computer age

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pages: 528 words: 146,459

Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan L. Ensmenger, Jeffrey R. Yost

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, Byte Shop, card file, cashless society, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, deskilling, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Jenner, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, garden city movement, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, Herman Kahn, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, natural language processing, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pirate software, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, Turing machine, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, young professional

Thus, for the cost of a couple of 407s, the 1401 provided the printing capacity of four standard accounting machines—and the flexibility of a stored-program computer was included, as it were, for free. The new printing technology was an unanticipated motive for IBM’s customers to enter the computer age, but no less real for that. For a while, IBM was the victim of its own success, as customer after customer decided to turn in old-fashioned accounting machines and replace them with computers. In this decision they were aided and abetted by IBM’s industrial designers, who excelled themselves by echoing the modernity and appeal of the new computer age: out went the round-cornered steel-gray punched-card machines, and in came the square-cornered light-blue computer cabinets.

With these changes we hope that, for the next several years, the third edition of Computer will continue to serve as an authoritative, semi-popular history of computing. INTRODUCTION IN JANUARY 1983, Time magazine selected the personal computer as its Man of the Year, and public fascination with the computer has continued to grow ever since. That year was not, however, the beginning of the computer age. Nor was it even the first time that Time had featured a computer on its cover. Thirty-three years earlier, in January 1950, the cover had sported an anthropomorphized image of a computer wearing a navy captain’s hat to draw readers’ attention to the feature story, about a calculator built at Harvard University for the US Navy.

But now we can see that it is important to the history of computing in that it pioneered three key features of the office-machine industry and the computer industry that succeeded it: the perfection of the product and low-cost manufacture, a sales organization to sell the product, and a training organization to enable workers to use the technology. THE RANDS Left to itself, it is unlikely that the Remington Typewriter Company would have succeeded in the computer age—certainly none of the other typewriter companies did. However, in 1927 Remington became part of a conglomerate, Remington Rand, organized by James Rand Sr. and his son James Jr. The Rands were the inventor-entrepreneur proprietors of the Rand Kardex Company, the world’s leading supplier of record-keeping systems.


pages: 224 words: 12,941

From Gutenberg to Google: electronic representations of literary texts by Peter L. Shillingsburg

bread and circuses, British Empire, computer age, disinformation, double helix, HyperCard, hypertext link, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, language acquisition, means of production, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Saturday Night Live, Socratic dialogue

Works by other scholars form greater and more important enabling contexts, knowledge of which might help the reader to assess my arguments for their intended effects. This book could be seen as the third book of a trilogy that was not intended as such, but which seems to me to have happened accidentally. My Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age (1984, revised in 1986 and again in 1996) attempted to survey the prevailing notions about the nature of literary texts that propelled and guided scholarly editors. Its idea most relevant to the present work is that literary works are traditionally viewed from one of five rather different and mutually exclusive ‘‘orientations’’ which depend on how one posits authority for or ownership of the text.

It can be questioned whether textuality, in the constrained form of print, has been allowed to reveal its nature fully. It can still be argued that texts were not constrained by print technology but, instead, were designed specifically for print technology. This argument might hold that while electronic media have provided novelists and poets in the computer age with new visions about how and what to write, it would be inappropriate to drag texts written with print design in mind – indeed, written with no notion of any alternative ‘‘condition of being’’ other than print – into an electronic environment with some notion of releasing them from the constraints of print.

They are also bibliographers and they know how to conduct literary and historical research. But they are usually not also librarians, typesetters, printers, publishers, book designers, programmers, web-masters, or systems analysts. In the days of print editions, some editors undertook some of those production roles, and in the computer age, some editors try to program and design interfaces. In both book design and electronic presentations, textual scholarship often visibly outdistances the ability of these same persons’ amateur technical attempts at beauty and dexterity. Yet, in many cases, textual critics, whose business it is to study the composition, revision, publication, and transmission of texts, have had to adopt these other roles just to get the fruits of their textual labor produced at all or produced with scholarly quality control.


pages: 468 words: 137,055

Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age by Steven Levy

Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, disinformation, Donald Knuth, Eratosthenes, Extropian, Fairchild Semiconductor, information security, invention of the telegraph, Jim Simons, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knapsack problem, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mondo 2000, Network effects, new economy, NP-complete, quantum cryptography, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web of trust, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

As more people used computers, wireless telephones, and other electronic devices, they would demand cryptography. Just as the invention of the telegraph upped the cryptographic ante by moving messages thousands of miles in the open, presenting a ripe opportunity for eavesdroppers of every stripe, the computer age would be moving billions of messages previously committed to paper into the realm of bits. Unencrypted, those bits were low-hanging fruit for snoopers. Could cryptography, that science kept intentionally opaque by the forces of government, help out? The answer was as clear as plaintext. Of course it could!

It was a perpetual kind of voyage of discovery because he kept checking out these people. And sometimes he’d say, ‘I want you to stand here to listen. I don’t want anybody to see you but I just want you to listen.’ So I went on some of these encounters. But basically I didn’t have a clue what he was up to.” Sometimes Diffie would try to explain his motivations to her. The computer age, he told Mary, held terrible implications for privacy. As these machines become ascendant, and we use them for everyday communication, he warned, we may never experience privacy as we know it today. His apocalyptic tone unsettled Mary, but she wanted to hear more. Eventually, Mary understood how Diffie’s mission mixed the political with the personal.

Ultimately, it was only by questioning the conventional rules of cryptography and finding some of them “stupid” that Diffie made his breakthroughs. A case in point: the belief that the workings of a secure cryptosystem had to be treated with utmost secrecy. That might have held true for military organizations, but in the computer age, that didn’t make sense. There would be unlimited users who needed a system for privacy; obviously, such a system would have to be distributed so widely that potential crackers would have no trouble getting their hands on it and would have plenty of opportunity to practice attacking it. Instead, the secrecy had to rest somewhere else in the system.


A People’s History of Computing in the United States by Joy Lisi Rankin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Charles Babbage, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, corporate social responsibility, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Multics, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, pink-collar, profit motive, public intellectual, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog, wikimedia commons

Coordinated Science Lab at the University of Illinois, “1950s: The Classified Years,” http://­c sl​.­i llinois​.­edu ​/­about​-­lab​/­1950s​-­classified​-­years, archived at perma.cc/N3PC-5XGN. 7. Bethany Anderson, “The Birth of the Computer Age at Illinois,” University of Illinois Archives, 2013, http://­archives​.­library​.­illinois​.­edu​/ ­blog​/ ­birth​ -­of​-­t he​-­computer​-­age, archived at perma.cc/RJ57–9NV8. 8. Donald Bitzer, oral history interview by Mollie Price on August 17, 1982, Charles Babbage Institute. 9. Bitzer, interview; PLATO Quarterly Pro­ g ress Report for June–­ August 1960, Box 22, CBI PLATO Collection. 10.

Constructing Youth Hackers in ­Family Computing Magazines (1983–1987).” International Journal of Communication 8 (2014): 673–698. Alpert, Daniel, and Donald Bitzer. “Advances in Computer-­Based Education.” Science 167, no. 3925 (1970): 1582–1590. Anderson, Bethany. “The Birth of the Computer Age at Illinois.” University of Illinois Archives (2013). http://­archives​.­library​.­illinois​.­edu​/ ­blog​/ ­birth​-­of​ -­t he​-­computer​-­age. Archived at perma.cc/RJ57–9NV8. Anderson, Terry H. The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in Amer­i­ca from Greensboro to Wounded Knee. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Aspray, William. Computing before Computers. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1990. —­—­—.

Information about Secondary School Proj­ect schools, the NSF grant, and its purpose in Information File for the Computation Center, Rauner Library; and (for example) Kiewit Comments 1, no. 5 (June 19, 1967); Kiewit Comments 2, no. 6 (August 19, 1968); Kiewit Comments 2, no. 9 (November 22, 1968); Kiewit Comments 3, no. 2 (February 20, 1969); Kiewit Comments 3, no. 5 (June 1, 1969); Kiewit Comments 3, no. 6 (September 20, 1969); and Kiewit Comments 4, no. 6 (September 28, 1970). 62. “Loomis Catches Up with Computer Age,” Loomis Bulletin, July 1968, Loomis Chaffee School Archives; G. Albert Higgins, “BASIC: A New Language at Mount Hermon,” The Bulletin of Northfield and Mount Hermon Schools (Spring 1967), clipping in Folder DA 29 (7841) 5 of 6, labeled: Miscellaneous Time-­Sharing, Rauner Library. 63. Clippings from Valley News, Caledonia Rec­ord, Recorder-­Gazette (Greenfield, MA), Gazette (Haverhill, MA), Ea­gle (Claremont, NH), Eve­ning Eagle-­Tribune (Lawrence, MA), Herald (Portsmouth, NH), Union (Springfield, MA), Monitor & New Hampshire Patriot (Concord, NH), Telegraph (Nashua, NH), Sunday Globe (Boston, MA), Connecticut Valley Times Reporter (Bellows Falls, VT), Hartford Courant, Mascoma Week (Canaan, NH), in Folder 1964–67, Box 4242, RDCCS , DA-181, Rauner Library.


pages: 239 words: 70,206

Data-Ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else by Steve Lohr

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Carl Icahn, classic study, cloud computing, computer age, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, Emanuel Derman, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, impulse control, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, lifelogging, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, meta-analysis, money market fund, natural language processing, obamacare, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, RAND corporation, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, skunkworks, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tony Fadell, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, yottabyte

Decisions of all kinds will increasingly be made based on data and analysis rather than on experience and intuition—more science and less gut feel. Throughout history, technological change has challenged traditional practices, ways of educating people, and even ways of understanding the world. In 1959, at the dawn of the modern computer age, the English chemist and novelist C. P. Snow delivered a lecture at Cambridge University, “The Two Cultures.” In it, Snow dissected the differences and observed the widening gap between two camps, the sciences and the humanities. The schism between scientific and “literary intellectuals,” he warned, threatened to stymie economic and social progress, if those in the humanities remained ignorant of the advances in science and their implications.

Productivity gains—more wealth created per hour of labor—are the fuel of rising living standards, and a by-product of the efficiency that technology is supposed to generate. The conundrum raised the question of whether all of the investment in, and enthusiasm for, digital technology was justified. Robert Solow, a Nobel Prize–winning economist, tartly summed up the quandary in the late 1980s, when he wrote, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” Solow’s critique became known as the productivity paradox. Brynjolfsson, a technology optimist, has two answers for the skeptics. First, he argues, the official statistics do not fully capture the benefits of digital innovation. And second, he says that in technology, revolutions take time.

Uncertainty and experimentation while pursuing a new set of problems and opportunities are how disciplines emerge in technology. In the postwar years, big computers were the disruptive technology of the day, with the potential to transform scientific research, business, and government operations. To really create a computer age, skilled people and new tools and techniques were needed. In the 1960s, universities responded with programs in computer science, a new discipline that combined mathematics and electrical engineering. We see a similar pattern with data science. It is certainly where established academic departments, like statistics and computer science, are headed, and have been for a while.


pages: 434 words: 135,226

The Music of the Primes by Marcus Du Sautoy

Ada Lovelace, Andrew Wiles, Arthur Eddington, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Bletchley Park, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Dava Sobel, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Eratosthenes, Erdős number, Georg Cantor, German hyperinflation, global village, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, lateral thinking, Leo Hollis, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, P = NP, Paul Erdős, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine, William of Occam, Wolfskehl Prize, Y2K

2 The Atoms of Arithmetic 3 Riemann’s Imaginary Mathematical Looking-Glass 4 The Riemann Hypothesis: From Random Primes to Orderly Zeros 5 The Mathematical Relay Race: Realising Riemann’s Revolution 6 Ramanujan, the Mathematical Mystic 7 Mathematical Exodus: From Göttingen to Princeton 8 Machines of the Mind 9 The Computer Age: From the Mind to the Desktop 10 Cracking Numbers and Codes 11 From Orderly Zeros to Quantum Chaos 12 The Missing Piece of the Jigsaw Acknowledgements Further Reading Illustration and Text Credits Index P.S. About the Author Portrait of Marcus du Sautoy Snapshot Top Ten Favourite Books About the Book A Critical Eye Jerzy Grotowski Read On If You Loved This, You’ll Like … Find Out More Bookshop About the Author Praise Copyright About the Publisher CHAPTER ONE Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?

Instead it was based on solid calculation and theoretical ideas that Riemann had chosen not to reveal to the world. Within a few years of Siegel’s discovery of Riemann’s secret formula, it would be used by Hardy’s students in Cambridge to confirm that the first 1,041 zeros were on Riemann’s line. The formula, however, would truly come into its own with the dawn of the computer age. It is rather odd that it took mathematicians so long to realise that Riemann’s notes might contain such gems. There are certainly clues in Riemann’s ten-page paper, and in letters he wrote to other mathematicians at the time, that he was sitting on something. In the paper he mentions a new formula but goes on to say that he ‘has not yet sufficiently simplified it to announce it’.

Turing’s addiction for real-life inventions had infused his theoretical considerations. Although the universal machine was only a machine of the mind, his description of it sounded like the plan for an actual contraption. A friend of his joked that if it were ever built it would probably fill the Albert Hall. The universal machine marked the dawn of the computer age, which would equip mathematicians with a new tool in their exploration of the universe of numbers. Even during his lifetime, Turing appreciated the impact that real computing machines might have on investigating the primes. What he could not have foreseen was the role that his theoretical machine would later play in unearthing one of the Holy Grails of mathematics.


pages: 343 words: 102,846

Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future by Hal Niedzviecki

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, anti-communist, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, big-box store, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, computer age, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Zinn, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, independent contractor, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Armstrong, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, precariat, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Virgin Galactic, warehouse robotics, working poor

But the highlight for the audience was a speech-controlled train that could back up, stop, and move forward on command. The whole experience happened in a pavilion called the “House of Magic.”34 The prevailing attitude—future-as-passive-spectacle in which the forces of government and industry shape the time to come while “man conforms”—continued even up through the 1950s and ’60s, the dawn of the computer age and the golden age of a certain kind of future-longing we now look back at with nostalgia. Consider something like this 1956 ad in Scientific American for General Motors New Direction Ball Bearings: A week’s shopping in minutes! And you haven’t moved from your car. It’s that simple at the Drive-In Market of tomorrow.

Death, like so many other things, is the future. And the future is just chaos waiting to be shaped into the information. In the big-data age, the future, far more than the past and the present, is open to quantification, manipulation, alteration and disruption. This—not technological progress or the rise of the computing age—is the great story of the postmodern era. Am I exaggerating our faith in the power of abstraction—that ruptured awareness that abruptly separated us from the rest of the living creatures on Earth—to allow us to know and then control all things? Well we’ve already established that under the auspices of future our largest most powerful corporations are investing billions in schemes to convert the world to data.

In particular, Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron and Babbage’s mathematically gifted muse, enthused that Babbage’s analytical engine would not just calculate numbers, it would perform operations on “any process which alters the mutual relation of two or more things.” She went on: “This is the most general definition, and would include all subjects in the universe.”18 Lovelace, dubbed everything from “the prophet of the computer age” to “the enchantress of numbers,” had that rare combination of mathematical genius and inherited gift for language; as a result she had a vision for what a language of pure information could make possible—just about anything. She writes with beauty and scope about the information landscape to come: “A new, a vast, and a powerful language is developed . . . in which to wield its truths so that these may become of more speedy and accurate practical application for the purposes of mankind than the means hitherto in our possession have rendered possible.”19 Around the same time, Pierre-Simon Laplace, the great French astronomer and mathematician, an advocate for Newtonian principles, wrote of a new kind of “intelligence” that “would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.”20 Uncertainty banished.


pages: 414 words: 109,622

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

“It changed the way many others looked at it, too.” Some researchers, most notably Demis Hassabis, the young neuroscientist behind DeepMind, even believed they were on their way to building a machine that could do anything the human brain could do, only better, a possibility that has captured the imagination since the earliest days of the computer age. No one was quite sure when this machine would arrive. But even in the near term, with the rise of machines that were still a very long way from true intelligence, the social implications were far greater than anyone realized. Powerful technologies have always fascinated and frightened humanity, and humanity has gambled on them time and again.

A team from the University of Washington, including one researcher who soon moved to Facebook, used a neural network to build a video that put new words in the mouth of Barack Obama. At a start-up in China, engineers used similar techniques to turn Donald Trump into a Chinese speaker. It was not that fake images were a new thing. People had been using technology to doctor photographs since the dawn of photographs, and in the computer age, tools like Photoshop gave nearly anyone the power to edit both photos and videos. But because the new deep learning methods could learn the task on their own—or at least part of the task—they threatened to make the editing that much easier. Rather than paying farms of people to create and distribute fake images and fake video, political campaigns, nation-states, activists, and insurrectionists could potentially build systems that did the job automatically.

“When I was an undergrad at King’s College Cambridge, Les Valiant, who won the Turing Award in 2010, lived in the adjacent room on X staircase,” the tweet read. “He just told me that Turing lived on X staircase when he was a fellow at King’s and probably wrote his 1936 paper there.” This was the paper that helped launch the computer age. The awards ceremony was held two months later in the Grand Ballroom of the Palace Hotel in downtown San Francisco. Jeff Dean attended in black tie. So did Mike Schroepfer. A waitstaff in white jackets served dinner to more than five hundred guests sitting at round tables with white tablecloths, and as they ate, various other awards were presented to more than a dozen engineers, programmers, and researchers from across industry and academia.


pages: 397 words: 110,222

Habeas Data: Privacy vs. The Rise of Surveillance Tech by Cyrus Farivar

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, call centre, citizen journalism, cloud computing, computer age, connected car, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Golden Gate Park, information security, John Markoff, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lock screen, Lyft, national security letter, Occupy movement, operational security, optical character recognition, Port of Oakland, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech worker, The Hackers Conference, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, you are the product, Zimmermann PGP

This notion ended up becoming: Office of the Press Secretary, “Statement by the Press Secretary,” April 16, 1993. Available at: http://cd.textfiles.com/​hackersencyc/​PC/​CRYPTO/​CLIPPER.TXT. Clipper chip would not: John Markoff, “Big Brother and the Computer Age,” The New York Times, May 6, 1993. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/​1993/​05/​06/​business/​big-brother-and-the-computer-age.html. Many of them—notably FBI: Levy, p. 245. In 1995, Kallstrom: James C. McKinley, Jr., “Wiretap Expert Named to Head New York City Office of F.B.I.,” The New York Times, February 17, 1995. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/​1995/​02/​17/​nyregion/​wiretap-expert-named-to-head-new-york-city-office-of-fbi.html.

m=.1 But at the same time: Anthony Ramirez, “FBI’s Proposal on Wiretaps Criticized by Federal Agency,” The New York Times, January 15, 1993. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/​1993/​01/​15/​us/​fbi-s-proposal-on-wiretaps-criticized-by-federal-agency.html And in the end, the FBI’s efforts: John Markoff, “Big Brother and the Computer Age,” The New York Times, May 6, 1993. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/​1993/​05/​06/​business/​big-brother-and-the-computer-age.html. The law primarily targeted: Nate Anderson, The Internet Police (W. W. Norton & Company, 2014). p. 107. Crucially, the law does: 47 U.S. Code § 1002. Available at: https://www.law.cornell.edu/​uscode/​text/​47/​1002. In late June 1996: Philip Zimmermann, “Testimony of Philip R.

But it is almost impossible to think of late 18th-century situations that are analogous to what took place in this case. (Is it possible to imagine a case in which a constable secreted himself somewhere in a coach and remained there for a period of time in order to monitor the movements of the coach’s owner?). In any case, the Alito wing pointed out that in the pre-computer age, there was an inherent mechanism that made such broad surveillance untenable: economics. “Traditional surveillance for any extended period of time was difficult and costly and therefore rarely undertaken,” Alito continued. The surveillance at issue in this case—constant monitoring of the location of a vehicle for four weeks—would have required a large team of agents, multiple vehicles, and perhaps aerial assistance.


pages: 413 words: 119,587

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

He also presented more than a glimmer of the theoretical possibility and practical impact of machine learning: “The limitations of such a machine are simply those of an understanding of the objects to be attained, and of the potentialities of each stage of the processes by which they are to be attained, and of our power to make logically determinate combinations of those processes to achieve our ends. Roughly speaking, if we can do anything in a clear and intelligible way, we can do it by machine.”12 At the dawn of the computer age, Wiener could see and clearly articulate that automation had the potential of reducing the value of a “routine” factory employee to where “he is not worth hiring at any price,” and that as a result “we are in for an industrial revolution of unmitigated cruelty.” Not only did he have early dark forebodings of the computer revolution, but he foresaw something else that was even more chilling: “If we move in the direction of making machines which learn and whose behavior is modified by experience, we must face the fact that every degree of independence we give the machine is a degree of possible defiance of our wishes.

His machine would be composed of “hands,” “sensory organs,” “memory,” and a “brain.”1 Shockley’s inspiration for a humanlike factory robot was that assembly work often consists of a myriad of constantly changing unique motions performed by a skilled human worker, and that such a robot was the breakthrough needed to completely replace human labor. His insight was striking because it came at the very dawn of the computer age, before the impact of the technology had been grasped by most of the pioneering engineers. At the time it was only a half decade since ENIAC, the first general purpose digital computer, had been heralded in the popular press as a “giant brain,” and just two years after Norbert Wiener had written his landmark Cybernetics, announcing the opening of the Information Age.

Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (1988) contains an early detailed argument that the robots that he has loved since childhood are in the process of evolving into an independent intelligent species. A decade later he refined the argument in Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (1998). Significantly, although it is not widely known, Doug Engelbart had made the same observation, that computers would increase in power exponentially, at the dawn of the interactive computing age in 1960.33 He used this insight to launch the SRI-based augmentation research project that would help lead ultimately to both personal computing and the Internet. In contrast, Moravec built on his lifelong romance with robots. Though he has tempered his optimism, his overall faith never wavered.


pages: 436 words: 127,642

When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by Jim Holt

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, computer age, CRISPR, dark matter, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, George Santayana, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, luminiferous ether, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Monty Hall problem, Murray Gell-Mann, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paradox of Choice, Paul Erdős, Peter Singer: altruism, Plato's cave, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantum entanglement, random walk, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, Skype, stakhanovite, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, wage slave

And in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation—it had to mean something. And then I meant something too. Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something too. To God, there is no zero. I still exist. And so, one feels, does the infinitesimal. PART VI Heroism, Tragedy, and the Computer Age 14 The Ada Perplex: Was Byron’s Daughter the First Coder? The programming language that the U.S. Department of Defense uses to control its military systems is named Ada, after Ada Byron, the daughter of Lord Byron. This act of nomenclature was not meant to be entirely fanciful. Augusta Ada Byron, who became by marriage the Countess of Lovelace, is widely supposed to have produced the first specimen of what would later be called computer programming.

Augusta Ada Byron, who became by marriage the Countess of Lovelace, is widely supposed to have produced the first specimen of what would later be called computer programming. In her lifetime, she was deemed a mathematical prodigy, the Enchantress of Numbers. After her death in 1852—at the age of thirty-six, just like her father—popular biographers hymned her intellect and Byronic pedigree. With the coming of the computer age, Ada’s posthumous renown expanded to new proportions. She has been hailed as a technological visionary; credited with the invention of binary arithmetic; made into the cult goddess of cyber feminism. It is an index of her prestige as a scientific virtuosa that Tom Stoppard, in his play Arcadia, presents a character based upon Ada groping her way toward the law of entropy and the theory of chaos, not to mention a proof of Fermat’s last theorem.

But the halting problem, it turned out, was merely the decision problem in disguise. Turing was able to prove that no computing machine of the kind he envisaged could solve the decision problem. Reasoning could not be reduced to computation after all. But the death of Leibniz’s dream turned out to be the birth of the computer age. The boldest idea to emerge from Turing’s analysis was that of a universal Turing machine: one that, when furnished with the number describing the mechanism of any particular Turing machine, would perfectly mimic its behavior. In effect, the “hardware” of a special-purpose computer could be translated into “software” and then entered like data into the universal machine, where it would be run as a program.


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

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

Before the computer revolution, the Bureau of Labor Statistics described the role of the secretary as follows: “Secretaries relieve their employers of routine duties so they can work on more important matters. Although most secretaries type, take shorthand, and deal with callers, the time spent on these duties varies in different types of organizations.”15 The impact of the computer age becomes evident when we look at the description of the same job from the same source in the 2000s: “As technology continues to expand in offices across the Nation, the role of the secretary has greatly evolved. Office automation and organizational restructuring have led secretaries to assume a wide range of new responsibilities once reserved for managerial and professional staff.

But consistent with what we know from studies in neuroscience pointing out that women perform better in interactive and social settings, women have adjusted much better than men to an increasingly interactive world of work.33 Instead of being pushed back into low-wage service jobs, where women had traditionally been dominant, many have moved up into professional and managerial jobs. Women also are more likely to graduate from college than men, and consequently their skills are more suitable for the computer age. Indeed, while men have found themselves increasingly likely to be replaced by computer-controlled machines, women are more likely to use a computer at work.34 The rising share of women in the professions and the decline of male-dominated blue-collar sectors have allowed many women to overtake their male counterparts in terms of career advancement.

When a prototype has been developed and operations have become more standardized, it makes economic sense to relocate to places where real estate is cheaper and the costs of production lower. New jobs, in other words, will eventually spread to other locations. As long as nursery cities do not churn out new jobs faster than they diffuse geographically, convergence in employment will follow. But new jobs spread only as they become standardized, and since the beginning of the computer age, jobs that have become standardized have not diffused across the country: they have either been automated away or sent abroad. The flourishing cities of America have become nursery cities for innovation. But the rest is done abroad or by machines. The places where work has been replaced, rather than complemented, by machines, are the ones that are in decline.


From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry by Martin Campbell-Kelly

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business process, card file, Charles Babbage, computer age, computer vision, continuous integration, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, Donald Knuth, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, inventory management, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Larry Ellison, linear programming, longitudinal study, machine readable, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, Network effects, popular electronics, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, SimCity, software patent, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, vertical integration

Gallagher, Management Information Systems and the Computer (American Management Association, 1961), esp. pp. 150–176. 42. McKenney, Waves of Change, p. 105. 43. Bashe et al., IBM’s Early Computers, 518. 44. McKenney, Waves of Change, p. 111. 45. Gilbert Burck, The Computer Age (Harper & Row, 1965), p. 31. 46. Bashe et al., IBM’s Early Computers, p. 521. 47. This appellation appears in Burck, The Computer Age, p. 34. 48. R. W. Parker, “The SABRE System,” Datamation, September 1965: 49–52. 49. “A Survey of Airline Reservation Systems,” Datamation, June 1962: 53–55. 50. The original SABRE software was very long-lived. The same a code base was still being used more than two decades later, in 1987, when the system had expanded to process over 1,000 messages per second on a system that used eight 3090 mainframes, to support 12,000 agent terminals.

See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, 1962); Thomas Parke Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); Nathan Rosenberg, Inside the Black Box: Technology and Economics (Cambridge University Press, 1982). 26. Douglas K. Smith and R. C. Alexander, Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer (Morrow, 1988); Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (HarperBusiness, 1999). 27. Steven Levy, Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything (Penguin, 1994). 28. See, e.g., “A Fierce Battle Brews Over the Simplest Software Yet,” Business Week, November 21, 1983: 61–63. 29. Phil Lemmons, “A Guided Tour of VisiOn,” Byte, June 1983: 256ff. 30.

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering. Addison-Wesley, 1975. Brooks, John. The Go-Go Years: The Drama and Crashing Finale of Wall Street’s Bullish 60s. Wiley, 1973, 1999. Burck, Gilbert. The Assault on Fortress I.B.M.. Fortune, June 1964: 112–116, 196, 198, 200, 202, 207. Burck, Gilbert, The Computer Age. Harper & Row, 1965. Burck, Gilbert. The Computer Industry’s Great Expectations. Fortune, August 1968: 92–97, 142, 145–146. Burton Grad Associates Inc. Evolution of the US Packaged Software Industry. Tarrytown, N.Y.: Burton Grad Associates Inc., 1992. Bibliography 351 Business Communications Corp.


AC/DC: The Savage Tale of the First Standards War by Tom McNichol

computer age, electricity market, experimental subject, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Menlo Park, popular electronics, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thales of Miletus

As a result, the AC/DC war serves as a cautionary tale for the Information Age, which produces ever more arcane disputes over technical standards. In a standards war, the appeal is always to fear, whether it’s the fear of being killed, as it was in the AC/DC battle, or the palpable dread of the computer age, the fear of being left behind. c01.qxp 7/15/06 8:37 PM Page 5 1 FIRST SPARKS The story of electricity begins with a bang, the biggest of them all. The unimaginably enormous event that created the universe nearly 14 billion years ago gave birth to matter, energy, and time itself. The Big Bang was not an explosion in space but of space itself, a cataclysm occurring everywhere at once.

The future of computing lies in making digital devices truly portable, so that users can communicate on any device, anytime, from anywhere in the world. To build the “always connected” world, devices will have to be untethered from wires, including the wall outlet, and powered by long-lasting rechargeable batteries or fuel cells. In short, a move from AC to DC. The Industrial Age was powered almost exclusively by AC, but the Computer Age may well turn out to be DC’s revenge. c12.qxp 7/15/06 178 8:47 PM Page 178 AC/DC If Edison were alive today, he’d no doubt be in the thick of the effort to come up with a powerful and portable “box of electricity” to power electronic devices and even automobiles for days or weeks on a single charge.

., 90–91, 92–95, 97–106; long-distance transmission of, in Germany, 130–131; patents for, purchased by Edison’s company, 120; recommended use of, to execute criminals, 110–112; reliance of modern life on, 3, 173–174; as standard by 1930s, 173; Tesla’s Columbian Exposition demonstration of, 138–139 Alternating current (AC) system: first power plant using, 82; Gaulard-Gibbs, 66, 81; increasing number of power plants using, 91, 108, 114, 130–131; installed at hydroelectric power plants, 129–130, 140, 141–142; national-scale conceptualization of, 121; proposal to limit voltage in, 89–90, 117, 119–120; technical papers as defense for, 108; Westinghouse’s development of, 81–83; winning in marketplace, 108, 114, 131 Amber, 7, 9 Animal experiments: on calves, 108–109, 115; on dogs, 90–91, 92–95, 97–106, 115; on horses, ii, 109–110, 115 Ansonia Brass & Copper Company, 63 Arc lamps, 41–42, 88 Automobile, electric, 155–158, 159–161 B Bantu tribesmen, view of lightning, 8 Batchelor, Charles, 75 Batteries: in Computer Age, 177–178; Edison’s “A,” 159–161; Edison’s continued work on, 168; Edison’s “E,” 155–158; efforts to increase longevity of, 178; first rechargeable, 156; invention of, 22 Baum, Frank L., 136 Bible, on lightning, 8 Black Elk, 8–9 Blount, J. F., 144 Boxing Cats (film), 152 Brown, Harold: background of, 87–88; demonstrated AC’s power to kill animals, ii, 108–110, 115; demonstrated electrical resistance, 96–97; described DC-powered utopia, 117; linked AC to execution, 117, 118; procured AC generators for death chair, 115–116; relationship with Edison, 87, 88, 91–92, 102, 103, 112, 119, 123, 171; showed danger of DC vs.


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

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

—Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger speaker; consultant; author of Highest Duty and Making a Difference; pilot of US Airways 1549, the “Miracle on the Hudson” “With vivid stories and sharp analysis, Wachter exposes the good, the bad, and the ugly of electronic health records and all things electronic in the complex settings of hospitals, physician offices, and pharmacies. Everyone will learn from Wachter’s intelligent assessment and become a believer that, despite today’s glitches and frustrations, the future computer age will make medicine much better for us all.” —Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, PhD Vice Provost for Global Initiatives and Chair, Departments of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, University of Pennsylvania “In Bob Wachter, I recognize a fellow mindful optimist: someone who understands the immense power of digital technologies, yet also realizes just how hard it is to incorporate them into complicated, high-stakes environments full of people who don’t like being told what to do by a computer.

On our Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, just finding the right test result for the right patient was a small, sweet triumph. We didn’t dare hope for more. For those of us whose formative years were spent rummaging through shoeboxes, how could we help but greet healthcare’s reluctant, subsidized entry into the computer age with unalloyed enthusiasm? Yet once we clinicians started using computers to actually deliver care, it dawned on us that something was deeply wrong. Why were doctors no longer making eye contact with their patients? How could one of America’s leading hospitals (my own) give a teenager a 39-fold overdose of a common antibiotic, despite (scratch that— because of) a state-of-the-art computerized prescribing system?

The history of technology tells us that it is these financial, environmental, and organizational factors, rather than the digital wizardry itself, that determine the success and impact of new IT tools. This phenomenon is known as the “productivity paradox” of information technology. 38 The name comes from the fact that Gross and Tecco decided to launch the organization while sitting in Harvard Business School’s Rock Hall. Chapter 26 The Productivity Paradox You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics. —Nobel Prize–winning MIT economist Robert Solow, writing in 1987 Between the time David Blumenthal stepped down as national coordinator for health IT and became CEO of the Commonwealth Fund, he returned to Boston from 2011 to 2013 to manage the transition of Partners HealthCare from a homegrown electronic health record to the one made by Epic.


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The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, c2.com, call centre, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, commons-based peer production, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, desegregation, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, linear model of innovation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, PageRank, Paul Terrell, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yochai Benkler

In the case of computers, there were many such incremental advances made by faceless engineers at places like IBM. But that was not enough. Although the machines that IBM produced in the early twentieth century could compile data, they were not what we would call computers. They weren’t even particularly adroit calculators. They were lame. In addition to those hundreds of minor advances, the birth of the computer age required some larger imaginative leaps from creative visionaries. DIGITAL BEATS ANALOG The machines devised by Hollerith and Babbage were digital, meaning they calculated using digits: discrete and distinct integers such as 0, 1, 2, 3. In their machines, the integers were added and subtracted using cogs and wheels that clicked one digit at a time, like counters.

Bush’s machine, however, was not destined to be a major advance in computing history because it was an analog device. In fact, it turned out to be the last gasp for analog computing, at least for many decades. New approaches, technologies, and theories began to emerge in 1937, exactly a hundred years after Babbage first published his paper on the Analytical Engine. It would become an annus mirabilis of the computer age, and the result would be the triumph of four properties, somewhat interrelated, that would define modern computing: DIGITAL. A fundamental trait of the computer revolution was that it was based on digital, not analog, computers. This occurred for many reasons, as we shall soon see, including simultaneous advances in logic theory, circuits, and electronic on-off switches that made a digital rather than an analog approach more fruitful.

The almost-working machine was put into storage in the basement of the physics building at Iowa State, and a few years later no one seemed to remember what it did. When the space was needed for other uses in 1948, a graduate student dismantled it, not realizing what it was, and discarded most of the parts.37 Many early histories of the computer age do not even mention Atanasoff. Even if it had worked properly, his machine had limitations. The vacuum-tube circuit made lightning-fast calculations, but the mechanically rotated memory units slowed down the process enormously. So did the system for burning holes in the punch cards, even when it worked.


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Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen

Amazon Mechanical Turk, behavioural economics, Black Swan, brain emulation, Brownian motion, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deliberate practice, driverless car, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Flynn Effect, Freestyle chess, full employment, future of work, game design, Higgs boson, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, Loebner Prize, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, P = NP, P vs NP, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, reshoring, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra

Magnus Carlsen is, as I write, the highest rated player in the world and arguably the most impressive chess prodigy of all time, having attained grandmaster status at thirteen and world number one status at age nineteen, the latter a record. He is from Tønsberg, in southern Norway, and prior to the computer age Norway has no record of producing top chess players at all. Even Oslo (Carlsen now lives on its outskirts) is a relatively small metropolitan area of fewer than 1.5 million people. Carlsen, of course, had the chance to play chess over the internet. Many more young chess players come from the far reaches of the globe, including distant parts of China and India.

One day soon we will look back and see that we produced two nations, a fantastically successful nation, working in the technologically dynamic sectors, and everyone else. Average is over. Notes For the opening quotation, see D.T. Max, “The Prince’s Gambit: A Chess Star Emerges for the Post-Computer Age,” The New Yorker, March 21, 2011. Chapter 1: Work and Wages in iWorld For the figures on wages of college graduates, see Heidi Shierholz, Natalie Sabadish, and Hilary Wething, “The Class of 2012: Labor Market for Young Graduates Remains Grim,” Economic Policy Institute, May 3, 2012, http://www.epi.org /publication/bp340-labor-market-young-graduates/.

Glickman, “Sex Differences in Intellectual Performance: Analysis of a Large Cohort of Competitive Chess Players,” Psychological Science, December 2006, 17(12): 1040–46. For the quotations on looking at all chess through the eyes of the computer, see D.T. Max, “The Prince’s Gambit: A Chess Star Emerges for the Post-Computer Age,” The New Yorker, March 21, 2011. Chapter 7: The New Office: Regular, Stupid, and Frustrating For various reports on the failures of GPS, see Tom Vanderbilt, “It Wasn’t Me, Officer! It Was My GPS: What Happens When We Blame Our Navigation Devices for Our Car Crashes,” Slate, June 9, 2010.


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Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age by Leslie Berlin

AltaVista, Apple II, Arthur D. Levinson, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, book value, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, Computer Lib, discovery of DNA, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Oklahoma City bombing, packet switching, Project Xanadu, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, union organizing, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, work culture

George Pake, “Research and Development Management and the Establishment of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center,” Remarks for the IEEE Convocation “The Second Century Begins,” January 1985, XPA. 13. Pake’s role in increased salaries: Michael Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (New York: Harper-Collins, 2000): 61; Taylor’s role: performance reviews, RWT. 14. Taylor’s title: Performance Appraisal Notice, March 1, 1971, RWT. 15. In May 1971, Taylor talked about “Xerox’s ‘Information Company’ intent,” and he described the emphases for both CSL and SSL as “prototype systems experiments, especially with regard to library systems, office systems, medical systems, and educational systems.”

They appear to be notes for a talk he planned to give upon returning to PARC after Boca Raton. 18. Taylor, interview by author, July 18, 2014. 19. Performance reviews, RWT. “Because Bob is good” (in footnote): Sproull to Sutherland (acting director of PARC), May 4, 1977, RWT. 20. Michael Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (New York: HarperCollins, 2000): 379. Beyond the startling comparison (and Hiltzik points it out as such), Pake rarely spoke a word against Taylor. However, when Pake made a list of “pioneering managers” at PARC, he never elevated Taylor above “associate manager,” and he listed that qualified title before Taylor’s name, while every other manager was named before his title was given.

The demos, which have taken on mythical status in the history of Silicon Valley, have been detailed and rehashed so many times that only the broadest outlines are necessary here. The best, most detailed account of the PARC/Apple demo is in Michael Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (New York: HarperCollins, 2000). 10. Roughly fifty Xerox stores carried Apple computers, along with the Xerox 820 and machines from Hewlett-Packard and Osborne, until July 1982, when the agreement between the parent companies expired. Scott Mace and Paul Freiberger, “Xerox Stores Take Aim at Retail Computer Market,” Info World, March 29, 1982; Jeff Brown, “Apples Picked off Shelves of Xerox Corp’s Retail Stores,” Info World, July 26, 1982; Bertil Nordin to Arthur Rock, 12 July 1982, AR. 11.


pages: 159 words: 45,073

GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, Diane Coyle, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial intermediation, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Les Trente Glorieuses, Long Term Capital Management, Mahbub ul Haq, mutually assured destruction, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, new economy, Occupy movement, Phillips curve, purchasing power parity, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, University of East Anglia, working-age population

This epoch of the information and communications revolution has spanned forty years. THE NEW ECONOMY BOOM It was obvious by the mid-1980s that a lot of businesses were buying and using computers, but what effect this was having on the economy was not at all apparent. Robert Solow wrote a frequently quoted New York Times Book Review article in 1987 claiming, “You can see the computer age everywhere but the productivity statistics.”4 In fact, it took the convergence of a number of separate streams of technological innovation, plus the investment in new computer and communications equipment, plus the reorganization of businesses to use these new tools, before any benefit in terms of productivity or GDP could occur.

The Sino-U.S. bilateral trade imbalance has been greatly inflated,” according to one study of the statistics.7 Value-added trade statistics are now becoming available, and their study is likely to change the big picture we hold in our minds about the shape of the world economy. PRODUCTIVITY If economists were to play a game of word association, the one that would leap to mind on hearing productivity would be puzzle. I already quoted Robert Solow’s famous 1987 version of the productivity puzzle: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity figures.” As discussed in chapter 5, the New Economy era from the mid-1990s to 2001 did see productivity growth increase in the official figures, although that has slowed down again in the postcrisis economy. But a different “puzzle” may have emerged in the United Kingdom: despite more or less zero GDP growth since 2008, employment has increased.


The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apple II, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Ritchie, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, functional programming, Gary Kildall, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Multics, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, The Soul of a New Machine, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture, Wiener process, zero-sum game

Not only was it huge, being eight feet tall, fifty-one feet long, and two feet thick, but it had a sleek, shiny, sci-fi look; at the insistence of Watson, who was a past master at public relations, the machine had been encased in a futuristic stainless-steel- and-glass skin. The reporters instantly dubbed it "the electronic brain," a phrase that Aiken despised. But for better or worse, the name stuck, and the American public had its first introduction to the computer age. The Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator acquired its "Mark I" desig- nation a year later, when Aiken and his team began work on an upgraded Mark II for the navy. (There would eventually be a Mark III and a Mark IV as well.) None of these machines would have much impact on the development of com- puter hardware per se; Aiken's insistence on features such as base-l0 arithmetic was just too idiosyncratic.

The whole unedifying saga would drag on for another year, ending only in April 1947, when exasperated army attorneys at last threw out everybody's patent claims on the ground that von Neumann's "First Draft" paper represented prior public disclosure. They decreed that the stored-program idea rightfully belonged in the public domain. And there it has remained. 64 THE DREAM MACHINE That was probably just as well. However fierce the controversy surrounding its birth, the stored-program concept now ranks as one of the great ideas of the computer age-arguably the great idea. By rendering software completely abstract and decoupling it from the physical hardware, the stored-program concept has had the paradoxical effect of making software into something that is almost physically tangible. Software has become a medium that can be molded, sculpted, and engineered on its own terms.

