers, and manipulating them with levers and buttons and keyboards. For over thirty years, Engelbart has been trying to hasten what he believes will be the biggest step in cultural evolution since the invention of the printing press. To hear him tell it today, both the computer establishment and the computer revolutionaries still fail to understand that the art and power of using a computer as a mind amplifier are not in how the amplifier works but in what the amplified minds are able to accomplish. At the end of the summer of 1945, just after the surrender of Japan, Engelbart was a twenty-year-old American naval radar technician, waiting for his ship home from the Philippines.


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

This post-industrial, digital, information-rich era has been around for fifty or so years; I think of that as at most halfway through its probable life. This revolution cannot yet be judged in toto and stagnation has to be seen in that context.66 As with human rights in the early twentieth century, there will be setbacks, but also plenty more to come. Forty years after the invention of the printing press, books still resembled scribal manuscripts. Only when printers like the Venetian Aldus Manutius learned to redesign the codex, its fonts and layout and sizing, enabling large-scale print runs, did it become the great catalyst of the Renaissance, just as it took decades for manufacturers to reorientate around steam and then electricity.


Innovation and Its Enemies by Calestous Juma

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, big-box store, biodiversity loss, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, electricity market, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, financial innovation, global value chain, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, pensions crisis, phenotype, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, smart grid, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick

As pointed out by Neddermeyer, “Gutenberg’s invention was no real threat to the existence of scribes. More often than not, the social consequences of the mechanization of book-production were alleviated by the fact that the writers were supported by ecclesiastical institutions, offices or prebends.”29 At the time of the invention of the printing press, “The majority of the manuscripts had not been paid for, often the writer needed the book for himself, or it was meant to enlarge the library of the religious communities he was a member of.”30 The scribes also continued to be paid from writing minutes, letters, inventories, and other documents.


pages: 476 words: 120,892

Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology by Johnjoe McFadden, Jim Al-Khalili

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, complexity theory, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, Ernest Rutherford, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Late Heavy Bombardment, Louis Pasteur, Medieval Warm Period, New Journalism, phenotype, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, synthetic biology, theory of mind, traveling salesman, uranium enrichment, Zeno's paradox

Now consider one thousand similarly sized books in a library and imagine you had the job of faithfully copying every single character and space. How many errors do you think you would make? This was precisely the task performed by medieval scribes, who did their best to hand-copy texts before the invention of the printing press. Their efforts were, not surprisingly, riddled with errors, as shown by the variety of divergent copies of medieval texts. Of course, computers are able to copy information with a very high degree of fidelity, but they do so with the hard edges of modern electronic digital technology.


pages: 494 words: 116,739

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blood diamond, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gamification, germ theory of disease, global village, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Khan Academy, Kibera, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, North Sea oil, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, Twitter Arab Spring, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, Y2K

Thanks to advances such as modern medicine, air conditioning, cheap transport, and real-time communication, middle-class people today enjoy a quality of life that kings and queens didn’t have a century ago. There’s a reason, utopians argue, why historical epochs are named after technologies – the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Industrial Age, the Information Age – and why human culture flourished after the invention of the printing press. But whatever they say and write, what most unites utopians is how they feel about technology. They love it, and they want more. Many believe that every kind of problem can be solved by some invention, often one that is right around the corner. Whether the issue is poverty, bad governance, or climate change, they say things like, “[There] is no limit to human ingenuity,” and “When seen through the lens of technology, few resources are truly scarce.”7 Besotted with gadgets, technological utopians scoff at social institutions like governments, civil society, and traditional firms, which they pity as slow, costly, behind the times, or all of the above.


pages: 525 words: 116,295

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives by Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen

access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Andy Rubin, anti-communist, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, borderless world, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, false flag, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, hive mind, income inequality, information security, information trail, invention of the printing press, job automation, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Bork, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Susan Wojcicki, The Wisdom of Crowds, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, young professional, zero day

It is, as the military scholar Peter Singer notes in his masterly account of this trend, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, what scientists would call a “singularity”—a “state in which things become so radically different that the old rules break down and we know virtually nothing.” Much as with other paradigm shifts in history (germ theory, the invention of the printing press, Einstein’s theory of relativity), it is almost impossible to predict with any great accuracy how the eventual change to fully automated warfare will alter the course of human society. All we can do is consider the clues we see today, convey the thinking of people on the front lines, and make some educated guesses.


pages: 382 words: 120,064

Bank 3.0: Why Banking Is No Longer Somewhere You Go but Something You Do by Brett King