Indeed, he went on, looking back from the imag- ined viewpoint of the year 2000, "[the electronic commons] has supplanted the postal system for letters, the dial-tone phone system for conversations and tele- conferences, stand-alone batch-processing and time-sharing systems for compu- :- The occasion was a series of essays on the future of computing, collected by Mike Dertouzos and his deputy Joel Moses and published as The Computer Age: A Twenty-Year View. Lick's forty-page chapter, entitled "Computers and Government," was one of the longest in the book. In addition to his fantasy about the Multinet/Internet, it included a very thorough overview of the policy issues raised by information technology-an analysis that stands up pretty well today.


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Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans

4chan, Ada Lovelace, air gap, Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, crowdsourcing, D. B. Cooper, dark matter, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Edward Charles Pickering, game design, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Network effects, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, PalmPilot, pets.com, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, semantic web, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Soul of a New Machine, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K

“That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal,” she boasted as she sorted out all the ways the machine could deduce Bernoulli numbers. “Before ten years are over, the Devil’s in it if I have not sucked out some of the life-blood from the mysteries of this universe, in a way that no purely mortal lips or brains could do.” The Analytical Engine would never be completed, but it represents the conceptual dawn of the computer age. The four components of its design—input, storage, processing, and output—remain core components of all computers today, and the strikingly original notes that Ada prepared to explain this new kind of machine would presage the literature of computer science by nearly a century. To demonstrate how the engine could calculate Bernoulli Numbers without any assistance from a “human hand or head,” she wrote mathematical proofs that many scholars characterize as the first computer programs ever written, and all for a machine that never even existed.

Floating in and out of reality with doses of laudanum, wine, and chloroform, she echoed the family chord of recklessness and tragedy. “I do dread that horrible struggle, which I fear is in the Byron blood,” she wrote to her mother. “I don’t think we die easy.” Like her father’s, Ada’s work outlived her, although it would be nearly a century before it was properly recognized. It took until the beginning of the computer age, when the magnitude of their prescience became undeniable, for her Notes to be republished, in a British computing symposium; its editor marveled, in 1953, that “her ideas are so modern that they have become of great topical interest once again.” Ada was lucky to have been born wealthy, noble, and relatively idle.

“It is a known fact,” Babbage proclaimed: Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 116–17. writing of a “store” to hold the numbers: Ibid., 117. “very costly toy”: Gleick, The Information, 101–5. “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”: Betty Alexander Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: Prophet of the Computer Age (Mill Valley, CA: Strawberry Press, 1992), 6. “Oh, my poor dear child!”: Ibid., 21. “I do not believe that my father was”: Ibid., 156–57. “aptitude for grasping the strong points”: B. V. Bowden, “A Brief History of Computation,” in Faster Than Thought: A Symposium on Digital Computing Machines, ed.


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Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson (History of Computing) by Douglas R. Dechow

3D printing, Apple II, Bill Duvall, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, game design, HyperCard, hypertext link, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, knowledge worker, linked data, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, semantic web, Silicon Valley, software studies, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Home Computer Revolution, the medium is the message, Vannevar Bush, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

In addition, members of the Chapman University Department of English assisted in producing the Festschrift; graduate students Danny De Maio and Tatiana Servin transcribed several of the talks, and Dr. Anna Leahy provided editing for those talks. Douglas R. Dechow Daniele C. Struppa Orange, CA February 7, 2015 Contents Part I Artistic Contributions 1 The Computer Age Ed Subitzky 2 Odes to Ted Nelson Ben Shneiderman Part II Peer Histories 3 The Two-Eyed Man Alan Kay 4 Ted Nelson’s Xanadu Ken Knowlton 5 Hanging Out with Ted Nelson Brewster Kahle 6 Riffing on Ted Nelson—Hypermind Peter Schmideg and Laurie Spiegel 7 Intertwingled Inspiration Andrew Pam 8 An Advanced Book for Beginners Dick Heiser Part III Hypertext and Ted Nelson-Influenced Research 9 The Importance of Ted’s Vision Belinda Barnet 10 Data, Metadata, and Ted Christine L.

SubitzkyChapman University, Orange, CA, USA Ed Subitzky Noah Wardrip-FruinDepartment of Computational Media, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USA Part I Artistic Contributions © The Author(s) 2015 Douglas R. Dechow and Daniele C. Struppa (eds.)IntertwingledHistory of Computing10.1007/978-3-319-16925-5_1 1. The Computer Age Ed Subitzky1 (1)New York, USA Deceased Cartoonist and humor writer Open Access This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License, which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited


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Dealers of Lightning by Michael A. Hiltzik

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Boeing 747, business cycle, Charles Babbage, computer age, creative destruction, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, index card, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, L Peter Deutsch, luminiferous ether, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, oil shock, popular electronics, reality distortion field, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

DEALERS OF LIGHTNING Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age Michael Hiltzik To Deborah, Andrew, and David Contents Cast of Characters v Timeline ix Introduction The Time Machine xv Part I: Prodigies 1 Chapter 1 The Impresario 3 Chapter 2 McColough’s Folly 21 Chapter 3 The House on Porter Drive 33 Chapter 4 Utopia 52 Chapter 5 Berkeley’s Second System 68 Chapter 6 “Not Your Normal Person” 80 Chapter 7 The Clone 97 Chapter 8 The Future Invented 117 Part II: Inventors 125 Chapter 9 The Refugee 127 Chapter 10 Beating the Dealer 145 Chapter 11 Spacewar 155 Chapter 12 Thacker’s Bet 163 Chapter 13 The Bobbsey Twins Build a Network 178 Chapter 14 What You See Is What You Get 194 Chapter 15 On the Lunatic Fringe 211 Chapter 16 The Pariahs 229 Chapter 17 The Big Machine 242 Part III: Messengers 257 Chapter 18 Futures Day 259 Chapter 19 Future Plus One 274 Chapter 20 The Worm That Ate the Ethernet 289 Chapter 21 The Silicon Revolution 300 Chapter 22 The Crisis of Biggerism 314 Chapter 23 Steve Jobs Gets His Show and Tell 329 Chapter 24 Supernova 346 Chapter 25 Blindsided 361 Chapter 26 Exit the Impresario 371 Epilogue Did Xerox Blow It?

Determined in principle to move into the digital world but yoked in practice to the marketing of the copier machine (and unable to juggle two balls at once), Xerox management regarded PARC’s achievements first with bemusement, then uneasiness, and finally hostility. Because Xerox never fully understood the potential value of PARC’s technology, it stood frozen on the threshold of new markets while its rivals—including big, lumbering IBM—shot past into the computer age. Yet this relationship is too easily, and too often, simplified. Legend becomes myth and myth becomes caricature—which soon enough gains a sort of liturgical certitude. PARC today remains a convenient cudgel with which to beat big business in general and Xerox in particular for their myriad sins, including imaginary ones, of corporate myopia and profligacy.

In 1945 Bush had turned his attention to the scientific advances produced in the name of war and to how they might serve the peace. The result was a small masterpiece of scientific augury entitled “As We May Think,” which appeared in the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. “As We May Think” remains one of the few genuinely seminal documents of the computer age. Even today it stands out as a work of meticulous scientific and social analysis. The contemporary reader is struck by its pragmatism and farsightedness, expressed without a hint of platitude or utopianism, those common afflictions of writing about the future. Bush was not interested in drawing magical pictures in the air; he was busy scrutinizing the new technologies of the postwar world to see how they might relieve society’s pressing burdens.


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

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

Long-term Productivity Growth,” called attention to the mid-century peak in the U.S. growth process. At the same time there was clear evidence that the long post-1972 slump in U.S. productivity growth was over, at least temporarily, as the annual growth rate of labor productivity soared in the late 1990s. I was skeptical, however, that the inventions of the computer age would turn out to be as important for long-run economic growth as electricity, the internal combustion engine, and the other “great inventions” of the late nineteenth century. My skepticism took the form of an article, also published in 2000, titled “Does the ‘New Economy’ Measure Up to the Great Inventions of the Past?”

We can state this puzzle in two symmetric ways: Why was TFP growth so slow before 1920? Why was it so fast during the fifty years after 1920? The leading hypothesis is that of Paul David, who provided a now well-known analogy between the evolution of electric machinery and of the electronic computer.14 In 1987, Robert Solow quipped, “We can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”15 David responded, in effect: “Just wait”—suggesting that the previous example of the electric dynamo and other electric machinery implied that a long gestation period could intervene between a major invention and its payoff in productivity growth.

However, an examination of railroad timetables tells a surprising story about speed, which improved steadily from 1870 to 1940. Improvements came from mergers, interconnections, better switching, roller bearings, and eventually, in the 1930s, the conversion from inefficient steam locomotives to diesel–electric propulsion and air-conditioned passenger cars. In the pre-computer age, planning rail trips relied heavily on The Official Guide of the Railways, which dates back to 1868. The guide provides a unique window on a world that no longer exists, at least within the United States, of an extremely dense railroad network that connected almost every city and town, no matter how small.25 As an example of this density, the local train between Portland and Bangor, Maine, in 1900 made thirty-two stops along its 135-mile route (one stop every 4.2 miles) and required five hours to do so, for an average speed of twenty-seven miles per hour.


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The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market by Frank Levy, Richard J. Murnane

Atul Gawande, business cycle, call centre, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, correlation does not imply causation, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deskilling, digital divide, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Gunnar Myrdal, hypertext link, index card, information asymmetry, job automation, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, profit motive, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, talking drums, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, working poor

HD6331.L48 2004 331.1—dc22 2003065497 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Dante Printed on acid-free paper. f pup.princeton.edu www.russellsage.org Printed in the United States of America 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii CHAPTER 1 New Divisions of Labor 1 PART I Computers and the Economy CHAPTER 2 Why People Still Matter 13 CHAPTER 3 How Computers Change Work and Pay PART II The Skills Employers Value CHAPTER 4 Expert Thinking 57 31 vi CONTENTS CHAPTER 5 Complex Communication 76 PART III How Skills Are Taught CHAPTER 6 Enabling Skills 99 CHAPTER 7 Computers and the Teaching of Skills CHAPTER 8 Standards-Based Education Reform in the Computer Age 131 CHAPTER 9 The Next Ten Years Notes 159 Index 169 149 109 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS MANY PEOPLE HELPED US DURING THE YEARS THAT WE worked on this book. First and foremost, we thank our friend and colleague David Autor, professor of economics at MIT. David has had a long-standing interest in the impacts of computers on work.

For rich discussions of the asymmetric information and self-selection ideas, see Daron Acemoglu and Jorn-Steffan Pischke, “Beyond Becker: Training in Imperfect Labour Markets,” Economic Journal 109, no. 453 (February 1999): F112–42; and David Autor, “Why Do Temporary Help Firms Provide Free General Skills Training?” Quarterly Journal of Economics 116, no. 4 (November 2001): 1409–48. CHAPTER 8. Standards-Based Education Reform in the Computer Age 1. The wage data come from the following Economic Policy Institute website: http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/datazone dznational. 2. Expessed in constant 2000–01 dollars, the relevant numbers are $4,427 for the 1969–70 school year and $7,653 for the 1989–90 school year. These figures are taken from the Digest of Education Statistics 2001, p. 191, table 167. 3.


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The Secret Life of Bletchley Park: The WWII Codebreaking Centre and the Men and Women Who Worked There by Sinclair McKay

Beeching cuts, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, computer age, Desert Island Discs, Etonian, pneumatic tube, Turing machine

The austere wooden huts on the lawns and in the meadows played host to some of the most gifted – and quirky – individuals of their generation. Not only were there long-standing cryptographers of great genius; there were also fresh, brilliant young minds, such as Alan Turing, whose work was destined to shape the coming computer age, and the future of technology. Also at Bletchley Park were thousands of dedicated people, mostly young, many drawn straight from university. Some came straight from sixth form. As the war progressed, numbers grew. Alongside the academics, there were platoons of female translators and hundreds of eager Wrens, there to operate the fearsomely complicated prototype computing machines; there was also a substantial number of well-bred debutantes, sought out upon the social grapevine, and equally determined to do their bit.

The one name that shines out in terms of engineering ingenuity was Tommy Flowers, familiarly known as the ‘clever cockney’. There are some who argue that the name should be known in every household – for, they believe, he was the man who realised the dreams of Alan Turing and truly brought the computer age into being. In 1943, Bletchley Park had seen the establishment of a new section known as ‘The Newmanry’. It was set up under the aegis of mathematician Professor Max Newman from St John’s College, Cambridge, and the idea of it was to find ways of applying more advanced machinery to codebreaking work.

Flowers himself said: ‘It was a feat made possible by the absolute priority they were given to command materials and services and the prodigious efforts of the laboratory staff, many of whom did nothing but work, eat and sleep for weeks and months on end except for one half day a week … the US also contributed valves and an electric typewriter under the lend-lease’.8 And so this monster, this Colossus, was delivered to Bletchley in January 1944; and with it, many argue, came the dawn of the computer age. For this was more than just a huge, elaborate counting machine; it worked to a program, via electronic valve pulses and delicate, complex circuits, at a rate hitherto unimagined, opening up the Lorenz messages at a terrific rate. Tommy Flowers was vindicated; the work he did proved utterly invaluable.


pages: 408 words: 105,715

Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern by Jing Tsu

affirmative action, British Empire, computer age, Deng Xiaoping, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, information retrieval, invention of movable type, machine readable, machine translation, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, QWERTY keyboard, scientific management, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, transcontinental railway

As China entered a new era of internationalization, a new technological integration challenge loomed. It would dwarf the earlier challenges of telegraphy. As much as the Chinese script revolution had accomplished up to this point, it would still need to make several more steps to keep pace with the coming computing age. Now with a second identity in alphabetic form, the Chinese script had never been in a better position to propel China forward. The question is how far and how fast it could make that next leap. six ENTERING INTO THE COMPUTER (1979) converting input and output Even without being able to see the July sun, Zhi Bingyi felt its smoldering heat between his back and a thin, sweat-drenched straw mat.

The data for calculating and controlling flight paths, military targets, and geographical positioning, or tracking agricultural and industrial output, had to be collected first. Yet all the existing records, documents, and reports were in Chinese. It became clear that in order to be part of the computing age at all, the Chinese script would have to be rendered digitally. Western computing technology was also moving in the direction of text processing and communication, not just running large-scale calculations. Converting human language scripts into digital form was the next frontier. The arms race during the Cold War was advancing the state of computing technology in both the Soviet Union and the United States.

During Zhi’s incarceration, China was in the throes of its biggest social and political upheaval yet and hardly had the resources to make such a bid for the future. But for a country so far behind the Western world, science and technology were not just a barrier. They were viewed as essential for helping China leapfrog out of backwardness and speed up the process of modernization. China was doubly invested in exploring the computing age. Of the countless obstacles that lay in the country’s path, the Chinese language was the one that could stall the state’s ambitious plans before they even got off the ground. The challenge was multifaceted: to devise a code for Chinese that is easy for humans to remember and use and that can be entered into a machine via punched tape or keyboard; to find a way for the machine to store the massive amount of information required to identify and reproduce Chinese characters; and to be able to retrieve and restore the script with pinpoint precision, on paper or on a screen.


pages: 843 words: 223,858

The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

When it was turned on, its electricity consumption was so high that Philadelphia’s lighting twinkled.47 Yet the first commercial version of this primitive machine, UNIVAC–1, produced in 1951 by the same team, then under the Remington Rand brand name, was extremely successful in processing the 1950 US census. IBM, also supported by military contracts and relying partly on MIT research, overcame its early reservations about the computer age, and entered the race in 1953 with its 701 vacuum tube machine. In 1958, when Sperry Rand introduced a second-generation computer mainframe machine, IBM immediately followed up with its 7090 model. But it was only in 1964 that IBM, with its 360/370 mainframe computer, came to dominate the computer industry, populated by new (Control Data, Digital), and old (Sperry, Honeywell, Burroughs, NCR) business machines companies.

Furthermore, since the mid-1980s, microcomputers cannot be conceived of in isolation: they perform in networks, with increasing mobility, on the basis of portable computers. This extraordinary versatility, and the capacity to add memory and processing capacity by sharing computing power in an electronic network, decisively shifted the computer age in the 1990s from centralized data storage and processing to networked, interactive computer power-sharing. Not only did the whole technological system change, but its social and organizational interactions as well. Thus, the aver-age cost of processing information fell from around $75 per million operations in 1960 to less than one-hundredth of a cent in 1990.

Ball-Rokeach, Sandra J. and Cantor, Muriel (eds) (1986) Media, Audience and Social Structure, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Banegas, Jesus (ed.) (1993) La industria de la información: situación actual y perspectivas, Madrid: Fundesco. Bar, François (1990) “Configuring the telecommunications infrastructure for the computer age: the economics of network control”, unpublished PhD dissertation, Berkeley, CA: University of California. —— (1992) “Network flexibility: a new challenge for telecom policy”, Communications and Strategies, special issue, June: 111–22. —— and Borrus, M. (1993) The Future of Networking, Berkeley, CA: University of California, BRIE working paper. —— and —— with Coriat, Benjamin (1991) Information Networks and Competitive Advantage: Issues for Government Policy and Corporate Strategy Development, Brussels: Commission of European Communities, DGIII–BRIE–OECD Research Program.


User Friendly by Cliff Kuang, Robert Fabricant

A Pattern Language, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bill Atkinson, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, data science, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fake news, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, Google Glasses, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Dyson, John Markoff, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Norbert Wiener, Paradox of Choice, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skinner box, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tacit knowledge, Tesla Model S, three-martini lunch, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush, women in the workforce

What user-centered design did was to build a sensing process that gave companies a way to mimic that of the inventor. The gospel of innovation, and the imperative to innovate or be washed away by the rising tide of competition, rings hollow unless you have some mechanism for finding new ideas. The beauty of the design process as articulated at the dawn of the computer age was that we could all innovate, if only we knew how to empathize. Industrial empathy arose precisely when a new wave of technology arrived that few people understood, and that almost no one had ever bought for themselves. But when empathy becomes an imperative, then the question becomes: With whom should you empathize?

Jane Fulton Suri, “Saving Lives Through Design,” Ergonomics in Design (Summer 2000): 2–10. 15. Interview with Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld, May 14, 2018. 16. Interview with Bruce Horn, May 9, 2018. 17. Interview with Atkinson; Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 332–45. 18. Interview with Hertzfeld. 19. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning, 340. 20. Alan Kay, “A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages,” Proceedings of the ACM National Conference, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 1972, Viewpoints Research Institute, http://worrydream.com/refs/Kay%20-%20A%20Personal%20Computer%20for%20Children%20of%20All%20Ages.pdf. 21.

New York Times, May 7, 2011. www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/technology/08class.html. Hempel, Jessi. “What Happened to Facebook’s Grand Plan to Wire the World?” Wired, May 17, 2018. www.wired.com/story/what-happened-to-facebooks-grand-plan-to-wire-the-world/. Hiltzik, Michael A. Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. Hounshell, David A. From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Hunt, Morton M. “The Course Where Students Lose Earthly Shackles.” Life, May 16, 1955. Hutchins, Edwin. Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.


pages: 193 words: 19,478

Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext by Belinda Barnet

augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Duvall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, game design, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, Internet Archive, John Markoff, linked data, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Project Xanadu, publish or perish, Robert Metcalfe, semantic web, seminal paper, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, the scientific method, Vannevar Bush, wikimedia commons

Such an observation would be entirely unnecessary for a hypertext system now, but in 1986, by contrast, most ‘computer people’ who were tinkering with networks were doing AI.9 They go on to note with no small sense of irony that ‘we may be among a very small number of current software developers who do not claim to be doing AI’ (Bolter and Joyce 1986, 34). Bolter published a book shortly after his fellowship at Yale that would become a classic in computing studies, Turing’s Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age (1984). In Turing’s Man, he sets out to ‘foster a process of crossfertilization’ between computing science and the humanities and to explore the cultural impact of computing (Bolter 1984, xii).10 He also introduces some ideas around ‘spatial’ writing that would recur and grow in importance in his later work: in particular, the relationship between early Greek systems of place memory loci (the art of memory) and electronic writing.

In Hypertext ’91 Proceedings, edited by John J. Leggett, 243–60. San Antonio: ACM. Bogost, Ian. 2010. ‘Cow Clicker: The Making of an Obsession’. Ian Bogost Blog, 21 July. Online: http://www.bogost.com/blog/cow_clicker_1.shtml (accessed March 2012). Bolter, Jay David. 1984. Turing’s Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. . 1985. ‘The Idea of Literature in the Electronic Medium’. Topic 39: 23–34. . 1991. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext and the History of Writing. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. 2000. Remediation: Understanding New Media.


pages: 271 words: 77,448

Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will by Geoff Colvin

Ada Lovelace, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Black Swan, call centre, capital asset pricing model, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, flying shuttle, Freestyle chess, future of work, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, industrial cluster, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, job automation, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, rising living standards, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

A likely explanation is that the whole notion seems kind of weird—learning how to do something that we innately do. Most people wouldn’t even consider empathy a skill; they’d say it’s a trait, something you just have. We will see that, in this, it’s like many of the skills that turn out to be the high-value skills of the computer age—very deeply human, widely regarded as traits, not skills, and the kinds of things we don’t even think of as trainable. But we can get better at them—extraordinarily better—if we’re willing to think about them in a new way. In fact, we know a great deal about how it’s done. There exists a vast store of knowledge about how to make ordinary people much, much better at some essential abilities of human interaction, including the ones that will prove most valuable in the coming economy, and this knowledge resides in a most unexpected place.

In a world like that . . . Loukas Karabarbounis and Brent Neiman, “The Global Decline of the Labor Share,” National Bureau of Economic Research, October 2013. The authors find that “the decrease in the relative price of investment goods, often attributed to advances in information technology and the computer age, induced firms to shift away from labor and toward capital.” Economists aren’t the only experts . . . Quotations in this paragraph are from Pew Research Center, op. cit. Microsoft founder Bill Gates . . . He made these remarks during a session at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., 13 March 2014.


pages: 238 words: 77,730

Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything by Stephen Baker

23andMe, AI winter, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, behavioural economics, business process, call centre, clean water, commoditize, computer age, Demis Hassabis, Frank Gehry, information retrieval, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, job automation, machine translation, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, statistical model, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, thinkpad, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Naturally, a Jeopardy computer would run on IBM hardware. But the heart of the system, like IBM itself, would be the software created to answer difficult questions. A Jeopardy machine would also respond to another change in technology: the move toward human language. For most of the first half-century of the computer age, machines specialized in orderly rows of numbers and words. If the buyers in a database were listed in one column, the products in another, and the prices in a third, everything was clear: Computers could run the numbers in a flash. But if one of the customers showed up as “Don” in one transaction and “Donny” in another, the computer viewed them as two people: The two names represented different strings of ones and zeros, and therefore Don ≠ Donny.

In its scope, Cyc was as ambitious as the eighteenth-century French encyclopedists, headed by Denis Diderot, who attempted to catalogue all of modern knowledge (which had grown significantly since the days of Aristotle). Cyc, headed by a computer scientist named Douglas Lenat, aspired to fill a similar role for the computer age. It would lay out the relationships of practically everything, from plants to presidents, so that intelligent machines could make inferences. If they knew, for example, that Ukraine produced wheat, that wheat was a plant, and that plants died without water, it could infer that a historic drought in Ukraine would curtail wheat production.


pages: 464 words: 127,283

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

Manned by a small team of attendants from the Royal Sappers and Miners, the British military’s engineering corps, the vents were adjusted every two hours based on readings from fourteen thermostats placed throughout the structure.1 While far from automatic, the Crystal Palace’s ventilation system showed how mechanical controls and sensors could work together to dynamically reconfigure an entire, massive building in response to changes in the environment. Paxton’s contraption was a harbinger of the automation revolution that will transform the buildings and cities we live in over the coming decades. More than a century later, at the dawn of the computer age, a design for a very different kind of gathering space spurred another bold leap into building automation. Howard Gilman was the heir to a paper-making fortune but his true avocation was philanthropist and patron of the arts. Gilman lavished his family fortune on a variety of causes, supporting trailblazers in dance, photography, and wildlife preservation.

Cybernetic thinking inspired new directions in engineering, biology, neuroscience, organizational studies, and sociology. Cybernetics underpinned the plotline for Foundation, but advances in computing provided the props. Just weeks before the 1945 American nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Vannevar Bush published a seminal article in The Atlantic that laid out a road map for the computer age. Bush was a technological authority without equal, an MIT man who during World War II had directed the entire US scientific effort, including the Manhattan Project that developed the nuclear weapons used against Japan. Like Asimov’s psychohistorians, who wielded tablet computers as cognitive prosthetics as they built their socioeconomic simulations, Bush believed that the new thinking machines would liberate the creative work of cyberneticians from the drudgery of computation.

But as data mining and recommendations move to the forefront, Foursquare runs the risk of becoming a quixotic attempt to compute serendipity and spontaneity. The city of Foursquare might look like a lattice, but is it becoming an elaborate tree traced by hidden algorithms? Instead of urging us to explore on our own, will it guide us down a predetermined path based on what we might buy? The DIY City For most people the computer age began with the IBM PC, which went on sale in 1981. True geeks, however, date the opening shots of the personal-computer revolution to the launch of the MITS Altair 8800 in 1975. The Altair dramatically democratized access to computing power. At the time, Intel’s Intellec-8 computer cost $2,400 in its base configuration (and as much as $10,000 with all the add-ons needed to develop software for it).


pages: 437 words: 132,041

Alex's Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos

Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, beat the dealer, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, digital rights, Edward Thorp, family office, forensic accounting, game design, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, lateral thinking, Myron Scholes, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Pierre-Simon Laplace, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, random walk, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, SETI@home, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traveling salesman, two and twenty

He wants simply to show people that there is an alternative to the decimal system, and that perhaps it suits their needs better. He knows that the chances of the world abandoning dix for douze are non-existent. The change would be both confusing and expensive. And decimal works well enough for most people – especially in the computer age, where mental arithmetic skills are less required generally. ‘I would say that dozenal is the optimum base for general computation, for everyday use,’ he added, ‘but I am not here to convert anybody.’ An immediate goal of the DSA is to get the numerals for dek and el into Unicode, the repertoire of text characters used by most computers.

When we arrived at his house, his wife made us a cup of tea and we retired to his study, where he presented me with a wooden 1970s Faber-Castell slide-rule with a magnolia-coloured plastic finish. The rule was the size of a normal 30cm ruler and had a sliding middle section. On it, several different scales were marked in tiny writing. It also had a transparent movable cursor marked with a hairline. The shape and feel of the Faber-Castell were deeply evocative of a kind of post-war, pre-computer-age nerdiness – when geeks had shirts, ties and pocket protectors rather than T-shirts, sneakers and iPods. I went to secondary school in the 1980s, by which time slide-rules were no longer used, so Hopp gave me a quick tutorial. He recommended that as a beginner I should use the log scale from 1 to 100 on the main ruler and adjacent log scale from 1 to 100 on the sliding middle section.

In 1876, two and a half centuries after Mersenne wrote his list, the French number theorist Edouard Lucas devised a method that was able to check whether numbers written 2n – 1 are prime, and he found that Mersenne was wrong about 67 and that he had left out 61, 89 and 107. Amazingly, however, Mersenne had been right about 127. Lucas used his method to prove that 2127 – 1, or 170,141,183,460,469,231, 731,687,303,715,884,105,727, was prime. This was the highest-known prime number until the computer age. Lucas, however, was unable to determine if 2257 – 1 was prime or not; the number was simply too large to work on with pencil and paper. Despite its patches of error, Mersenne’s list immortalized him; and now a prime that can be written in the form 2n – 1 is known as a Mersenne prime. The proof of whether 2257 – 1 is prime would take until 1952 to be proven, using the Lucas method, but with a big assist.


Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents by Lisa Gitelman

Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, Charles Babbage, computer age, corporate governance, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, national security letter, Neal Stephenson, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, optical character recognition, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Turing test, WikiLeaks, Works Progress Administration

Ivan Edward Sutherland, “Sketchpad, A Man-­Machine Graphical Communication System,” PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1963. 28. Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 84. See also Michael Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox parc and the Dawn of the Computer Age (New York: Harper Collins, 1999), 90–91. 29. Ivan Edward Sutherland, “Sketchpad, A Man-­Machine Graphical Communication System,” PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1963, 70–71. 30. Ivan Edward Sutherland, “Sketchpad: A Man-­Machine Graphical Communication System,” afips Proceedings 23 (1963): 335. 31.

Chapel Hill: published in association with the American Antiquarian Society by the University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Hilderbrand, Lucas. Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Hiltzik, Michael. Dealers of Lightning: Xerox parc and the Dawn of the Computer Age. New York: Harper Collins, 1999. Hockey, Susan. “The History of Humanities Computing.” In A Companion to the Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, 3–19. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Hofmeyr, Isabel. Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading.


pages: 261 words: 81,802

The Trouble With Billionaires by Linda McQuaig

"World Economic Forum" Davos, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, carried interest, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John Bogle, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, lateral thinking, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, very high income, wealth creators, women in the workforce

Back in that early postwar period, the enormous economic gains were more widely shared, as a result of the more egalitarian ethos that produced more powerful unions, more progressive taxation and more generous social programmes. Today, the stupendous economic gains made possible by the technological advances of the computer age have been almost entirely captured and retained by a tiny elite, with little of the wealth flowing back to society through the tax system. This seems grossly unfair. It also appears to have led some of the lucky few to develop a false sense of their own contribution. We take issue, for instance, with Lew Frankfort, the CEO of Coach, who argued that today’s billionaires deserve their fortune because they had the ‘vision, lateral thinking, courage and an ability to see things’ that was necessary to succeed in the ‘technological age’.

Each passport has a unique identification number. Every time a person crosses a border, her number is swiped into a computer, which instantly discloses information about her. Transmitting an electronic record of all payments made by all banks would be no more complicated than that. It turns out that, among the benefits of the computer age, are not only video games, but also the easy tracking and taxation of the gigantic fortunes of the world’s billionaires. People wanting to conceal income from authorities would then find it no easier to move money undetected around the world than to travel without a passport. Checkmate. Support the international implementation of a Financial Transaction Tax, sometimes referred to as the ‘Robin Hood Tax’ or the ‘Tobin Tax’ The idea of curbing financial speculation by imposing a tax on financial transactions was first proposed by John Maynard Keynes in 1936 during the Great Depression.


Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors by Matt Parker

8-hour work day, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, British Empire, Brownian motion, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, fake news, Flash crash, forensic accounting, game design, High speed trading, Julian Assange, millennium bug, Minecraft, Neil Armstrong, null island, obamacare, off-by-one error, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, publication bias, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, selection bias, SQL injection, subprime mortgage crisis, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Therac-25, value at risk, WikiLeaks, Y2K

If you can write a short computer program to generate a sequence of numbers, then that sequence cannot be random. If the only way to communicate a sequence is to print it out in its entirety, then you’ve got some randomness on your hands. And printing random numbers out is sometimes the best option. Let’s get physical Before the computer age, lists of random numbers had to be generated in advance and printed as books for people to buy. I say ‘before the computer age’, but when I was at school in the 1990s we still had books with tables of random numbers in them. Handheld calculators, and indeed handheld computers, have come a long way since then. But, for true randomness, the printed page is hard to beat.


pages: 361 words: 83,886

Inside the Robot Kingdom: Japan, Mechatronics and the Coming Robotopia by Frederik L. Schodt

carbon-based life, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, factory automation, game design, guest worker program, industrial robot, Jacques de Vaucanson, Norbert Wiener, post-industrial society, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce

Why, though, if karakuri became only a form of art and entertainment, are they given so much attention in Japan today? Tatsukawa, the professor partly responsible for re-popularizing them, suggests that modern people, being surrounded by cold, impersonal machines, long for technology with a more human face. The cute, simple karakuri help satisfy this craving. He also notes that since our computer age has made us reliant on millions of automatic and mechatronic devices, there is an overpowering interest in simple, easy-to-understand automatic and autonomous mechanisms. Finally, he points out how Japanese "used to think that automata only existed in Europe. Realizing that Japan also had this technological capability in the Edo period has increased interest, because karakuri can be seen as a point where Japan's machine civilization began."9 The Roots of Modern Japanese Technology When Commodore Perry and his fleet steamed into Uraga Bay in 1853, demanding trading rights at the point of a gun, Japan's nearly two hundred and fifty years of isolation was effectively ended.

The solution was easy—to rotate employees among different tasks and help them grasp the workings of the total system—but the problem was by no means limited to Star Micronics.22 * * * * * * * * * * * * While robots should also liberate humans from hazardous work, sometimes they themselves are the hazard. Robots only do as commanded by their programmers or operators, yet they are distinctly different from pre-computer-age industrial machines such as cranes or fork lift trucks that operate under direct human control. The robot's movements are set in advance. If equipped with sensors, a robot may begin moving through a programmed sequence or change its moves according to the information they feed it. But a malfunction due to component failure or electronic interference from other machines may make an industrial robot arm that seems at rest suddenly start moving, at a speed or in a direction never intended.


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!

Knowing this, it could then treat translation as a giant math problem, with the computer figuring out probabilities to determine what word best substitutes for another between languages. Of course Google was not the only organization that dreamed of bringing the richness of the world’s written heritage into the computer age, and it was hardly the first to try. Project Gutenberg, a volunteer initiative to place public domain works online as early as 1971, was all about making the texts available for people to read, but it didn’t consider ancillary uses of treating the words as data. It was about reading, not reusing.

A worldview we thought was made of causes is being challenged by a preponderance of correlations. The possession of knowledge, which once meant an understanding of the past, is coming to mean an ability to predict the future. These issues are much more significant than the ones that presented themselves when we prepared to exploit e-commerce, live with the Internet, enter the computer age, or take up the abacus. The idea that our quest to understand causes may be overrated—that in many cases it may be more advantageous to eschew why in favor of what—suggests that the matters are fundamental to our society and our existence. The challenges posed by big data may not have set answers, either.


pages: 361 words: 81,068

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

The Stanford University political scientist Francis Fukuyama, assuming that the great debate between capitalists and socialists over the best way to organize industrial society had finally been settled, described the moment that the Wall came down as the “End of History.” But the converse is actually true. Nineteen eighty-nine actually represents the birth of a new period of history, the Networked Computer Age. The Internet has created new values, new wealth, new debates, new elites, new scarcities, new markets, and above all, a new kind of economy. Well-intentioned technologists like Vannevar Bush, Norbert Wiener, J. C. R. Licklider, Paul Baran, Robert Kahn, and Tim Berners-Lee had little interest in money, but one of the most significant consequences of their creation has been the radical reshaping of economic life.

But even Solow, whose research was mostly based on productivity improvements from the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, later became more skeptical of labor’s ability to maintain its parity with capital in terms of reaping the rewards of more economic productivity. In a 1987 New York Times Book Review piece titled “We’d Better Watch Out,” he acknowledged that what he called “Programmable Automation” hadn’t increased labor productivity. “You can see the computer age everywhere,” he memorably put it, “but in the productivity statistics.”73 Timothy Noah, the author of The Great Divergence, a well-received book on America’s growing inequality crisis, admits that computer technology does create jobs. But these, he says, are “for highly skilled, affluent workers,” whereas the digital revolution is destroying the jobs of “moderately skilled middle class workers.”74 The influential University of California, Berkeley economist and blogger J.


pages: 308 words: 85,880

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

The whole spectacle—the dilapidated room, the mesmerized audience, the pixelated face flickering on the giant screen—recalls for me one of television’s most iconic commercials, the Super Bowl XVIII slot for the Apple Macintosh computer. In this January 1984 advertisement for the machine that launched the personal computer age, a man on a similarly large screen in a similarly decrepit room addresses a crowd of similarly transfixed people. But in the Macintosh commercial the man is a version of Big Brother, the omniscient tyrant from Orwell’s twentieth-century dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The young man on the Berlin screen, in contrast, is an enemy of authoritarianism.

Reback has a keen sense of history. In his very readable history of antitrust, Free the Market! Why Only Government Can Keep the Marketplace Competitive,19 he explicitly compares what he calls the “excesses” of nineteenth-century “robber baron” industrial capitalism to the networked economics of the computer age. Yet Reback is too sophisticated a student of modern history to fall into the trap of seeing it endlessly repeat itself, like an annoying internet meme. So yes, he acknowledges, Google is, in many ways, the new Microsoft, and the great challenge for antitrust lawyers like himself, as it was in the 1990s with the so-called Beast of Redmond, is to build a case against the Mountain View leviathan.


pages: 696 words: 143,736

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, fudge factor, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, information retrieval, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, ought to be enough for anybody, pattern recognition, phenotype, punch-card reader, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

As transistor die sizes decrease, the electrons streaming through the transistor have less distance to travel, hence the switching speed of the transistor increases. So exponentially improving speed is the first strand. Reduced transistor die sizes also enable chip manufacturers to squeeze a greater number of transistors onto an integrated circuit, so exponentially improving densities of computation is the second strand. In the early years of the computer age, it was primarily the first strand—increasing circuit speeds—that improved the overall computation rate of computers. During the 1990s, however, advanced microprocessors began using a form of parallel processing called pipelining, in which multiple calculations were performed at the same time (some mainframes going back to the 1970s used this technique).

Collins, eds. Representation and Understanding. New York: Academic Press, 1975. Boden, Margaret. Artificial Intelligence and Natural Man. New York: Basic Books, 1977. ____. The Creative Mind: Myths & Mechanisms. New York: Basic Books, 1991. Bolter, J. David. Turing’s Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Boole, George. An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on Which Are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities. 1854. Reprint. Peru, IL: Open Court Publishing, 1952. Botvinnik, M. M. Computers in Chess: Solving Inexact Search Problems.

New York: Copernicus, 1997. Depew, David J. and Bruce H. Weber, eds. Evolution at a Crossroads. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. Dertouzos, Michael. What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. Dertouzos, Michael L. and Joel Moses Dertouzos. The Computer Age: A Twenty Year View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979. Descartes, R. Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology. 1637. Reprint. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956. _____. Meditations on First Philosophy. Paris: Michel Soly, 1641. _____. Treatise on Man. Paris, 1664. Devlin, Keith.


pages: 288 words: 92,175

Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, From Missiles to the Moon to Mars by Nathalia Holt

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, British Empire, computer age, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, desegregation, financial independence, Grace Hopper, Isaac Newton, labor-force participation, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operation paperclip, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, space junk, Steve Jobs, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra

Launch Vehicles (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002). More information about the Fibonacci sequence can be found in Alfred S. Posamentier and Ingmar Lehmann, The (Fabulous) Fibonacci Numbers (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007). The history of the IBM 701 can be found in Paul E. Ceruzzi, Beyond the Limits: Flight Enters the Computer Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), and Emerson W. Pugh, Building IBM: Shaping an Industry and Its Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). Janez Lawson and Elaine Chappell were both sent to the IBM training school, as reported in JPL’s Lab-Oratory newsletter, February 1953. Remembrances of hearing magnetic-tape audio recordings during World War II are from John T.

The IBM 1620’s nickname of CADET was facetiously said to stand for “Can’t Add, Doesn’t Even Try” because it had no digital circuit that performed addition functions, which meant that operators had to look up their answers in tables instead, as described in Richard Vernon Andree, Computer Programming and Related Mathematics (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 1966). A missing bar in the program was partly responsible for the Mariner accident, as reported in Ceruzzi, Beyond the Limits: Flight Enters the Computer Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). Arthur C. Clarke mistakenly said that Mariner 1 was “wrecked by the most expensive hyphen in history” in The Promise of Space (New York: Berkley, 1955), and similar reports have been made elsewhere. Ceruzzi explains how the Mariner 1 failure was a “combination of a hardware failure and software bug.”


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

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

As Intel executive Mike Marberry puts it, “If you’re only using the same technology, then in principle you run into limits. The truth is we’ve been modifying the technology every five or seven years for 40 years, and there’s no end in sight for being able to do that.”6 This constant modification has made Moore’s Law the central phenomenon of the computer age. Think of it as a steady drumbeat in the background of the economy. Charting the Power of Constant Doubling Once this doubling has been going on for some time, the later numbers overwhelm the earlier ones, making them appear irrelevant. To see this, let’s look at a hypothetical example. Imagine that Erik gives Andy a tribble, the fuzzy creature with a high reproductive rate made famous in an episode of Star Trek.

.* FIGURE 7.1 Labor Productivity Productivity improvement was particularly rapid in the middle part of the twentieth century, especially the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, as the technologies of the first machine age, from electricity to the internal combustion engine, started firing on all cylinders. However, in 1973 productivity growth slowed down (see figure 7.1). In 1987, Bob Solow himself noted that the slowdown seemed to coincide with the early days of the computer revolution, famously remarking, “We see the computer age everywhere, except in the productivity statistics.”4 In 1993, Erik published an article evaluating the “Productivity Paradox” that noted the computers were still a small share of the economy and that complementary innovations were typically needed before general purpose technologies like IT had their real impact.5 Later work taking into account more detailed data on productivity and IT use among individual firms revealed a strong and significant correlation: the heaviest IT users were dramatically more productive than their competitors.6 By the mid-1990s, these benefits were big enough to become visible in the overall U.S. economy, which experienced a general productivity surge.


pages: 474 words: 87,687

Stealth by Peter Westwick

Berlin Wall, centre right, computer age, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, fixed-gear, friendly fire, Haight Ashbury, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, knowledge economy, machine translation, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, Teledyne, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, white flight

Rich and Leo Janos, Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed (New York: Little, Brown, 1994), 306. 30 Waaland interview with Volker Janssen, November 10, 2010. 31 Cashen 1 and 2; Waaland interview with Westwick; Kinnu; Hal Maninger interview, September 28, 2017. 32 Waaland interview with Westwick. 33 Cashen 1; Waaland interview with Westwick. 34 Sybil Francis, “Warhead Politics: Livermore and the Competitive System of Nuclear Weapon Design” (PhD dissertation, MIT, 1996); Anne Fitzpatrick, “Igniting the Elements: The Los Alamos Thermonuclear Project, 1942–1952,” Los Alamos National Laboratory, LA-13577-T, July 1999. 35 Paul Ceruzzi, Beyond the Limits: Flight Enters the Computer Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 20–30. 36 Cashen 2; Ken Dyson and Robert Loschke interview, January 9, 2012. 37 Waaland interview with Westwick. Chapter six: showdown at ratscat 1 Ryan H. Edgington, Range Wars: The Environmental Contest for White Sands Missile Range (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014). 2 H.