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, asset-backed security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, fixed income, George Gilder, Google Glasses, high net worth, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Infrastructure as a Service, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, operational security, optical character recognition, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Pingit, platform as a service, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, self-driving car, Skype, speech recognition, stem cell, telepresence, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, underbanked, US Airways Flight 1549, web application, world market for maybe five computers

In this case you can expect to start to see media walls and in-built displays being deployed everywhere within the next four to five years. They will be commonplace by 2016–18. Electronic Paper Very closely related to soft-screen or OLED improvements is the area of electronic paper. This has been termed the most significant development in print technology since the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg in 1440. It was actually in the 1970s that Nick Sheridon at the Xerox Palo-Alto Research Centre developed the first e-paper. This electronic paper, called Gyricon,13 consisted of polyethylene spheres embedded in a transparent silicon sheet. Depending on whether a negative or positive charge is applied, the spheres would translate into a pixel that emits either a black or white appearance, thus looking a lot like normal paper.


Text Analytics With Python: A Practical Real-World Approach to Gaining Actionable Insights From Your Data by Dipanjan Sarkar

bioinformatics, business intelligence, business logic, computer vision, continuous integration, data science, deep learning, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, functional programming, general-purpose programming language, Guido van Rossum, information retrieval, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, iterative process, language acquisition, machine readable, machine translation, natural language processing, out of africa, performance metric, premature optimization, recommendation engine, self-driving car, semantic web, sentiment analysis, speech recognition, statistical model, text mining, Turing test, web application

Since print and verbal media came into prominence, there has been an abundance of books, articles, audio, and video. This began all the way back in the 3rd or 4th century B.C., when people referred to a huge quantity of books, as there seemed to be no end to the production of books , and this overload of information was often met with disapproval. The Renaissance gave us the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg around 1440 A.D., which led to the mass production of books, manuscripts, articles, and pamphlets. This greatly increased information overload, with scholars complaining about an excess of information, which was becoming extremely difficult to consume, process, and manage.


pages: 538 words: 141,822

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Earth, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, lolcat, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Sinatra Doctrine, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, Steve Jobs, Streisand effect, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Is There History After Twitter? It’s tempting to see technology as some kind of a missing link that can help us make sense of otherwise unrelated events known as human history. Why search for more complex reasons if the establishment of democratic forms of government in Europe could be explained by the invention of the printing press? As the economic historian Robert Heilbroner observed in 1994, “history as contingency is a prospect that is more than the human spirit can bear.” Technological determinism—the belief that certain technologies are bound to produce certain social, cultural, and political effects—is attractive precisely because “it creates powerful scenarios, clear stories, and because it accords with the dominant experience in the West,” write Steve Graham and Simon Marvin, two scholars of urban geography.


pages: 422 words: 131,666

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back by Douglas Rushkoff

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, AOL-Time Warner, banks create money, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, big-box store, Bretton Woods, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Google Earth, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, market bubble, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, peak oil, peer-to-peer, place-making, placebo effect, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social software, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

But instead of resorting to animism, Descartes turned to the logic of science. His Cartesian coordinate system described space and movement within it purely in terms of an x, y, and z axis. This led to maps with latitude and longitude lines, as well as analytic geometry and calculus. The invention of the printing press turned reading, literature, and Bible study from a group activity into an individual one. Instead of listening to a priest read from a sacred manuscript, people (at least the rich ones) could now read from mass-produced texts. To read individually meant interpreting texts as an individual.


pages: 607 words: 133,452

Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin, David K. Levine

accounting loophole / creative accounting, agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, business cycle, classic study, cognitive bias, cotton gin, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial innovation, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, independent contractor, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jean Tirole, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, linear programming, market bubble, market design, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, new economy, open economy, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, pirate software, placebo effect, price discrimination, profit maximization, rent-seeking, Richard Stallman, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, the market place, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Y2K

For the economic and legal theories of “no innovation without monopolization,” this plain fact is as inexplicable a mystery as the Catholic dogma of virginitas ante partum is for most of us.26 To see the actual impact of copyright on creativity, let us start with some history. Copyright emerged in different European countries only after the invention of the printing press. Copyright originated not to protect the profits of authors from copyists or to encourage creation, but rather as an instrument of government censorship. Royal and religious powers arrogated to themselves the right to decide what could and could not be safely printed. Hence, the right to copy was a concession of the powerful to the citizenry to print and read what the powerful thought proper to print and read; Galileo’s trial was nothing more than an exercise in copyright enforcement by the pope of Rome.