(Ben Rich papers, box 2, folder 10, Huntington Library). 23 Overholser interview. 24 Waaland interview with Janssen; Cashen 1. 25 Rebecca Grant, B-2: The Spirit of Innovation, Northrop Grumman Aeronautical Systems, report NGAS 13–0405 (2013, available at www.northropgrumman.com/Capabilities/B2SpiritBomber/Documents/pageDocuments/B-2-Spirit-of-Innovation.pdf), 11. Chapter seven: have blue and the f-117a 1 David A. Mindell, Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Paul Ceruzzi, Beyond the Limits: Flight Enters the Computer Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 191–95. On test pilots as cowboys: Westwick, “An Album of Early Southern California Aviation,” in Blue Sky Metropolis: The Aerospace Century in Southern California, ed. Peter J. Westwick (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 24. 2 Robert Loschke and Ken Dyson interview, January 9, 2012. 3 Robert Ferguson, NASA’s First A: Aeronautics from 1958 to 2008 (Washington, DC: NASA, 2013), 107–13. 4 Loschke-Dyson interview; Robert Loschke emails to Westwick, January 30 and February 1, 2019. 5 Sherman N.


pages: 89 words: 31,802

Headache and Backache by Ole Larsen

computer age

Neither would they use the kind of chairs that, in our culture, are one of the major causes of damaged backs. There are many tips for protecting the cartilage discs, but I’d like to especially emphasise two of these: Tarzan then and now A natural lifestyle involves varied movements, produces normal muscular tension and gives relaxation. An unnatural lifestyle imprisons the body, especially in the computer age. Break free and become a Tarzan! ● Get ”up on your marks“ and place your spine in a neutral position with low disc pressure If you’re reading this book sitting down, stop for a second and think about the position of your spine right now! You’re probably sitting slumped forward with a round back, like a flower that’s begun to wilt.


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

: Byron to Augusta Leigh, 12 October 1823, in Leslie A. Marchand, ed., Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. 9 (London: John Murray, 1973–94), 47. ♦ “I AM GOING TO BEGIN MY PAPER WINGS”: Ada to Lady Byron, 3 February 1828, in Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: Prophet of the Computer Age (Mill Valley, Calif.: Strawberry Press, 1998), 25. ♦ “MISS STAMP DESIRES ME TO SAY”: Ada to Lady Byron, 2 April 1828, ibid., 27. ♦ “WHEN I AM WEAK”: Ada to Mary Somerville, 20 February 1835, ibid., 55. ♦ AN “OLD MONKEY”: Ibid., 33. ♦ “WHILE OTHER VISITORS GAZED”: Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan, Memoir of Augustus De Morgan (London: Longmans, Green, 1882), 89

Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1986. Boden, Margaret A. Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Bollobás, Béla, and Oliver Riordan. Percolation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Bolter, J. David. Turing’s Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Boole, George. “The Calculus of Logic.” Cambridge and Dublin Mathematical Journal 3 (1848): 183–98. ———. An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, on Which Are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities. London: Walton & Maberly, 1854. ———.

In Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers. Washington, D.C.: IEEE Computer Society, 1998. Toole, Betty Alexandra. “Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace, an Analyst and Metaphysician.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 18, no. 3 (1996): 4–12. ———. Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: Prophet of the Computer Age. Mill Valley, Calif.: Strawberry Press, 1998. Tufte, Edward R. “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint.” Cheshire, Conn.: Graphics Press, 2003. Turing, Alan M. “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 42 (1936): 230–65. ———.


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Red Plenty by Francis Spufford

Adam Curtis, affirmative action, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, asset allocation, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, cognitive dissonance, computer age, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kitchen Debate, linear programming, lost cosmonauts, market clearing, MITM: man-in-the-middle, New Journalism, oil shock, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, profit motive, RAND corporation, scientific management, Simon Kuznets, the scientific method

Available at www.sovietcomputing.com. See also D.A.Pospelov & Ya. Fet, Essays on the History of Computer Science in Russia (Novosibirsk: Scientific Publication Centre of the RAS, 1998), and the chapter about Lebedev and the very first Soviet computer in Mike Hally, Electronic Brains: Stories from the Dawn of the Computer Age (London: Granta, 2005), pp. 137–60. 2 And, more secretly still, an M-40 exists, and an M-50 too: for Lebedev’s computers for the Soviet missile-defence project, and the imaginary Moscow in the Kazakh desert, see Malinovsky, Pioneers of Soviet Computing, pp. 101–3. For ‘military cybernetics’ in general, see Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak. 3 ‘We can shoot down a fly in outer space, you know’: Malinovsky, Pioneers of Soviet Computing, p. 103 4 Remembering the story his rival Izaak Bruk told him: see Malinovsky, Pioneers of Soviet Computing, p. 70, which does not however specify the codename flower the vacuum tube buyer had to mention.

Available at www.sovietcomputing.com. See also D.A.Pospelov & Ya. Fet, Essays on the History of Computer Science in Russia (Novosibirsk: Scientific Publication Centre of the RAS, 1998), and the chapter about Lebedev and the very first Soviet computer in Mike Hally, Electronic Brains: Stories from the Dawn of the Computer Age (London: Granta, 2005), pp. 137–60. 2 And, more secretly still, an M-40 exists, and an M-50 too: for Lebedev’s computers for the Soviet missile-defence project, and the imaginary Moow in the Kazakh desert, see Malinovsky, Pioneers of Soviet Computing, pp. 101–3. For ‘military cybernetics’ in general, see Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak. 3 ‘We can shoot down a fly in outer space, you know’: Malinovsky, Pioneers of Soviet Computing, p. 103 4 Remembering the story his rival Izaak Bruk told him: see Malinovsky, Pioneers of Soviet Computing, p. 70, which does not however specify the codename flower the vacuum tube buyer had to mention.

., Value and Plan: Economic Calculation and Organization in Eastern Europe (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1960) Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, translated by Robert Chandler (London: Harvill, 1995) —, Forever Flowing, translated by Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1972) P. Charles Hachten, ‘Property Relations and the Economic Organization of Soviet Russia, 1941 to 1948: Volume One’, PhD thesis, University of Chicago 2005 Mike Hally, Electronic Brains: Stories from the Dawn of the Computer Age (London: Granta, 2005) John Pearce Hardt, ed., Mathematics and Computers in Soviet Economic Planning (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1967) Robert L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers, 4th edn (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971) Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2006) Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003) Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 19450) (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997) Geoffrey M.


pages: 343 words: 101,563

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blockadia, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Chekhov's gun, climate anxiety, cognitive bias, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, effective altruism, Elon Musk, endowment effect, energy transition, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, failed state, fiat currency, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, it's over 9,000, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kevin Roose, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, megastructure, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, microplastics / micro fibres, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the built environment, The future is already here, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Whole Earth Catalog, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

* * * — That technology might liberate us, collectively, from the strain of labor and material privation is a dream at least as old as John Maynard Keynes, who predicted his grandchildren would work only fifteen-hour weeks, and yet never ultimately fulfilled. In 1987, the year he won the Nobel Prize, economist Robert Solow famously commented, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” This has been, even more so, the experience of most of those living in the developed world in the decades since—rapid technological change transforming nearly every aspect of everyday life, and yet yielding little or no tangible improvement in any conventional measures of economic well-being.

as old as John Maynard Keynes: Keynes extended the prediction—much, much talked about ever since—in an essay notably published in 1930, just after the stock market crash of 1929: John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” Nation and Athenaeum, October 11 and 18, 1930. “You can see the computer age”: This line first appeared in Robert M. Solow, “We’d Better Watch Out,” review of Manufacturing Matters by Stephen S. Cohen and John Zysman, The New York Times Book Review, July 12, 1987. a million transatlantic flights: Alex Hern, “Bitcoin’s Energy Usage Is Huge—We Can’t Afford to Ignore It,” The Guardian, January 17, 2018.


pages: 268 words: 109,447

The Cultural Logic of Computation by David Golumbia

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, American ideology, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, borderless world, business process, cellular automata, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, creative destruction, digital capitalism, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, finite state, folksonomy, future of work, Google Earth, Howard Zinn, IBM and the Holocaust, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, machine translation, means of production, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, web application, Yochai Benkler

I focus on the institutional effects of computing not merely to ensure that cultural criticism fully addresses our moment; rather, I am convinced both intellectually and experientially that computers have different effects and meanings when seen from the nodes of institutional power than from the ones they have when seen from other perspectives. If an unassailable slogan of the computing age is that “computers empower users,” the question I want to raise is not what happens when individuals are empowered in this The Cultural Logic of Computation p4 fashion (a question that has been widely treated in literature of many different sorts), but instead what happens when powerful institutions— corporations, governments, schools—embrace computationalism as a working philosophy.

These thinkers were lumped together at the time under the term mechanists as opposed to vitalists (who thought living matter was different in kind from mechanisms like watches), and it is the mechanists we associate especially with the rest of possessive-individualist doctrine. A contemporary name for this doctrine, I have been suggesting, is computationalism. Contrary to the views of advocates and critics alike that the computer age should be characterized by concepts like “decentralizing, globalizing, har- Computationalism and Political Authority p 219 monizing, and empowering” (Negroponte 1995, 229), it seems more plausible that the widespread striating effects of computerization walk hand-in-hand with other, familiar concepts from the histories of rationalism.


pages: 407 words: 103,501

The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Netwo Rking by Mark Bauerlein

Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, business cycle, centre right, citizen journalism, collaborative editing, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital divide, disintermediation, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late fees, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, meta-analysis, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, pets.com, radical decentralization, Results Only Work Environment, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, search engine result page, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technology bubble, Ted Nelson, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, web application, Yochai Benkler

Many of these Natives rarely enter a library, let alone look something up in a traditional encyclopedia; they use Google, Yahoo, and other online search engines. The neural networks in the brains of these Digital Natives differ dramatically from those of Digital Immigrants: people—including all baby boomers—who came to the digital/computer age as adults but whose basic brain wiring was laid down during a time when direct social interaction was the norm. The extent of their early technological communication and entertainment involved the radio, telephone, and TV. As a consequence of this overwhelming and early high-tech stimulation of the Digital Native’s brain, we are witnessing the beginning of a deeply divided brain gap between younger and older minds—in just one generation.

Conservation biologist Oliver Pergams at the University of Illinois recently found a highly significant correlation between how much time people spend with new technology, such as video gaming, Internet surfing, and video watching, and the decline in per capita visits to national parks. Digital Natives are snapping up the newest electronic gadgets and toys with glee and often putting them to use in the workplace. Their parents’ generation of Digital Immigrants tends to step more reluctantly into the computer age, not because they don’t want to make their lives more efficient through the Internet and portable devices but because these devices may feel unfamiliar and might upset their routine at first. During this pivotal point in brain evolution, Natives and Immigrants alike can learn the tools they need to take charge of their lives and their brains, while both preserving their humanity and keeping up with the latest technology.


pages: 350 words: 98,077

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boston Dynamics, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, folksonomy, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, ImageNet competition, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, ought to be enough for anybody, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, tail risk, TED Talk, the long tail, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers

FIGURE 5: Plots showing how many kilos of rice are needed for each chess square in order to fulfill the sage’s request; A, squares 1–24 (with y-axis showing hundreds of kilos); B, squares 24–64 (with y-axis showing tens of trillions of kilos) Exponential Progress in Computers For Ray Kurzweil, the computer age has provided a real-world counterpart to the exponential fable. In 1965, Gordon Moore, cofounder of Intel Corporation, identified a trend that has come to be known as Moore’s law: the number of components on a computer chip doubles approximately every one to two years. In other words, the components are getting exponentially smaller (and cheaper), and computer speed and memory are increasing at an exponential rate.

In particular, the best-known reinforcement-learning successes have been in the domain of game playing. Applying reinforcement learning to games is the topic of the next chapter. 9 Game On Since the earliest days of AI, enthusiasts have been obsessed with creating programs that can beat humans at games. In the late 1940s, both Alan Turing and Claude Shannon, two founders of the computer age, wrote programs to play chess before there were even computers that could run their code. In the decades that followed, many a young game fanatic has been driven to learn to program in order to get computers to play their favorite game, whether it be checkers, chess, backgammon, Go, poker, or, more recently, video games.


pages: 484 words: 104,873

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

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

The decline in labor’s share in China—the country that most of us assume is hoovering up all the work—was especially precipitous, falling at three times the rate in the United States. Karabarbounis and Neiman concluded that these global declines in labor’s share resulted from “efficiency gains in capital producing sectors, often attributed to advances in information technology and the computer age.”23 The authors also noted that a stable labor share of income continues to be “a fundamental feature of macro-economic models.”24 In other words, just as economists do not seem to have fully assimilated the implications of the circa-1973 divergence of productivity and wage growth, they are apparently still quite happy to build Bowley’s Law into the equations they use to model the economy.

Computers are getting dramatically better at performing specialized, routine, and predictable tasks, and it seems very likely that they will soon be poised to outperform many of the people now employed to do these things. Progress in the human economy has resulted largely from occupational specialization, or as Adam Smith would say, “the division of labour.” One of the paradoxes of progress in the computer age is that as work becomes ever more specialized, it may, in many cases, also become more susceptible to automation. Many experts would say that, in terms of general intelligence, today’s best technology barely outperforms an insect. And yet, insects do not make a habit of landing jet aircraft, booking dinner reservations, or trading on Wall Street.


pages: 331 words: 104,366

Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins by Garry Kasparov

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, business process, call centre, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, computer age, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Freestyle chess, gamification, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, job automation, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, low earth orbit, machine translation, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, rolodex, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Some of these questions have been answered while others are more passionately disputed than ever. CHAPTER 2 RISE OF THE CHESS MACHINES IN 1968, when the 2001 book and movie were created, it was not yet a foregone conclusion that computers would come to dominate humans at chess, or anything else beyond rote automation and calculation. As you might expect from the dawn of the computer age, predictions about machine potential were all over the map. Utopian dreams about the fully automated world just around the corner shared column space with dystopian nightmares of, well, pretty much the same thing. This is a critical point to keep in mind before we criticize or praise anyone for their predictions, and before we make our own.

The basic formula hasn’t changed since 1949, when the American mathematician and engineer Claude Shannon wrote a paper describing how it might be done. In “Programming a Computer for Playing Chess,” he proposed a “computing routine or ‘program’” for use on the sort of general-purpose computer Alan Turing had theorized years earlier. You can tell how early it was in the computer age that Shannon put the word “program” in quotation marks as jargon. As with many who followed him, Shannon was slightly apologetic at proposing a chess-playing device of “perhaps no practical importance.” But he saw the theoretical value of such a machine in other areas, from routing phone calls to language translation.


pages: 391 words: 105,382

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

To my surprise (and, I admit, delight), bloggers swarmed around the piece like phagocytes. Within days it had been viewed by thousands and had sprouted a tail of comments. So began my argument with—what should I call it? There are so many choices: the digital age, the information age, the internet age, the computer age, the connected age, the Google age, the emoji age, the cloud age, the smartphone age, the data age, the Facebook age, the robot age, the posthuman age. The more names we pin on it, the more vaporous it seems. If nothing else, it is an age tailored to the talents of the brand manager. I’ll just call it Now.

The paper’s predicament highlights a broader issue about the web’s tenacious but malleable memory. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, a public policy professor at Harvard, tells Hoyt that newspapers “should program their archives to ‘forget’ some information, just as humans do.” Through the ages, humans have generally remembered the important stuff and forgotten the trivial, he said. The computer age has turned that upside down. Now, everything lasts forever, whether it is insignificant or important, ancient or recent, complete or overtaken by events. Following Mayer-Schönberger’s logic, the Times could program some items, like news briefs, which generate a surprising number of the complaints, to expire, at least for wide public access, in a relatively short time.


pages: 440 words: 108,137

The Meritocracy Myth by Stephen J. McNamee

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American ideology, antiwork, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, collective bargaining, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, equal pay for equal work, estate planning, failed state, fixed income, food desert, Gary Kildall, gender pay gap, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, job automation, joint-stock company, junk bonds, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, occupational segregation, old-boy network, pink-collar, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, prediction markets, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Scientific racism, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, white flight, young professional

In short, the future would belong to the nerds. In some ways, Bell’s predictions seem to have been realized with the advance of the computer age. The computer has become the leading edge of the information society. Computer-related industries, populated by young, technically competent experts, flourished in the digital e-boom of the 1980s and 1990s. The postindustrial society would presumably create demand for a more highly educated labor force. While it is true that the computer age ushered in a new genre of occupational specialties, it is also true that the bulk of the expansion of new jobs, as we have seen, has actually been very low tech.


pages: 518 words: 107,836

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy) by Benjamin Peters

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Anthropocene, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commons-based peer production, computer age, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Davies, double helix, Drosophila, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, index card, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, power law, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, scientific mainstream, scientific management, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, transaction costs, Turing machine, work culture , Yochai Benkler

See, for example, Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (New York: Penguin Books, 2010), and Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 35–132. 8. Anatoly Kitov, Electronnie tsifrovie mashini [Electronic Ciphered Machines] (Moscow: Radioeletronika Nauka, 1956). 9. Charles Eames and Ray Eames, A Computer Perspective: Background to the Computer Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 64, 96–97. 10. Marc Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); Jacob Soll, The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence System (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009). 11.

B. DeBevoise. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009. Dyker, David. Restructuring the Soviet Economy. New York: Routledge, 1991. Dyson, George. Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe. Pantheon Books: New York, 2012. Eames, Charles, and Ray Eames. A Computer Perspective: Background to the Computer Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973. Edmonds, David, and John Eidinow. Bobby Fisher Goes to War: How a Lone American Star Defeated the Soviet Chess Machine. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005. Edwards, Paul N. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America.


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The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory Zuckerman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, automated trading system, backtesting, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, book value, Brownian motion, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, financial engineering, Flash crash, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, illegal immigration, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Loma Prieta earthquake, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Monty Hall problem, More Guns, Less Crime, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, off-the-grid, p-value, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Two Sigma

But Simons hoped rigorous testing and sophisticated predictive models, based on statistical analysis rather than eyeballing price charts, might help him escape the fate of the chart adherents who had crashed and burned. But Simons didn’t realize that others were busy crafting similar strategies, some using their own high-powered computers and mathematical algorithms. Several of these traders already had made enormous progress, suggesting that Simons was playing catch-up. Indeed, as soon as the computer age dawned, there were investors, up bright and early, using computers to solve markets. As early as 1965, Barron’s magazine spoke of the “immeasurable” rewards computers could render investors, and how the machines were capable of relieving an analyst of “dreary labor, freeing him for more creative activity.”

IBM knew it faced a real problem the day the wife of a member of the chess team, who taught at a Catholic college, spoke with the college’s president, an elderly nun, and the sister kept referring to IBM’s amazing “Deep Throat” program. IBM ran a contest to rename the chess machine, choosing Brown’s own submission, Deep Blue, a nod to IBM’s longtime nickname, Big Blue. A few years later, in 1997, millions would watch on television as Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov, the chess world champion, a signal that the computing age had truly arrived.6 Brown, Mercer, and the rest of the team made progress enabling computers to transcribe speech. Later, Brown realized probabilistic mathematical models also could be used for translation. Using data that included thousands of pages of Canadian parliamentary proceedings featuring paired passages in French and English, the IBM team made headway toward translating text between languages.


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A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order by Judith Flanders

computer age, death from overwork, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, index card, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of movable type, invention of the wheel, invention of writing, trade route, Y2K

., 1727) Leedham-Green, Elisabeth, ‘A Catalogue of Caius College Library, 1569’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 8, 1, 1981, pp. 29–41 Le Men, Ségolène, Les abécédaires français illustrés du XIXe siècle (Paris, Promodis, 1984) Lendinara, Patrizia, Loredana Lazzari and Claudia Di Sciacca, eds., Rethinking and Recontextualizing Glosses: New Perspectives in the Study of Late Anglo-Saxon Glossography (Turnhout, Brepols, 2011) Lerner, Fred, The Story of Libraries: From the Invention of Writing to the Computer Age (New York, Continuum, 2009) Lieshout, H.H.M. van, The Making of Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (Amsterdam and Utrecht, APA-Holland University Press, 2001) Locke, John, ‘A New Method of Making Commonplace Books’ (London, J. Greenwood, 1706) Logan, Robert K., The Alphabet Effect: The Impact of the Phonetic Alphabet on the Development of Western Civilization (New York, St Martin’s Press, 1986) Loveland, Jeff, The European Encyclopedia: From 1650 to the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019) Lund, Roger D., ‘The Eel of Science: Index Learning, Scriblerian Satire, and the Rise of Information Culture’, Eighteenth-century Life, vol. 22, no. 2, 1998, pp. 18–39 Lyall, R.J., ‘Materials: The Paper Revolution’, in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475, Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall, eds.

Others assert without hesitation that Callimachus was the author of the Pinakes, and they were ordered alphabetically. See, for example, Margaret Zeegers and Deirdre Barron, Gatekeepers of Knowledge: A Consideration of the Library, the Book and the Scholar in the Western World (Oxford, Chandos, 2010), pp. 12–13; Fred Lerner, The Story of Libraries: From the Invention of Writing to the Computer Age (New York, Continuum, 2009), pp. 16–17. 26. Hatzimichali, ‘Encyclopaedism’, in König and Woolf, Encyclopaedism from Antiquity, pp. 76–7. 27. Daly, Contributions, pp. 23, 40. 28. Ibid., pp. 45–50, 75. 29. Werner Hüllen, English Dictionaries, 800–1700: The Topical Tradition (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2006), pp. 30–31. 30.


The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley by Leslie Berlin

Apple II, Bob Noyce, book value, business cycle, California energy crisis, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, computer age, data science, Fairchild Semiconductor, George Gilder, Henry Singleton, informal economy, John Markoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, open economy, prudent man rule, Richard Feynman, rolling blackouts, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, Teledyne, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, vertical integration, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Uses for integrated circuits: “A Briefing on Integrated Circuits”; “Engineers Eye Integrated Consumer Products,” Television Digest, 30 March 1964, 7–8; Michael F. Wolff, “When Will Integrated Circuits Go Civilian? Good Guess: 1965,” Electronics, 10 May 1963, 20–24. 37. Cost of IBM System/360: Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, Computer, 140. Only computers anyone would need: Don Palfreman and Doron Swade, The Dream Machine: Exploring the Computer Age (London: BBC Books, 1993), 78– Notes to Pages 139–146 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 335 80. For a contemporary description of the IBM System/360 series, see International Business Machines, Introduction to IBM Data Processing Systems (White Plains, N.Y.: 1969).

Competitive Edge: The Semiconductor Industry in the U.S. and Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984. Ozaki, Robert S. “How Japanese Industrial Policy Works. In The Industrial Policy Debate, ed. Chalmers Johnson, 47–70. San Francisco: ICS Press, 1984. Palfreman, Don, and Doron Swade. The Dream Machine: Exploring the Computer Age. London: BBC Books, 1993. Parks, Martha Smith. Microelectronics in the 1970s. Rockwell International Corporation, 1974. Bibliography 373 Patterson, James T. Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pitti, Stephen J. The Devil in Silicon Valley : Northern California, Race, and Mexican Americans.

“Dissatisfaction as a Spur to Career,” New York Times, 15 December 1976. Bibliography 379 Noyce, Robert N. “False Hopes and High-Tech Fiction.” Harvard Business Review, January–February 1990, 31–34. ———. “Microelectronics.” Scientific American, September 1977. ———. “Hardware Prospects and Limitations.” In The Computer Age: A TwentyYear View, ed. Michael Dertouzous and Joel Moses, 321–337. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1979. ———. “Competition and Cooperation—A Prescription for the Eighties.” Research Management, March 1982, 13–17. Noyce, Robert, and Marcian E. Hoff, Jr. [Ted Hoff]. “A History of Microprocessor Development at Intel,” IEEE Micro, February 1981.


pages: 598 words: 183,531

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition by Steven Levy

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, air freight, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, corporate governance, Donald Knuth, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, Free Software Foundation, game design, Gary Kildall, Hacker Ethic, hacker house, Haight Ashbury, John Conway, John Markoff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, Multics, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, Paul Graham, popular electronics, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, software patent, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, value engineering, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

There was no subject in the media hotter than computers in the early 1980s, and with the New York public relations firm helping channel the dazzled inquisitors, a steady stream of long-distance phone calls and even long-distance visitors began to arrive in Oakhurst that autumn. This included an “NBC Magazine” camera crew which flew to Oakhurst from New York City to document this thriving computer-age company for its video magazine show. NBC shot the requisite footage of Roberta mapping a new adventure game at her home, Ken going over his phone messages, Ken and Roberta touring the building site of their new home. But the NBC producer was particularly anxious to speak to the heart of the company: the young programmers.

IBM was power and money. I wanted both,” she said. Electronic Arts seemed the way. The products and philosophy of the company would be truth and beauty, and the company founders would all be powerful and rich. And the programmers, who would be treated with the respect they deserved as the artists of the computer age, would be elevated to the status of rock or movie stars. This message managed to find its way around the Applefest, enough so knots of programmers began gathering outside the Convention Hall for the buses that supposedly would take them to the Stanford Court Hotel, where Electronic Arts was throwing its big party.

Tom Tatum, former lawyer, lobbyist, and Carter campaign aide, now a leading purveyor of video “docusports” programming, thought he had serendipitously latched on to a jackpot bigger than that of any slot machine in the casino only yards away from where he stood. “This is the event where Hollywood meets the Computer Age,” said Tom Tatum to the crowd of reporters and computer tradespeople in town for the Comdex show. “The ultra-contest of the eighties.” Tom Tatum’s creation was called Wizard vs. Wizards. It was to be a television contest where game designers play each other’s games for a set of prizes. Tatum had gathered programmers from companies like On-Line and Sirius because he sensed the arrival of a new kind of hero, one who fought with brains instead of muscle, one who represented America’s bold willingness to stay ahead of the rest of the world in the technological battle of supremacy: the hacker.


Decoding Organization: Bletchley Park, Codebreaking and Organization Studies by Christopher Grey

Bletchley Park, call centre, classic study, computer age, glass ceiling, index card, iterative process, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, military-industrial complex, old-boy network, post-war consensus, seminal paper, work culture

(Hill, 2004: 43) The shoeboxes reflected the general tightness of resources, but of course the use of a paper-based system of any sort reflects the necessities of a pre-computerization era. BP is well known as the place where arguably the first semi-programmable electronic computer – Colossus – was developed (Goldstine, 1993; Copeland, 2001, 2006) and in this sense stands on the cusp of the computer age, but for the most part it used pre-computer technologies. Clearly, an equivalent organization now would use computerized databases to store and retrieve the information held in indexes and almost all of the human labour of indexing would disappear (for that matter, much of the more skilled work at BP would now be readily computerized).

‘The Turing bombe’, The Rutherford Journal 3, www.rutherfordjournal.org/article030108.html. Child, J. 1972. ‘Organizational structure, environment and performance: The role of strategic choice’, Sociology 6: 1–22. Clayton, A. 1980. The Enemy is Listening: The Story of the Y Service. London: Hutchinson. Copeland, B. J. 2001. ‘Colossus and the dawning of the computer age’ in Smith, M. and Erskine, R. (eds.), Action This Day. London: Bantam, pp. 342–69. Copeland, B. J. (ed.) 2004. The Essential Turing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Copeland, B. J. 2006. Colossus. The Secrets of Bletchley Park’s Codebreaking Computers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clark, P. and Rowlinson, M. 2004.


pages: 453 words: 117,893

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

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

For instance, the strong period of growth in the 1950s and 60s is associated with post-war technological advances, such as widespread air travel and industrial robots. Curiously, recent technological improvements, centred on computing, information and communication technologies (ICT) and the internet, do not seem to have raised productivity across the economy. Solow’s 1987 observation that ‘You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics’ is known as the Solow paradox.6 He revisited this question decades later, but concluded that we still do not know, as the role of computing is still evolving. Solow points out that since our lives and work have been transformed by computers, this technology should have improved our productivity.

It’s challenging, as seen in Japan, and some factors like demographics are difficult to alter, but the above suggestions can help and the advent of new technologies could be game changing. Solow would probably view the debate over whether the technologies of the digital era are as productive as the steam engine or electrification of the earlier industrial revolutions as being related to investment. If the computer age is to increase productivity and so lead to a stronger phase of economic growth, it will require investment in not just R&D but also people’s skills and firms’ practices to embed those technologies into how businesses operate. The basic tenets of Robert Solow’s model of economic growth point the way forward.


pages: 374 words: 113,126

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

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

For instance, the strong period of growth in the 1950s and 60s is associated with post-war technological advances, such as widespread air travel and industrial robots. Curiously, recent technological improvements, centred on computing, information and communication technologies (ICT) and the internet, do not seem to have raised productivity across the economy. Solow’s 1987 observation that ‘You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics’ is known as the Solow paradox.6 He revisited this question decades later, but concluded that we still do not know, as the role of computing is still evolving. Solow points out that since our lives and work have been transformed by computers, this technology should have improved our productivity.

It’s challenging, as seen in Japan, and some factors like demographics are difficult to alter, but the above suggestions can help and the advent of new technologies could be game changing. Solow would probably view the debate over whether the technologies of the digital era are as productive as the steam engine or electrification of the earlier industrial revolutions as being related to investment. If the computer age is to increase productivity and so lead to a stronger phase of economic growth, it will require investment in not just R&D but also people’s skills and firms’ practices to embed those technologies into how businesses operate. The basic tenets of Robert Solow’s model of economic growth point the way forward.


pages: 450 words: 113,173

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties by Christopher Caldwell

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, computer age, crack epidemic, critical race theory, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Attenborough, desegregation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, Future Shock, George Gilder, global value chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, James Bridle, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, libertarian paternalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, Norman Mailer, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, post-industrial society, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

The distance abolished was the kind that is in people’s heads. Looked at this way, computers have been not so much an expression of America’s historic ingenuity as an alternative to it. In his history of economic growth in the United States, the Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon found no special productivity boost from the computer age. Outside of Silicon Valley, according to the economist Edmund Phelps, American innovation “would narrow to a trickle” after the 1960s. In 1969, U.S. Industries, Inc., had promised that within a decade the 1960s would seem like the Dark Ages, once Americans got used to “automatic highways—computerized kitchens—person-to-person television . . . food from under the sea.”

The first harvest of innovation came from Japan, starting with the Panasonic Toot-a-Loop AM-radio-and-bracelet, and culminating in the Sony Walkman, the great bridge product from the industrial to the information economy, released in the final weeks of the 1970s. Artists were generally as blind as anyone else to the upshot of computers, even as the computer age approached. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) correctly anticipated both voiceprint security identification and, seemingly, the end of the Cold War. Kubrick, however, viewed twentieth-century American corporations as immortal, placing a Howard Johnson’s motel in a space station that could be reached by a Pan Am moon shuttle.


Hacking Capitalism by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Abraham Maslow, air gap, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Debian, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, Donald Davies, Eben Moglen, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mitch Kapor, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, patent troll, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, profit motive, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, safety bicycle, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

Natalie Rothstein, “The Introduction of the Jacquard Loom to Great Britain, in ed. Veronika Gervers, Studies in Textile History—In Memory of Harold B. Burnham (Toronto: Alger Press, 1977). 5. For a historical account of the Luddite uprising, see Kirkpatrick Sale, Rebels Against the Future—The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution, Lessons for the Computer Age (Reading Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1995). 6. Even if machine breaking could not stop industrial capitalism, Eric Hobsbawm estimated that the implementation of labour-saving technologies in local areas was held back due to sabotage. Furthermore, the breaking of machines was part of a more general strategy of ‘collective bargaining by riot’, as he called it, which could also include arsoning the employer’s stock and home.

. ——— No-Collar—The Human Workplace and its Hidden Costs, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004. Sahlins, Marshall. Stone Age Economics, Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1972. Sale, Kirkpatrick. Rebels Against the Future—The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution—Lessons for the Computer Age, Reading Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1995. Salus, Peter. A Quarter Century of Unix, Reading Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994. Sassen, Saskia. Losing Control?—Sovereignity in an Age of Globalization, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Schell, Bernadette, and John Dodge. The Hacking of America—Who’s Doing it, Why, and How, London: Quorum Books, 2002.


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

The last forty years of human history imply that it can still take a long time to translate information into useful knowledge, and that if we are not careful, we may take a step back in the meantime. The term “information age” is not particularly new. It started to come into more widespread use in the late 1970s. The related term “computer age” was used earlier still, starting in about 1970.28 It was at around this time that computers began to be used more commonly in laboratories and academic settings, even if they had not yet become common as home appliances. This time it did not take three hundred years before the growth in information technology began to produce tangible benefits to human society.

In 1971, for instance, it was claimed that we would be able to predict earthquakes within a decade,29 a problem that we are no closer to solving forty years later. Instead, the computer boom of the 1970s and 1980s produced a temporary decline in economic and scientific productivity. Economists termed this the productivity paradox. “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics,” wrote the economist Robert Solow in 1987.30 The United States experienced four distinct recessions between 1969 and 1982.31 The late 1980s were a stronger period for our economy, but less so for countries elsewhere in the world. Scientific progress is harder to measure than economic progress.32 But one mark of it is the number of patents produced, especially relative to the investment in research and development.

—Present (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988). http://econ161.berkeley.edu/TCEH/1998_Draft/World_GDP/Estimating_World_GDP.html. 27. Figure 1-2 is drawn from DeLong’s estimates, although converted to 2010 U.S. dollars rather than 1990 U.S. dollars as per his original. 28. Google Books Ngram Viewer. http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=information+age%2C+computer+age&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3. 29. Susan Hough, Predicting the Unpredictable: The Tumultuous Science of Earthquake Prediction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, Kindle edition, 2009), locations 862–869. 30. Robert M. Solow, “We’d Better Watch Out,” New York Times Book Review, July 12, 1987. http://www.standupeconomist.com/pdf/misc/solow-computer-productivity.pdf. 31.


The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

On the relationship between Vietnam-era countercultural politics and the emergence of the personal computer, as well as a much deeper dive into the lives and careers of the people discussed in this chapter, see Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006); Markoff, What the Dormouse Said; and Michael Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (New York: HarperBusiness, 1999). 13. Lee Felsenstein, “Resource One/Community Memory—1972–1973,” http://www.leefelsenstein.com/?page_id=44 archived at https://perma.cc/4K8U-2BG3; Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 69–102; Claire L. Evans, Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet (New York: Portfolio / Penguin, 2018), 95–108. 14.

Burt McMurtry, interview with the author, January 15, 2015; Leena Rao, “Sand Hill Road’s Consiglieres: August Capital,” TechCrunch, June 14, 2014, https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/14/sand-hill-roads-consiglieres-august-capital/, archived at https://perma.cc/6DN4-DERQ. 8. Charles Simonyi, interview with the author, October 4, 2017, Bellevue, Wash.; Michael Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (New York: HarperBusiness, 1999), 194–210; Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger, Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer, 3rd ed. (Raleigh, N.C.: The Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2014), 271. 9. Simonyi interview; Charles Simonyi, oral history interview by Grady Booch, February 6, 2008, CHM, 30–34; Manes and Andrews, Gates, 167. 10.

Bureau of the Census, Robert Kominski, Current Population Reports, Special Studies, Series P-23, No. 155, Computer Use in the United States: 1984 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988). 31. Author interview with former associate of RMI, Inc., August 6, 2018. 32. Mike Hogan, “Fighting for the Heavyweight Title,” California Business, November 1984, 78–93; Computer Age, December 12, 1983, quoted in Thomas & Company, “Competitive Dynamics”; Hogan, “Fighting for the Heavyweight Title.” 33. SRI’s Values and Lifestyles (VALS) program was relied upon heavily by Apple for its market research. See Macintosh Product Introduction Plan, October 7, 1983, M1007, Series 7, Box 13, FF 21, SU. 34.


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

” * There is no logical explanation for the rise of all these different hands; it was a cultural phenomena. To understand, consider how many different website designs or themes are available to someone who wants to set up a site using WordPress. Each one has its own look and its own associations, and when there is no consensus as to how words should look, there is enormous choice. Early in the computer age, people reveled in choosing a different font to best clothe their letters. That has settled down now, as Times New Roman—another “New Roman” script, like Carolingian minuscule and humanist—has become a de facto standard. Chapter 7 RIGHTEOUS, MANLY HANDS Geneva-on-the-Lake, Ohio, is a tired resort town on the shores of Lake Erie.


pages: 144 words: 43,356

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence by Calum Chace

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, discovery of the americas, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Flash crash, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hedonic treadmill, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, life extension, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter Thiel, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, wage slave, Wall-E, zero-sum game

Some people argue that the fears are over-done because technology is not actually advancing as fast as the excitable folk in Silicon Valley suppose. It is true that economists have long struggled to record the productivity improvements that would be expected from the massive investments in information technology of the last half-century; this failure prompted economist Robert Solow to remark back in 1987 that “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” (Of the various explanations for this phenomenon, the one which seems most plausible to me is that there is an increase in productivity, but for some reason our economic measurements don’t catch it. When I started work in the early 1980s we used to spend hours each day looking for information by searching in files and phoning each other up.


pages: 409 words: 125,611

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of DNA, Doha Development Round, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population

What is happening today is analogous to developments a few decades ago, early in the era of personal computers. In 1987, the economist Robert Solow—awarded the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on growth—lamented, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” There are several possible explanations for this. Perhaps GDP does not really capture the improvements in living standards that computer-age innovation is engendering. Or perhaps this innovation is less significant than its enthusiasts believe. As it turns out, there is some truth in both perspectives. Recall how a few years ago, just before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the financial sector prided itself on its innovativeness.


pages: 472 words: 117,093

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

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

Phase one of the second machine age describes a time when digital technologies demonstrably had an impact on the business world by taking over large amounts of routine work—tasks like processing payroll, welding car body parts together, and sending invoices to customers. In July of 1987 the MIT economist Robert Solow, who later that year would win a Nobel prize for his work on the sources of economic growth, wrote, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” By the mid-1990s, that was no longer true; productivity started to grow much faster, and a large amount of research (some of it conducted by Erik‡‡ and his colleagues) revealed that computers and other digital technologies were a main reason why.

id=8186897092162507742#x0026;hl=en. 13 Within a few hours the campaign raised: Jonathan Shieber, “GE FirstBuild Launches Indiegogo Campaign for Next Generation Icemaker,” TechCrunch, July 28, 2015, https://techcrunch.com/2015/07/28/ge-firstbuild-launches-indiegogo-campaign-for-next-generation-icemaker. 13 in excess of $1.3 million: Samantha Hurst, “FirstBuild’s Opal Nugget Ice Maker Captures $1.3M during First Week on Indiegogo,” Crowdfund Insider, August 3, 2015, http://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2015/08/72196-firstbuilds-opal-nugget-ice-maker-captures-1-3m-during-first-week-on-indiegogo. 13 the Opal campaign had attracted more than $2.7 million: “FirstBuild Launches Affordable Nugget Ice Machine,” Louisville Business First, July 22, 2015, http://www.bizjournals.com/louisville/news/2015/07/22/firstbuild-launches-affordable-nugget-ice-machine.html. 13 more than 5,000 preorder customers: Indiegogo, “Opal Nugget Ice Maker.” 16 “You can see the computer age”: Robert M. Solow, “We’d Better Watch Out,” New York Times, July 21, 1987, http://www.standupeconomist.com/pdf/misc/solow-computer-productivity.pdf. 17 more than a billion users of smartphones: Don Reisinger, “Worldwide Smartphone User Base Hits 1 Billion,” CNET, October 17, 2012, https://www.cnet.com/news/worldwide-smartphone-user-base-hits-1-billion. 18 more than 40% of the adults: Jacob Poushter, “Smartphone Ownership and Internet Usage Continues to Climb in Emerging Economies,” Pew Research Center, February 22, 2016, http://www.pewglobal.org/2016/02/22/smartphone-ownership-and-internet-usage-continues-to-climb-in-emerging-economies. 18 approximately 1.5 billion more were sold: Tess Stynes, “IDC Cuts Outlook for 2016 Global Smartphone Shipments,” Wall Street Journal, September 1, 2016, http://www.wsj.com/articles/idc-cuts-outlook-for-2016-global-smartphone-shipments-1472740414. 19 “There were many factories”: Warren D.


pages: 481 words: 121,300

Why geography matters: three challenges facing America : climate change, the rise of China, and global terrorism by Harm J. De Blij

agricultural Revolution, airport security, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial exploitation, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, John Snow's cholera map, Khyber Pass, manufacturing employment, megacity, megaproject, Mercator projection, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, UNCLOS, UNCLOS

Nineteenth-century maps tend to represent science, not art, although many were still hand colored for clarity. But the twentieth century witnessed the revolution that would transform cartography and is still under way: the introduction of photography from airplanes, the launching of image-transmitting orbital satellites, and the coming of the computer age. In the process, the very definition of the term "map" has changed. In traditional works on cartography such as The Nature of Maps by Arthur H. Robinson and Barbara B. Petchenik (1976) or P. C. and J. O. Muehreke's Map Use (1997) the authors define a map as "a graphic representation of the milieu" or "any geographical image of environment."