pages: 517 words: 139,477

Stocks for the Long Run 5/E: the Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies by Jeremy Siegel

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, carried interest, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, compound rate of return, computer age, computerized trading, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, fundamental attribution error, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, joint-stock company, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, machine readable, market bubble, mental accounting, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Northern Rock, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uptick rule, Vanguard fund

I do not believe that even the developed world’s productivity is necessarily on a downward path. The digitization and instant availability of information will combine to spur faster productivity growth. When we study history, we find that inventions that hastened communication, such as Ts’ai Lun’s discovery of paper in the first century and Johannes Guttenberg’s invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, preceded periods of rapid discovery and innovation.18 In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the telegraph and then the telephone spurred growth by enabling the first instant communication between distant individuals. But no recent discovery has as much potential to foster innovation as the Internet.


pages: 509 words: 142,456

Empire of the Scalpel: The History of Surgery by Ira Rutkow

augmented reality, Charles Lindbergh, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, New Journalism, Stephen Hawking, trade route, unbiased observer, white picket fence, wikimedia commons, yellow journalism

Copernicus reconnoitered our place in the universe by placing the sun, rather than the Earth, at the center of the solar system; Mercator drew his map of the world with its location of the continents. An eagerness to question and seek new knowledge had a vast impact on the development of surgery, fueled by the invention of the printing press and widespread use of gunpowder. Few substances had a greater effect on civilization than gunpowder, an explosive mixture of charcoal, potassium nitrate (saltpeter), and sulphur. It altered the art of warfare and affected the whole fabric of society. Gunpowder was introduced into Europe in the mid-thirteenth century and warfare turned deadlier and injuries more dreadful, conspicuous for their staggering amount of blood and tissue loss.


pages: 475 words: 156,046

When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches That Shape the World – and Why We Need Them by Philip Collins

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, collective bargaining, Copley Medal, Corn Laws, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Great Leap Forward, invention of the printing press, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rosa Parks, stakhanovite, Ted Sorensen, Thomas Malthus, Torches of Freedom, World Values Survey

A nation is an achievement before it is a place. In the case of the strange multinational state of Britain this is an especially precarious task. Nationhood is the expression of solidarity rather than the discovery of a common race of men. Anderson dates national consciousness to the invention of the printing press, the creation of the novel and the appearance of newspapers. For the first time, men and women could experience the stories of people like themselves, being lived out in their own day. Nationhood remains the most potent form of allegiance in modern politics. Affiliation to the nation has always trumped the claim of class and has always stood in the way of durable multinational institutions.


pages: 579 words: 160,351

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now by Alan Rusbridger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Andy Carvin, banking crisis, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, country house hotel, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, death of newspapers, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, forensic accounting, Frank Gehry, future of journalism, G4S, high net worth, information security, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Large Hadron Collider, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, natural language processing, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-truth, pre–internet, ransomware, recommendation engine, Ruby on Rails, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Now it’s the other way round: they see the film and then, on the way out of the cinema, get out their smartphones and read your review. And then they start vehemently letting you know what they think. You get reviewed! It’s been a sobering experience for all critics to realise that the one-party state of media and publishing – which lasted from the invention of the printing press in the middle ages to about 2004 – is over.’13 ‘Open’ became something of a mantra within the office – doubtless to the irritation of some, and to the excitement of others. It was too general a word to be an ideal piece of motivational shorthand, but it was a big enough umbrella to include a number of ideas about what we could be experimenting with.


pages: 655 words: 156,367

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Let the innovations that hackers and their venture capitalist supporters were generating travel to every corner of the media economy and let American consumers determine, through purchases, which of the new products and services delighted them the most.61 Excitement about the internet deepened the sense that America, indeed the world, was on the cusp of a market-powered transformation. Observers searching for a precedent for a communications revolution of this magnitude reached back to the invention of the printing press half a millennium before. The internet, some asserted, would do even more than the advent of printed books had once accomplished. Patricia Aufderheide, a hard-headed media critic, herself marveled in the 1990s at how the net “was equally good at sending and receiving in any direction, making every user a potential producer as much as a potential consumer.


pages: 531 words: 161,785

Alcohol: A History by Rod Phillips

clean water, conceptual framework, European colonialism, financial independence, GPS: selective availability, invention of the printing press, Kickstarter, large denomination, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, New Urbanism, profit motive, restrictive zoning, trade route, women in the workforce, working poor

The continuing special status attributed to brandy is highlighted by the 1614 warning that “brandy is not a drink to be taken immoderately, but only for strength or medicinal purposes.”25 Attempts to limit consumption to small therapeutic doses proved futile, however, and production of spirits spread rapidly throughout Europe. The distilling industry, like religion, was one of the first beneficiaries of the invention of the printing press. From Gutenberg’s marvel flowed a veritable stream of books that described the technique of distilling and lauded the value of aqua vitae. By 1525, books on distilling (and on brandy specifically) had been published in a variety of European languages, including French, German, Dutch, Italian, and English.


pages: 855 words: 178,507

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, bank run, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, citation needed, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pre–internet, quantum cryptography, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Simon Singh, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, talking drums, the High Line, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, Turing test, women in the workforce, yottabyte

Yet they refuse to count evident misprints found by way of Internet searches. They do not recognize straight-laced, even though statistical evidence finds that bastardized form outnumbering strait-laced. For the crystallization of spelling, the OED offers a conventional explanation: “Since the invention of the printing press, spelling has become much less variable, partly because printers wanted uniformity and partly because of a growing interest in language study during the Renaissance.” This is true. But it omits the role of the dictionary itself, arbitrator and exemplar. For Cawdrey the dictionary was a snapshot; he could not see past his moment in time.


pages: 540 words: 168,921

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by Joyce Appleby

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, land bank, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, PalmPilot, Parag Khanna, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

Deepal Lal goes back even farther in time to the eleventh century, where he finds the roots of the “Great Divergence” in papal decrees that established a common commercial law for all of Christendom.3 The Latin motto post hoc, ergo propter hoc reminds us that because something happened before something else, it is not necessarily a cause of the following event. The emergence of capitalism was not a general phenomenon, but one specific to time and place. People who take the long-run-up view of the emergence of capitalism note factors like the discovery of the New World, the invention of the printing press, the use of clocks, or papal property arrangements. These were present in countries that did not change their economic ways. Logically, widely shared developments can’t explain a response that was unique to one country. What the myriad theories about how the West broke with its past do have right is that there were many, many elements that went into capitalism’s breakout from its traditional origins.


pages: 533

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

Fourth, digital information has almost no marginal cost of reproduction— it can be replicated millions of times very cheaply. Together, these factors explain why the transition from a print-based information system to a digital one has yielded such an explosion of data. Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier compare current developments with the last ‘information revolution’: the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg nearly 600 years ago. In the fifty years following Gutenberg’s innovation, more than 8 million books were printed.This change was described as ‘revolutionary’ by the scholar Elizabeth Eisenstein because it meant, in all likelihood, that more books had been printed in half a century than had been handwritten by ‘all the scribes in Europe’ in the previous 1,200 years.8 Yet if it took fifty or so years for the amount of data in existence to OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 29/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS Increasingly Quantified Societ y 63 d­ ouble in Gutenberg’s day, consider that the same feat is now being achieved roughly every two years.9 Much of the data in the world originates with human beings.


pages: 693 words: 169,849

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business intelligence, central bank independence, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of gunpowder, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-oil, pre–internet, public intellectual, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sexual politics, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce

John Calvin, the founder of a particularly austere version of Protestantism, went further, insisting that the spiritual hierarchy of the elect and the damned bore no necessary relationship with the hierarchy on Earth.21 The religious revolution was also an educational revolution. It was no longer enough to gape at the priest mumbling in Latin and performing miracles before the altar. You had to study the Good Book yourself (which had fortunately been made easily available by the new invention of the printing press). It was no longer enough to justify institutions by appealing to tradition. You had to test them in the light of faith. Protestant countries quickly created elite institutions for the spiritual elect. Philip I of Hesse founded the first specifically Protestant university, the University of Marburg, in 1527, a decade after Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses on the church door.


pages: 687 words: 189,243

A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy by Joel Mokyr

Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, business cycle, classic study, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Copley Medal, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, Deng Xiaoping, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, flying shuttle, framing effect, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Herbert Marcuse, hindsight bias, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land tenure, law of one price, Menlo Park, moveable type in China, new economy, phenotype, price stability, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, the market place, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, ultimatum game, World Values Survey, Wunderkammern

More than a century later, François Rozier (1734–1793), publisher of the Observations sur la Physique, sur l’Histoire Naturelle, et sur les Arts (widely regarded as the first independent periodical to be concerned wholly with advances in cutting-edge science), assured the American Philosophical Society that “all of Europe will be informed in less than three months” if they sent the new information first to him and that such correspondence would be “indispensable for the progress of science” (quoted in McClellan, 1979, p. 444). Eisenstein and others have stressed the importance of the invention of the printing press to the evolution of the Republic of Letters, although Fumaroli (2015, pp. 24, 37) points out that the first use of the term, by the Venetian politician and humanist intellectual Francesco Barbaro, predates the first press by at least three decades. Much less discussed than printing but of great importance in the operation of the Republic of Letters was the improvement in the continent-wide flow of mail.


pages: 636 words: 202,284

Piracy : The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates by Adrian Johns

active measures, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, commoditize, Computer Lib, Corn Laws, demand response, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, pirate software, radical decentralization, Republic of Letters, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, software patent, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, the scientific method, traveling salesman, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog

Far from being timeless, that concept is in fact not even ancient. It arose in the context of Western Europe in the early modern period – the years of religious and political upheaval surrounding the Reformation and the scientific revolution. In particular, it owed its origin to the cultural transformations set in train by Johann Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. At the origin of the history of piracy thus lies one of the defining events of Western civilization. Printing posed serious problems of politics and authority for the generations following Gutenberg. It was in the process of grappling with those problems that they came up with the notion of piracy.


pages: 829 words: 186,976

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't by Nate Silver

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, book value, Broken windows theory, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Freestyle chess, fudge factor, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, housing crisis, income per capita, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Laplace demon, locking in a profit, Loma Prieta earthquake, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oklahoma City bombing, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, power law, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, public intellectual, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, savings glut, security theater, short selling, SimCity, Skype, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

It seemed obvious to him that a more thorough understanding of probability was essential to scientific progress.32 The intimate connection between probability, prediction, and scientific progress was thus well understood by Bayes and Laplace in the eighteenth century—the period when human societies were beginning to take the explosion of information that had become available with the invention of the printing press several centuries earlier, and finally translate it into sustained scientific, technological, and economic progress. The connection is essential—equally to predicting the orbits of the planets and the winner of the Lakers’ game. As we will see, science may have stumbled later when a different statistical paradigm, which deemphasized the role of prediction and tried to recast uncertainty as resulting from the errors of our measurements rather than the imperfections in our judgments, came to dominate in the twentieth century.


pages: 745 words: 207,187

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

active measures, Admiral Zheng, airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Carrington event, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, dual-use technology, Eddington experiment, Edward Snowden, energy security, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, global value chain, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Laura Poitras, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, low earth orbit, mandelbrot fractal, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, operation paperclip, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precision agriculture, prediction markets, profit motive, Project Plowshare, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, skunkworks, South China Sea, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, the long tail, time dilation, trade route, War on Poverty, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

As to the availability of ready-made lenses, Van Helden marshals extensive evidence that by the middle of the sixteenth century, the shops of spectacle sellers across Europe commonly offered a selection of both concave and convex lenses of varying strengths. The explosion of book publication in mid-fifteenth-century Europe, spurred by Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press with movable metal type, had led to rapid increases in myopia. The solution—concave spectacle lenses—was for sale in Florence by 1451 (Van Helden, “Invention of the Telescope,” 10–11). 3.See Watson, Stargazer, 71–73, re observations prior to Galileo’s. As with the rest of his scientific discoveries, Harriot did not publish his results, note J.


pages: 828 words: 232,188

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, crony capitalism, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, household responsibility system, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of the printing press, iterative process, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labour management system, land reform, land tenure, life extension, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, open economy, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, Port of Oakland, post-industrial society, post-materialism, price discrimination, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey, zero-sum game

In agrarian societies, a person’s important life choices—where to live, what to do for a living, what religion to practice, whom to marry—were mostly determined by the surrounding tribe, village, or caste. Individuals consequently did not spend a lot of time sitting around asking themselves, “Who am I, really?” According to Anderson, all this begins to change with the emergence of commercial capitalism in sixteenth-century Europe, powered by the invention of the printing press and the growth of a market for books. The printing press sharply reduced the price of written communication and thus made possible publication of books in vernacular languages. Martin Luther, writing in German rather than Latin, became a bestselling author early in the sixteenth century and as a result played a key role in creating a sense of common German culture.


pages: 778 words: 227,196

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, British Empire, Charles Babbage, Copley Medal, Dava Sobel, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, Etonian, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Harrison: Longitude, music of the spheres, placebo effect, polynesian navigation, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade route, unbiased observer, University of East Anglia, éminence grise

Davy is told a sort of scientific creation myth, a Promethean version of man’s growing material dominion over the earth. From his primitive tribal beginnings, art and technology lifts man above the wild animals, until such global developments as chemistry, engineering, medicine and the ‘Faustian’ invention of the printing press bring an advanced Western civilisation.120 This account by Genius includes some racial theory about the ‘superiority of the Caucasian stock’ of a type familiar to students of Blumenbach. But Genius also makes an uneasy prophecy of colonial persecutions, of the kind that Banks would have recognised.


pages: 904 words: 246,845

A History of the Bible: The Story of the World's Most Influential Book by John Barton

classic study, complexity theory, feminist movement, invention of the printing press, Johannes Kepler, lateral thinking, liberation theology, Republic of Letters, source of truth, the market place, trade route

REFORMATION TRANSLATIONS The great age of biblical translation, after the achievements of Jerome, is the period of the Reformation and its immediate precursors, when the Bible came to occupy a more prominent place in the Christian system, and to be regarded as all-important. In the eight decades before Luther, the Bible had been translated into various kinds of German between 1466 and 1522; into Italian in 1471; Dutch in 1477; Spanish and Czech in 1478; and Catalan in 1492. The great impetus was the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1439, which made quick dissemination possible for the first time. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s argument, which suggests that the rise in translations of the Bible helped to cause, rather than was created by, the Reformation, is supported by the sheer number of fifteenth-century versions, well before the Reformation is generally reckoned to have begun in earnest.15 A medieval translation of the Vulgate into Middle German had been produced in 1350 and printed as early as 1466, but the translators had had no knowledge of Greek or Hebrew.


pages: 918 words: 257,605

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, book scanning, Broken windows theory, California gold rush, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, connected car, context collapse, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, fake news, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Ian Bogost, impulse control, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, linked data, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, precision agriculture, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, smart cities, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, union organizing, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

Frazier asks.45 Skinner advocated, via Frazier, that the virtue of a “planned society” is “to keep intelligence on the right track, for the good of society rather than of the intelligent individual.… It does this by making sure that the individual will not forget his personal stake in the welfare of society.”46 Pentland understands instrumentarian society as an historical turning point comparable to the invention of the printing press or the internet. It means that for the first time in human history, “We will have the data required to really know ourselves and understand how society evolves.”47 Pentland says that “continuous streams of data about human behavior” mean that everything from traffic, to energy use, to disease, to street crime will be accurately forecast, enabling a “world without war or financial crashes, in which infectious disease is quickly detected and stopped, in which energy, water, and other resources are no longer wasted, and in which governments are part of the solution rather than part of the problem.”48 This new “collective intelligence” operates to serve the greater good as we learn to act “in a coordinated manner” based on “social universals.”


pages: 1,351 words: 385,579

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

I will return to the life-was-cheap hypothesis in the final chapter, but for now we must seek other candidates for an exogenous change that made people more compassionate. One technology that did show a precocious increase in productivity before the Industrial Revolution was book production. Before Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1452, every copy of a book had to be written out by hand. Not only was the process time-consuming—it took thirty-seven persondays to produce the equivalent of a 250-page book—but it was inefficient in materials and energy. Handwriting is harder to read than type is, and so handwritten books had to be larger, using up more paper and making the book more expensive to bind, store, and ship.


Greece by Korina Miller

car-free, carbon footprint, credit crunch, flag carrier, Google Earth, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, informal economy, invention of the printing press, pension reform, period drama, restrictive zoning, sensible shoes, Suez canal 1869, too big to fail, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

The island became a way-station for intellectuals and ideas – at precisely the moment when a hunger for learning ancient Greek and Latin texts in the original was growing in Italy and other Western European countries. Indeed, wealthy Italian noblemen such as that great Florentine, Cosimo de’ Medici, were funding whole Platonic ‘academies’, where aspiring scholars sat enraptured at the feet of learned Greek émigrés. Further, the simultaneous invention of the printing press meant that ancient texts suddenly could be made widely available. And a Cretan typesetter and calligrapher, Markos Mousouros (1470–1517), designed the typeface in which Europeans would read many of the first printed Ancient Greek texts. His employer, Aldus Manutius, a Venetian publisher who revolutionised and popularised the study of Ancient Greek philosophy and literature, used the typeface based on Mousouros’ own handwriting to print his editions of the Greek classics.