See also specific countries and borders, 111-13, 119, 182-83,262-65 decolonization, 37, 112, 184, 197, 265, 276 and globalization, 9, 111, 197 Columbia, 180 comet hypothesis, 58, 59 Committee on Foreign Names, 40 Common Market (European Economic Community), 210, 211 Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), 251 communism. See also Cold War; Soviet Union and Africa, 266 and cartography, 35 of China, 125, 127, 139 Iron Curtain, 197, 198,209 and U.S. intervention, 197, 209, 276 compass rose, 27-28 computer age, 24 Confucius (Kongfuzi or Kongzi), 138 291 Congo and Belgium, 162, 263, 265 Islam in, 185, 186 and Mobutu regime, 268, 269 in Pangaea, 61 conical projections in maps, 32, 33 continental drift, 54-57, 55 Convention on Law of the Sea, 115, 148, 252, 281 Corsicans, 152, 206, 207, 218, 220, 222 Costa Rica, 180 Cote d'lvoire, 176, 183-84, 185, 186, 260, 269 Council of Ministers, 215, 216 countries, size of, 30, 33, 34 Cretaceous period, 62, 64 Crete, 76, 128 crime, 248-49 Crimea, Ukraine, 206 Croatia conflicts, 207 creation of, 109 devolutionary pressures, 206 and European Union, 218, 225, 227 Islam in, 169 Cro-Magnons, 70-71 crustal (sea-floor) spreading, 54-55 Cuba, 114, 176, 180, 181 Cyclades, 76 cylindrical projections in maps, 33 Cyprus conflict, 222 and European Union, 217, 218, 225 name, 37 Czechoslovakia (former), 226 Czech Republic, 212, 213, 218 Dagestan Republic, Russia, 246 Dalai Lama, 137 Dardanelles Strait, 236 Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 181, 186 Darfur Province, 104, 165, 183 Davao International Airport attack (2003), 160 Davis, William Morris, 118 Dayton model, 195 decay, 10 deception in maps, 36 Defense Mapping Agency, 40 deglaciation, 76 delimitation, 119 demarcation of boundaries, 120 democracy in Africa, 268, 270 [see also specific countries) China's reaction to, 131 in Germany, 145, 148,276 in Hong Kong, 142, 143 in Iraq, 112, 145, 194, 195, 276-77 in Japan, 145, 146, 148, 194, 195 in Nigeria, 255, 268. 269-70 and population, 94 in Russia, ix, 204, 205, 231, 250, 251, 256 in South Africa, 255, 268 in South Korea, 129 in Taiwan, 131 in United States, 148, 195, 276, 281 Democratic Republic of Congo, 185, 186 dendochronology (tree ring research), 78 Deng Xiaoping economy, 129, 141 "One Child Only" program, 137, 143 policies, 127, 137, 141 political administration, 139 Denmark, 110, 169,210,213 Denmark Strait, 80 D'Estaing, Giscard, 214 devolutionary pressures, 206, 218, 220, 221-22, 228 Devonian period, 59 Diamond, Jared, 7-8, 90, 259 diets and nutrition, 100 dinosaurs, 59, 62, 102 disease.


pages: 165 words: 45,397

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming by Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby

3D printing, Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, capitalist realism, Cass Sunstein, computer age, corporate governance, David Attenborough, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, General Motors Futurama, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, Herman Kahn, intentional community, life extension, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mouse model, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Wall-E

As the science fiction writer Frederick Pohl once remarked, a good writer does not think up only the automobile but also the traffic jam. Just as ergonomics emerged during the mechanical age to ensure a better physical fit between our bodies and machines, and user-friendliness came about during the computer age to ensure a better fit between our minds and computers, ethics needs to be at the forefront of working with biological technologies. We need to zoom out and consider what it means to be human and how to manage our changing relationship to nature and our new powers over life. This shift in focus requires new design methods, roles, and contexts.


pages: 675 words: 141,667

Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise) by Andrew L. Russell

Aaron Swartz, American ideology, animal electricity, barriers to entry, borderless world, Californian Ideology, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, creative destruction, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, open economy, OSI model, packet switching, pre–internet, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, vertical integration, web of trust, work culture

After all, many standards for American telephone and telegraph networks in the nineteenth century were established within the corporate hierarchies of AT&T and Western Union, and the self-conscious movement for open systems and open standards did not begin until the 1970s. But the key principles and formative practices of open standards – due process, consensus, and a balance of interests – were not inventions of the computer age; rather, their roots stretch back to the late nineteenth century, when engineers first experimented with specialized committees to set industrywide standards. In order to understand the technological and ideological history of the twenty-first-century digital age, it is necessary to disrupt the familiar linear narrative of communication networks (telegraph to telephone to Internet) and explore how the key principles and formative practices of industrial standardization emerged from a variety of American industrial practices in the late nineteenth century.

Software and protocols, which were new, were left to graduate students.19 The split between hardware and software was a recent development in computing, and perhaps just as significant for the history of standardization as for the history of computing.20 Indeed, most instances of compatibility standards to this point – with the minor yet telling exceptions of programming languages such as FORTRAN discussed in Chapter 5 – concerned interfaces between tangible objects such as nuts and bolts or electrical plugs. In the computer age, the boundaries between technologies and organizations increasingly became problems that could be solved by software. We will see how the speed with which software could be written and deployed introduced new dynamics into negotiations over standards that had previously implied changes in the manufacture of artifacts.


pages: 372 words: 152

The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin

banking crisis, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, cashless society, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, general-purpose programming language, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kaizen: continuous improvement, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, prudent man rule, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, strikebreaker, technoutopianism, Thorstein Veblen, Toyota Production System, trade route, trickle-down economics, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

More than half of all black workers held positions in the four job categories where companies made net employment cuts: office and clerical, skilled, semi-skilled and laborers."34 John Johnson, the director of labor for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), says that "what the whites often don't realize is that while they are in a recession, blacks are in a depression."35 More than forty years ago, at the dawn of the computer age, the father of cybernetics, Norbert Weiner, warned of the likely adverse consequences of the new automation technologies. "Let us remember," he said, "that the automatic machine ... is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor."36 Not surprisingly, the first community to be devastated by the cybernetics revolution was black America.

Borrus opined that "for every company using computers right, there is one using them wrong-and the two negate each other."9 American corporations and companies around the world had been structured one hundred years earlier to produce and distribute goods and services in an age of rail transport and telephone and postal communication. Their organizational apparatus proved wholly inadequate to deal with the speed, agility, and information-gathering ability of computer-age technology. OLD-FASHIONED MANAGEMENT Modem management had its birth in the railroad industry in the 1850s. In the early years, railroads ran their trains along a single track. Keeping "track" of train movements became critical to maintaining safe passage along the line. When the Western Railroad experienced a Post-Fordism 93 series of accidents on its Hudson River rail, culminating in a head-on crash on October 4, 1841, that killed a passenger and conductor, the company responded to the growing safety problem by instituting elaborate changes in its organizational management, including a more systematic process of data collection from its roadmasters and faster dissemination of vital scheduling information to its train crews.


pages: 237 words: 50,758

Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly by John Kay

Andrew Wiles, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, bonus culture, British Empire, business process, Cass Sunstein, computer age, corporate raider, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, discovery of penicillin, diversification, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, market fundamentalism, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, shareholder value, Simon Singh, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk

Chapter 10 COMPLEXITY—How the World Is Too Complex for Directness to Be Direct Computers don’t do obliquity. Computers work through prescribed routines of any degree of complexity in a direct, linear manner with incredible speed and accuracy. Sudoku is an easy problem for a computer, and chess seems not much harder. At the dawn of the computer age, some people really believed that not just sudoku and chess but lives, loves and businesses could be efficiently run by computer. Herbert Simon, a pioneer of artificial intelligence, wrote (in 1958) that:there are now in the world machines that think, that learn and that create. Moreover, their ability to do other things is going to increase rapidly until—in a visible future—the range of problems they can handle will be coextensive with the range to which the human mind has been applied.1 Such a machine is the murderous computer HAL, star of Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey (released in 1968).


pages: 193 words: 47,808

The Flat White Economy by Douglas McWilliams

access to a mobile phone, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer age, correlation coefficient, Crossrail, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, George Gilder, hiring and firing, income inequality, informal economy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, loadsamoney, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, vertical integration, working-age population, zero-sum game

IT investment as an enabling technology In the 1980s, economic studies seemed not to be able to find much evidence of information technology making much difference to economic growth. This was known at the time as the ‘productivity paradox.’6 Nobel laureate Robert Solow famously quipped “You can see the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistics”.7 But micro studies since have provided compelling evidence that IT is not only a technology that enhances growth but also one that enables further productivity gains. A Google search lists over 64,000 references for ‘information technology as an enabler’.8 The modern thinking about IT investment is that it encourages improved and innovative products, services and methods of production.


pages: 209 words: 53,175

The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness by Morgan Housel

airport security, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Madoff, book value, business cycle, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial engineering, financial independence, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, Paul Graham, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, stocks for the long run, tech worker, the scientific method, traffic fines, Vanguard fund, WeWork, working-age population

You might be on the clock for fewer hours than you would in 1950. But it feels like you’re working 24/7. Derek Thompson of The Atlantic once described it like this: If the operating equipment of the 21st century is a portable device, this means the modern factory is not a place at all. It is the day itself. The computer age has liberated the tools of productivity from the office. Most knowledge workers, whose laptops and smartphones are portable all-purpose media-making machines, can theoretically be as productive at 2 p.m. in the main office as at 2 a.m. in a Tokyo WeWork or at midnight on the couch.²⁹ Compared to generations prior, control over your time has diminished.


pages: 495 words: 154,046

The Rights of the People by David K. Shipler

affirmative action, airport security, computer age, disinformation, facts on the ground, fudge factor, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, mandatory minimum, Mikhail Gorbachev, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Oklahoma City bombing, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, RFID, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, working poor, zero-sum game

And that is not the standard for issuance of an NSL.”40 A BIGGER HAYSTACK Following the revelations in the 1970s about FBI snooping, the agency reportedly stopped amassing huge files on people who were not part of criminal or counterintelligence investigations. In the first place, everything was on paper, one former agent noted, and warehouse space was limited. But it doesn’t take warehouses to store data in a computer age, and since 9/11, law enforcement and intelligence officers have understood one very bold lesson: They risk more criticism from Congress and the public by missing an attack than by violating privacy. So, they collect. “As a criminal investigator, my goal is to gather evidence necessary to prosecute a bad guy,” to get “one step closer to putting that guy in handcuffs and going to court,” said Mike German, the former undercover agent who infiltrated domestic militia groups for the FBI.

• • • “If a burglar brings us documents he stole from someone’s house,” said a federal prosecutor in California, “the law is clear that we can use that information. There’s no Fourth Amendment violation, as long as we didn’t instigate the burglary.” So, the private, high-tech burglar has flourished in the computer age like a digital bounty hunter. Immune from the Fourth Amendment, a hacker with a moral cause can burrow into people’s online crimes for the sheer satisfaction of seeing the criminals put away. Even if he violates anti-hacking laws, he hardly risks arrest by police who are grateful for his tips and files of electronic evidence.


pages: 519 words: 142,646

Track Changes by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

active measures, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, corporate governance, David Brooks, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, forensic accounting, future of work, Future Shock, Google Earth, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, HyperCard, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, machine readable, machine translation, mail merge, Marshall McLuhan, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, popular electronics, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social web, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, text mining, thinkpad, Turing complete, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, Year of Magical Thinking

But this was by no means true of elsewhere in the world, even other Anglophone nations. By contrast, for example, Joe Moran suggests that in the United Kingdom it was the September 1985 debut of Alan Sugar’s Amstrad PCW 8256 that marked “the tipping point when many writers, published and aspiring, made the trek to Dixons, where it was exclusively sold, and joined the computer age.” The Amstrad, which Sugar had designed after seeing word processors in Tokyo, came with a twelve-inch screen, a dot matrix printer, and its own word processing program, called LocoScript. It cost £399. See Moran, “Typewriter, You’re Fired! How Writers Learned to Love the Computer,” The Guardian, August 28, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/28/how-amstrad-word-processor-encouraged-writers-use-computers. 14.

Catano, “Poetry and Computers: Experimenting with the Communal Text,” Computers and the Humanities 13, no. 4 (October–December 1979): 269–275; see also Catano, “Computer-Based Writing: Navigating the Fluid Text,” College Composition and Communication 36, no. 3 (October 1985): 309–316. 12. Larry Tesler, interview with the author, October 11, 2013. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. The best overview of Xerox PARC’s history and associated innovations is Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (New York: Harper, 1999). 16. This episode (and Apple’s subsequent development of the technologies) is recounted in detail in Steven Levy, Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything (New York: Penguin, 1994), 77–103. For video of Tesler describing the demo in 2011, see Philip Elmer-DeWitt, Fortune, August 24, 2014, embedded YouTube video, http://fortune.com/2014/08/24/raw-footage-larry-tesler-on-steve-jobs-visit-to-xerox-parc/. 17.


pages: 464 words: 155,696

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender, Rick Tetzeli

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, Byte Shop, Charles Lindbergh, computer age, corporate governance, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, market design, McMansion, Menlo Park, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, planned obsolescence, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Stephen Fry, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

We also relied on passages from the following books: Gates, by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews; Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple, A Journey of Adventure, Ideas, and the Future, by John Sculley; The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs, by Chrisann Brennan; Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World’s Most Colorful Company, by Owen W. Linzmayer; Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age, by Michael A. Hiltzik; and Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything, by Steven Levy; as well as Moritz’s The Little Kingdom, and Wozniak and Smith’s iWoz. Other journalistic sources included “The Fall of Steve” by Bro Uttal, published in Fortune on August 5, 1985; and the PBS television documentary The Entrepreneurs, broadcast in 1986.

Stuttgart: Arnoldsche Verlaganstalt, 2014. Grove, Andrew S. Swimming Across: A Memoir. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2001. Hertzfeld, Andy. Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2004. Hiltzik, Michael A. Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age. New York: HarperBusiness, 1999. Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011. Kahney, Leander. Jony Ive: The Man Behind Apple’s Greatest Products. New York: Portfolio Hardcover, 2013. Krueger, Myron W. Artificial Reality II. Boston: Addison-Wessley Professional, 1991. Lashinsky, Adam.


pages: 543 words: 153,550

Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You by Scott E. Page

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Checklist Manifesto, computer age, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, discrete time, distributed ledger, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental economics, first-price auction, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Higgs boson, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, money market fund, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Network effects, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, Phillips curve, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, race to the bottom, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, school choice, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, selection bias, six sigma, social graph, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Great Moderation, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the rule of 72, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, value at risk, web application, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

As the personal computer market grew, other companies developed software compatible with DOS, providing more positive feedbacks. These events—the success of DOS, the growth of the personal computer market, and the development of software running on the DOS platform—can be thought of as one color of ball being consistently drawn from the urn. Each outcome made the next more likely. The computer age may have been inevitable, but Microsoft’s central role and the growth of the personal computer represent one of many potential paths. We can contrast the path dependence of Microsoft’s growth with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, which many see as a tipping point that led to World War I.

Quarterly Journal of Economics 87, no. 3: 355–374. Squicciarini, Mara, and Nico Voigtländer. 2015. “Human Capital and Industrialization: Evidence from the Age of Enlightenment.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 30, no. 4: 1825–1883. Starfield, Anthony, Karl Smith, and Andrew Bleloch. 1994. How to Model It: Problem Solving for the Computer Age. Minneapolis, MN: Burgess International. Stein, Richard A. 2011. “Superspreaders in Infectious Diseases.” International Journal of Infectious Diseases 15, no. 8: e510–e513. Sterman, John D. 2000. Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World. New York: McGraw-Hill. Sterman, John. 2006.


pages: 524 words: 154,652

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

Land of Lost Content: The Luddite Revolt. London: Heinemann, 1986. Romilly, Samuel. The Life of Sir Samuel Romilly Written by Himself, with a Selection from His Correspondence. 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1842. Sale, Kirkpatrick. Rebels against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution; Lessons for the Computer Age. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995. Sandler, Matt. The Black Romantic Revolution: Abolitionist Poets at the End of Slavery. London: Verso, 2020. Say, Jean-Baptiste. A Treatise on Political Economy. Trans. Charles Robert Trinsop. London, 1821. First published as Traité d’économie politique, ou simple exposition de la manière dont se forment les richesses (1803).

Imagine millions of ordinary people Scenes like the one that opens the book, as well as numerous newspaper accounts, are detailed in nearly every major Luddite history, including Alan Brooke and Leslie Kipling, Liberty or Death: Radicals, Republicans and Luddites 1728–1828 (Huddersfield, UK: Huddersfield Local History Society, 2012); Frank Peel, The Risings of the Luddites, Chartists, and Plugdrawers (Heckmondwike, UK, 1880); and Kirkpatrick Sale, Rebels against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution; Lessons for the Computer Age (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995). The scene describes the way the Luddites typically assembled before embarking on a raid against an entrepreneur who ran automating machinery. 2. The public cheered F[rank]. O[gley]. Darvall, Popular Disturbances and Public Order in Regency England: Being an Account of the Luddite and Other Disorders in England During the Years 1811–1817 and of the Attitude and Activity of the Authorities (London: Oxford University Press, 1934; reprint, 1969), introduction. 3.


pages: 223 words: 58,732

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

But the growth vanished almost as quickly as it came. We are still awaiting the productivity gains we were assured would result from the digital economy. With the exception of most of the 1990s, productivity growth has never recaptured the rates it achieved in the post-war decades. ‘You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics,’ said Robert Solow, the Nobel Prize-winning economist. Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire, who has controversially backed Donald Trump, put it more vividly: ‘We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters [Twitter].’ That may be about to change, with the acceleration of the robot revolution and the spread of artificial intelligence.


pages: 204 words: 58,565

Keeping Up With the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics by Thomas H. Davenport, Jinho Kim

behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, business intelligence, business process, call centre, computer age, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, forensic accounting, global supply chain, Gregor Mendel, Hans Rosling, hypertext link, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, longitudinal study, margin call, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Myron Scholes, Netflix Prize, p-value, performance metric, publish or perish, quantitative hedge fund, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Shiller, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, six sigma, Skype, statistical model, supply-chain management, TED Talk, text mining, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport

Rama Ramakrishnan, “Three Ways to Analytic Impact,” The Analytic Age blog, July 26, 2011, http://blog.ramakrishnan.com/. 10. People v. Collins, 68 Cal. 2d 319 (1968); http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=2393563144534950884; “People v. Collins,” http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/People_v._Collins. Chapter 3 1. A. M. Starfield, Karl A. Smith, and A. L. Bleloch, How to Model It: Problem Solving for the Computer Age (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 19. 2. George Box and Norman R. Draper, Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces (New York: Wiley, 1987), 424. 3. Garth Sundem, Geek Logik: 50 Foolproof Equations for Everyday Life, (New York: Workman, 2006). 4. Minnie Brashears, Mark Twain, Son of Missouri (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2007). 5.


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

The path from the vacuum-tube triode to the silicon integrated circuit was historically short—a matter of a few decades—and geographically even shorter. Hewlett-Packard managed to bridge the two technologies cleanly, and that stability amid the churning start-up seas helped make it the region’s signature firm, even as its followers overtook it in size. Unlike Litton or Varian, HP made it from the tube to the computer age on its own terms. More than Shockley or even Fred Terman, H and P were suited to the era. Offshore To understand the emergence of Silicon Valley, we need to grasp more than the procession of inventors and investors who came to define the region. We also need to understand the role Silicon Valley played in the transition from a chaotic global order based on national rivalries and alliances to the Cold War’s bipolar reorganization.

Ibid, 22. 10. “The 1968 Demo—Interactive,” Doug Engelbart Institute, https://dougengelbart.org/content/view/374/464. 11. Leslie Berlin, Troublemakers: Silicon Valley’s Coming of Age (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), 29. 12. Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (New York: HarperBusiness, 1999), 67, 78. 13. Engelbart, “Augmenting Human Intellect,” para. 4d. 14. John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said—: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Viking, 2005), 26–28. 15. Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, Perennial Library (New York: Harper & Row, 1995), 178. 16.

Margaret O’Mara, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (New York: Penguin Press, 2019), 189. 12. Steve Johnson, “What You Didn’t Know about Apple’s ‘1984’ Super Bowl Ad,” Chicago Tribune, February 2, 2017. 13. Sol Libes, “Bytelines,” BYTE, June 1961, 208. 14. Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (New York: HarperBusiness, 1999), 335. 15. Brice Carnahan and James O. Wilkes, The IBM Personal Computers and the Michigan Terminal System (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan College of Engineering, 1984), 1.32. 16. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning, 344–45. 17. Andrew Pollack, “Big I.B.M. Has Done It Again,” New York Times, March 27, 1983, https://www.nytimes.com/1983/03/27/business/big-ibm-has-done-it-again.html. 18.


pages: 202 words: 62,901

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism by Leigh Phillips, Michal Rozworski

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, combinatorial explosion, company town, complexity theory, computer age, corporate raider, crewed spaceflight, data science, decarbonisation, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fulfillment center, G4S, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kiva Systems, linear programming, liquidity trap, mass immigration, Mont Pelerin Society, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, post scarcity, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now

Today, this may seem obvious (and its very obviousness is likely a product of how influential cybernetic notions have become in our culture; this is where the word “feedback” comes from), but at the time, this was a revelation wherein linear, “if this, then that” control systems dominated. As Richard Barbrook recounts in his 2007 history of the dawn of the computer age, Imaginary Futures, despite the military engineering origins of the field, Wiener would go on to be radicalized by the Cold War and the arms race, not only declaring that scientists had a responsibility to refuse to participate in military research, but asserting the need for a socialist interpretation of cybernetics.


Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression by Geoff Cox, Alex McLean

4chan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, bash_history, bitcoin, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, finite state, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Conference 1984, Ian Bogost, Jacques de Vaucanson, language acquisition, Larry Wall, late capitalism, means of production, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, power law, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Slavoj Žižek, social software, social web, software studies, speech recognition, SQL injection, stem cell, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, The Nature of the Firm, Turing machine, Turing test, Vilfredo Pareto, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

London: Pluto Press, 2008. Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. References 137 Bogost, Ian. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Bolter, Jay David. Turing’s Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Bolter, Jay, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Borrelli, Loretta. “The Suicide Irony: Seppukoo and Web 2.0 Suicide Machine.” Digimag 52 (March 2010). Available at http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?


pages: 219 words: 63,495

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know by Richard Watson

23andMe, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, Charles Babbage, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, digital Maoism, digital map, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, gamification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, hive mind, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Shuttleworth, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peak oil, personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Florida, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, smart transportation, space junk, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, telepresence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Turing test, urban decay, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, young professional

And don’t think you’re safe at work either: 75 percent of US companies monitor employees’ email and 30 percent track keystrokes and the amount of time employees spend on their computer. Monitoring employee activity isn’t new, but it is becoming more pervasive thanks to digital technologies that make activities easier to capture, store and search. Other by-products of the computer age that go unnoticed include cell phones, most of which now contain cameras, which may one day be linked to face recognition technology. On top of that, people are increasingly choosing to communicate with each other through digital interfaces, which leave a digital trace. Nothing is private As a consequence, we can now look very closely at things that were previously unobservable.


Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Politics and Society in Modern America) by Louis Hyman

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business logic, card file, central bank independence, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, p-value, pattern recognition, post-Fordism, profit maximization, profit motive, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technological determinism, technology bubble, the built environment, transaction costs, union organizing, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Dixon saw this legislation as important because “the rapid growth of interconnected credit bureaus tied in with computer centers and telephone lines constitutes an agglomerate growth pattern which will likely parallel, in ultimate significance, the history of the railroad and telephone systems.”157 Credit reporting would form the infrastructure of the computer-age economy, as the railroad and telephone had made possible the industrial-age economy. To Dixon and the authors of the bill, the fairness of the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) was in preserving the accuracy of information. Dixon saw “the two words as synonymous in this bill. Fair and accurate.”158 These two issues, privacy and accuracy, drove the debates surrounding the FCRA, and how to resolve them would shape the future of the credit reporting industry, which, outside of legal questions, was under other pressures as well.

As Retail Credit Company used its large capital to become Equifax in the mid-1970s, it changed more than its name—it changed the way it did business. The older, inaccurate, expensive investigative reports gave way to the new methods. The profitability of the new credit methods led to Credit Data’s acquisition by the large conglomerate TRW in the early 1970s.186 Following the efficiencies of the computer age, TRW abandoned investigative reports on consumers and had no information about habits, moral character, driving record, or health in their records, just financial data on outstanding debts, income, and payment histories.187 Rather than relying on investigators, TRW relied on accounting books. The information was cheaper, more reliable, and easier to quantify and to store on a computer’s magnetic tape.


pages: 578 words: 168,350

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, British Empire, butterfly effect, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean water, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, driverless car, Dunbar number, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, housing crisis, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of agriculture, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Benioff, Marchetti’s constant, Masdar, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Murray Gell-Mann, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Suez canal 1869, systematic bias, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, working poor

Indeed, the litany of such discoveries both large and small is testament to the extraordinary ingenuity of the collective human mind. Unfortunately, however, there is another serious catch. Theory dictates that such discoveries must occur at an increasingly accelerating pace; the time between successive innovations must systematically and inextricably get shorter and shorter. For instance, the time between the “Computer Age” and the “Information and Digital Age” was perhaps twenty years, in contrast to the thousands of years between the Stone, Bronze, and Iron ages. If we therefore insist on continuous open-ended growth, not only does the pace of life inevitably quicken, but we must innovate at a faster and faster rate.

This quintessential modern human dynamic has led to the speeding up of the pace of life and of the rate at which we have to make major innovations in order to combat the imminent threat of what finite time singularities portend. The image of an accelerating Sisyphus haunts us. The time between the “Computer Age” and the “Information and Digital Age” was no more than about thirty years—to be compared with the thousands of years between the Stone, Bronze, and Iron ages. The clock by which we measure time on our watches and digital devices is very misleading; it is determined by the daily rotation of the Earth around its axis and its annual rotation around the sun.


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One Day in August: Ian Fleming, Enigma, and the Deadly Raid on Dieppe by David O’keefe

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, card file, Charles Babbage, computer age, conceptual framework, friendly fire, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Suez canal 1869, trade route, trickle-down economics

Kahn, David. The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. ——. Seizing the Enigma: The Race to Break the German U-Boat Codes: 1939–1943. Barnsley, UK: Pen and Sword, 2012. Montaqim, Abdul. Pioneers of the Computer Age: From Charles Babbage to Steve Jobs. Monsoon Media, 2012. Newton, David E. Alan Turing: A Study in Light and Shadow. Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2003. Paterson, Michael. Voices of the Codebreakers. London: David and Charles, 2007. Sebag-Montefiore, Hugh. Enigma. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000.

The author would like to thank Joel Silver for his kind help in sorting through the massive collection. 18. Charles Babbage, The Writings of Charles Babbage (Alvin, TX: Halcyon Press, 2009), Kindle edition; Bruce Collier and James MacLachlan, Charles Babbage and the Engines of Perfection (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Abdul Montaqim, Pioneers of the Computer Age: From Charles Babbage to Steve Jobs (London: Monsoon Media, 2012). The vast collection at Indiana University includes Babbage’s ‘Reflexions on the decline of science in England, and some of its causes’ from 1830 and the work of Dionysius Lardner, who in 1834 penned a review of seven papers by or about Babbage’s work including the Second ‘Difference Engine’ and one on a projected analytical machine. 19.


pages: 391 words: 71,600

Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella, Greg Shaw, Jill Tracie Nichols

3D printing, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, anti-globalists, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bretton Woods, business process, cashless society, charter city, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fault tolerance, fulfillment center, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Mars Rover, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, place-making, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Soul of a New Machine, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, two-sided market, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, young professional, zero-sum game

In recent decades, the world has invested hundreds of billions of dollars in technology infrastructure—PCs, cell phones, tablets, printers, robots, smart devices of many kinds, and a vast networking system to link them all. The aim has been to increase productivity and efficiency. Yet what, exactly, do we have to show for it? Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Solow once quipped, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” However, from the mid-1990s to 2004, the PC Revolution did help to reignite once-stagnant productivity growth. But other than this too brief window, worldwide per capita GDP growth—a proxy for economic productivity—has been disappointing, just a little over 1 percent per year.


pages: 233 words: 66,446

Bitcoin: The Future of Money? by Dominic Frisby

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, capital controls, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer age, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, friendly fire, game design, Hacker News, hype cycle, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, Julian Assange, land value tax, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Occupy movement, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing complete, Twitter Arab Spring, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, War on Poverty, web application, WikiLeaks

When such communication takes place electronically, and confidentiality is desired – perhaps it is a communication between you and your bank, and you don’t want internet service providers, crooks or the NSA to know what’s being said – some sort of encryption software is used. As you can imagine, the role of encryption in the computer age is enormous. The science of encoding and decoding data to maintain privacy is the science of cryptography. And remember, when Satoshi Nakamoto first announced Bitcoin, he did it on a mailing list only read by people with an interest in cryptography. The primitive tropical island that would become a blueprint for Bitcoin The tiny tropical island of Yap lies in the eastern Pacific Ocean, about a thousand miles to the east of the Philippines.


pages: 212 words: 68,754

Thinking in Numbers by Daniel Tammet

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, computer age, dematerialisation, Edmond Halley, Georg Cantor, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index card, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Paul Erdős, Searching for Interstellar Communications, Vilfredo Pareto

Near the end of the line, I gathered my things – my bearings too – and stepped out. The platform was covered in litter and broken glass, but for an instant, at least, it felt unambiguously good to be back. Time is more than an attitude or a frame of mind. It is about more than seeing the hourglass as half empty or half full. More than ever in this age, let us call it the computer age, a lifetime has become a discrete and eminently measurable quality. To date, to believe the surveys in newspapers, I have spent some one hundred thousand minutes standing in a queue, and five hundred hours making tea. I have spent a year’s worth of waking days on the hunt for lost things. This year, I knew, contained my twelve thousand and twelfth day and night.


pages: 230 words: 71,320

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

affirmative action, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Boeing 747, computer age, corporate raider, crew resource management, medical residency, old-boy network, Pearl River Delta, popular electronics, power law, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, union organizing, upwardly mobile, why are manhole covers round?

been the massive, expensive mainframes of the sort sitting in the white expanse of the Michigan Computer Center. For years, every hacker and electronics whiz had dreamt of the day when a computer would come along that was small and inexpensive enough for an ordinary person to use and own. That day had finally arrived. If January 1975 was the dawn of the personal computer age, then who would be in the best position to take advantage of itThe same principles apply here that applied to the era of John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. “If you're too old in nineteen seventy-five, then you'd already have a job at IBM out of college, and once people started at IBM, they had a real hard time making the transition to the new world,” says Nathan Myhrvold, who was a top executive at Microsoft for many years.


pages: 235 words: 62,862

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek by Rutger Bregman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Branko Milanovic, cognitive dissonance, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Graeber, Diane Coyle, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, George Gilder, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, income inequality, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, low skilled workers, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, precariat, public intellectual, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wage slave, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey

Whereas in 1800, water power still supplied England with three times the amount of energy as steam, 70 years later English steam engines were generating the power equivalent of 40 million grown men.24 Machine power was replacing muscle power on a massive scale. Now, two centuries later, our brains are next. And it’s high time, too. “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics,” the economist Bob Solow said in 1987. Computers could already do some pretty neat things, but their economic impact was minimal. Like the steam engine, the computer needed time to, well, gather steam. Or compare it to electricity: All the major technological innovations happened in the 1870s, but it wasn’t until around 1920 that most factories actually switched to electric power.25 Fast forward to today, and chips are doing things that even ten years ago were still deemed impossible.


Kindle Fire: The Missing Manual by Peter Meyers

computer age, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos, lock screen, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex

Visit the Dojo to select new styles, more of which become available the more you play. Quizzes and Brain Teasers Rest your fingers. Time to exercise your mind. Video games meet education in these brain-building apps. The Secret of Grisly Manor ($0.99). This app is one of the best examples of what some predicted would happen to novels in the Computer Age: They’d turn into audience-piloted explorations of richly illustrated worlds. Behind each door, and within each room, users could inspect objects, chew on clues (“There’s something hidden underneath the grate”), and decide how to navigate the storyline. Needless to say, Stephen King still has a job.


pages: 281 words: 71,242

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer

artificial general intelligence, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, Colonization of Mars, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, income inequality, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, PageRank, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, yellow journalism

He imagined a test of the computer’s intelligence in which a person would send written questions to a human and a machine in another room. Receiving two sets of answers, the interrogator would have to guess which answers came from the human. Turing predicted that within fifty years the machine would routinely fool the questioner. • • • THIS PREDICTION SET THE TERMS for the computer age. Ever since, engineers have futilely attempted to build machines capable of passing Turing’s test. For many of those seeking to invent AI, their job is just a heap of mathematics, a thrilling intellectual challenge. But for a significant chunk of others, it’s a theological pursuit. They are at the center of a transformative project that will culminate in the dawning of a new age.


The Intelligent Asset Allocator: How to Build Your Portfolio to Maximize Returns and Minimize Risk by William J. Bernstein

asset allocation, backtesting, book value, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, commoditize, computer age, correlation coefficient, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, fixed income, index arbitrage, index fund, intangible asset, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, p-value, passive investing, prediction markets, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, South Sea Bubble, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, the rule of 72, the scientific method, time value of money, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, Wayback Machine, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

Why is this so important? As already discussed the most diversification benefit is obtained from uncorrelated assets. The above Math Details: How to Calculate a Correlation Coefficient In this book’s previous versions, I included a section on the manual calculation of the correlation coefficient. In the personal computer age, this is an exercise in masochism.The easiest way to do this is with a spreadsheet. Let’s assume that you have 36 monthly returns for two assets, A and B. Enter the returns in columns A and B, next to each other, spanning rows 1 to 36 for each pair of values. In Excel,enter in a separate cell the formula ⫽ CORREL(A1:A36, B1:B36) In Quattro Pro, the formula would be @CORREL(A1..A36, B1..B36) Both of these packages also contain a tool that will calculate a “correlation grid” of all of the correlations of an array of data for more than two assets.Those of you who would like an explanation of the steps involved in calculating a correlation coefficient are referred to a standard statistics text. 40 The Intelligent Asset Allocator analysis suggests that there is not much benefit from mixing domestic small and large stocks and that there is great benefit from mixing REITs and Japanese small stocks.


pages: 239 words: 56,531

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

They will have enough power to be entirely shaped by software.” 18 . Kay was especially impressed by the ways in which MIT mathematician Seymour Papert used Piaget’s theories when he developed the LOGO programming language. 19 . See Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (New York: HarperCollins, 1999); Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander, Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer (New York: William Morrow, 1988). 20 . I take this phrase from Robert X. Cringely’s documentary for the Public Broadcasting System, The Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires (1996), which drew from his earlier book Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date (New York: Harper Business, 1993). 21 .


pages: 266 words: 67,272

Fun Inc. by Tom Chatfield

Adrian Hon, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, An Inconvenient Truth, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, behavioural economics, Boris Johnson, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer age, credit crunch, game design, invention of writing, longitudinal study, moral panic, publication bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, upwardly mobile

And yet, as the next chapter explores their own brief history represents an evolution of incredible rapidity and scope: one that has from the beginning lain at the cutting edge of the computer revolution, and that is now beginning to remould our actions everywhere from the classroom to the boardroom to the arenas of twenty-first century warfare. CHAPTER 2 Technology and magic ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ wrote the science fiction novelist Arthur C Clarke in 1973, giving the computer age one of its most memorable maxims. Had Clarke, who died in 2008, lived just a year longer, he would have been able to see a piece of technology being demonstrated at a 2009 Expo in Los Angeles that looked, to many in the audience, very close to magic indeed. The machine, perched on a black conical stand, looked like nothing so much as an oversized television remote control.


pages: 272 words: 64,626

Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs by Andy Kessler

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, disintermediation, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Michael Milken, Money creation, Netflix Prize, packet switching, personalized medicine, pets.com, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, vertical integration, wealth creators, Yogi Berra

So what I ended up doing right before the final, I guess a few days before, I went to the course Web site, downloaded all the images, made a new Web site, where there was a page for each image, right, where the image was there and there was a box to add comments, and then I sent out a link to this site to the class list, and said, ‘Hey, guys, I built a study tool. Everyone just can go use this to go comment and see what everyone else was commenting on these photos.’” Cheating in the computer age. Or was it? “So within an hour or two, a bunch of people in the class went and filled out all the information about the photos. I just went back and kind of absorbed it all. I got an A in the class. I think generally, I heard something afterwards, that the grades in that class on the final were way higher than they have ever been.”


pages: 245 words: 12,162

In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman: Mathematics at the Limits of Computation by William J. Cook

Bletchley Park, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, financial engineering, four colour theorem, index card, John von Neumann, linear programming, NP-complete, P = NP, p-value, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, traveling salesman, Turing machine

It is not that we have a desperate thirst for the details of particular optimal tours, but rather a desperate need to know that the TSP can be pushed back just a bit further. The salesman may defeat us in the end, but not without a good fight. From 49 to 85,900 The heroes of the field are Dantzig, Fulkerson, and Johnson. Despite the dawning of the computer age and a steady onslaught of new researchers tackling the TSP, the 49-city example that Dantzig et al. solved by hand stood as an unapproachable record for seventeen years. Algorithms were developed, computer codes written, and research reports published, but year after year their record held its ground.


pages: 244 words: 66,599

Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything by Steven Levy

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Atkinson, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, General Magic , Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, information retrieval, information trail, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Pepsi Challenge, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, the medium is the message, Vannevar Bush

Allover the Valley, people were whispering about how a small group of geniuses was devising something along the lines of Apple's impressive but prohibitively expensive Lisa computer. Introduced in January 1983, Lisa had been acclaimed as offering breakthrough technology, but few could afford it. Hopes abounded, however, that this new computer would break through to the masses, single-handedly launching the computer age into the stratosphere. Those depressed by the ease with which IBM had rocketed ahead of Apple looked to this new machine as the magic bullet that could stop Big Blue in its tracks. Very little in the way of specifics had leaked out of Apple, but it was common knowledge that the shipping date had slipped more than once.


pages: 232 words: 71,237

Kill It With Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems by Marianne Bellotti

anti-pattern, barriers to entry, business logic, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, continuous integration, create, read, update, delete, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, Dennis Ritchie, DevOps, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Google Chrome, Hans Moravec, iterative process, Ken Thompson, loose coupling, microservices, minimum viable product, Multics, no silver bullet, off-by-one error, platform as a service, pull request, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Stallman, risk tolerance, Schrödinger's Cat, side project, software as a service, Steven Levy, systems thinking, web application, Y Combinator, Y2K

The best codes now were ones that were a bit more complex, had a fixed length, and ultimately stored more data. A few different systems were developed. The first one to stick was developed by Emile Baudot in 1870. The so-called Baudot code, aka International Telegraph Alphabet No. 1, was a 5-bit binary system. Fast-forward to the early computer age when people were developing massive room-sized machines that also were using binary systems. They needed a way to input data and instructions, but they had no visual interface. Computers wouldn’t be developed to work with monitors until 1964 when Bell Labs incorporated the first primitive visual interface into the Multics time-sharing system.


In the Age of the Smart Machine by Shoshana Zuboff

affirmative action, American ideology, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, data acquisition, demand response, deskilling, factory automation, Ford paid five dollars a day, fudge factor, future of work, industrial robot, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, job automation, lateral thinking, linked data, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, old-boy network, optical character recognition, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, social web, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

Whenever one is dealing with a multi- plicity of individuals on whom a task or a particular form of behavior must be imposed, the panoptic schema may be used."? THE PANOPTIC POWER OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY Information systems that translate, record, and display human behavior can provide the computer age version of universal transparency with a degree of illumination that would have exceeded even Bentham's most outlandish fantasies. Such systems can become information panopticons that, freed from the constraints of space and time, do not depend upon the physical arrangement of buildings or the laborious record keeping of industrial administration.

Ramchandran Jaikumar, "Postindustrial Manufacturing," Harvard Business Review (November-December 1986): 69-76. 8. David F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); see particularly 144-92. 9. Harley Shaiken, Work Transformed: Automation and Labor in the Computer Age (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1985), 264. 10. Robert Howard, Brave New Workplace (New York: Viking, 1985); see partic- ularly 15-35. 11. The psychiatrist R. D. Laing used the term "knots" to describe the com- plexities of interpersonal communication and understanding. See his Knots (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970).


Longevity: To the Limits and Beyond (Research and Perspectives in Longevity) by Jean-Marie Robine, James W. Vaupel, Bernard Jeune, Michel Allard

caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, computer age, conceptual framework, confounding variable, demographic transition, Drosophila, epigenetics, life extension, longitudinal study, phenotype, stem cell, stochastic process

As shown by Coale and Kisker (1986, p. 398), the ratios of those aged 95 years or over to those aged 70 or over in the 23 countries with accurate data quality were all less than six per thousand, whereas the ratios for the 28 countries with poor data clearly showed the exaggeration of very old persons aged 95 or over, extending from 1 % to 10 %. This ratio for male and female Han Chinese in 1990 is 0.76 per thousand and 2.18 per thousand, respectively, which is almost exactly the same as their Swedish counterparts in the period from 1985 -1994. Coale and Kisker calculated 2 It is important to ask for the date of birth and to compute age by subtracting from the date of the census or survey (if respondents supply the Chinese calendar, conversion to the Western calendar is needed). If the questionnaire asks the individual's age, the Chinese system of reckoning nominal age makes the response ambiguous, because a person may be counted as one-year-old on the day of birth and one year older with each new year according to the Chinese tradition. 94 Wang Zhenglian et al.


pages: 265 words: 79,896

Red Rover: Inside the Story of Robotic Space Exploration, From Genesis to the Mars Rover Curiosity by Roger Wiens

Apollo 11, computer age, James Webb Space Telescope, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, Ronald Reagan, Skype

During the concept phase, our support staff at JPL and Lockheed Martin consisted of the minimum number of people—basically their “dreamworks” proposal hotshots who could extract the critical information from the various experts in propulsion, thermal, navigation, and other specialties. The hotshots sent the information on to us. Actually pulling the information together into a coherent proposal was going to fall to Don and me. The word-processing era was just coming of age. Having been born closer to the computer age than Don, I took charge of publishing the volumes, while he reviewed everything and coordinated inputs. We had graduated from the TRS-80 computer to a “386” that was connected to a printer. The most recent advance was an e-mail hookup. E-mail at this point consisted of simple messages; attachments were as yet unheard of.


pages: 269 words: 74,955

The Crash Detectives: Investigating the World's Most Mysterious Air Disasters by Christine Negroni

Air France Flight 447, Airbus A320, Boeing 747, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, computer age, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, flag carrier, low cost airline, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, South China Sea, Tenerife airport disaster, Thomas Bayes, US Airways Flight 1549

The riveting story of how experience and teamwork saved the day follows in part 5 of this book. The lesson here comes from Pearson, who said he and others learned that day that they were unprepared for the monumental leap in technology—and this from a man who had literally flown into the jet age. “Transitioning from the noncomputer age to the computer age was more difficult than transitioning from propeller planes to jets, and it wasn’t because they flew twice as high and twice as fast. It was all the big unknowns,” he said. After years of accidents attributable to pilot error, automating some functions was intended to make flying more precise, more efficient, and of course safer.


Microchip: An Idea, Its Genesis, and the Revolution It Created by Jeffrey Zygmont

Albert Einstein, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, computer age, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, invisible hand, popular electronics, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

When the Yankees play, Sue wants to watch the game clear through, from opening pitch to final out, without any between-inning cuts to catch up on the contests shown on other channels. So John retreats to a separate TV, where he is free to surf around all of Major League Baseball. Now, in an era that is mislabeled the Computer Age, cable television may not appear to occupy the technical vanguard. But consider that the ball games that entertain Sue and John on so many summer evenings first arrive at the couple's cable company as dense streams of digitally encoded signals beamed earthward by a satellite. Forget the fact that so much of the inner workings of the satellite itself consist of unimaginably compressed and compact electronic circuits that contain mil- XIII xiv Prologue lions and millions of parts.


pages: 297 words: 77,362

The Nature of Technology by W. Brian Arthur

Andrew Wiles, Boeing 747, business process, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, computer age, creative destruction, double helix, endogenous growth, financial engineering, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, haute cuisine, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, locking in a profit, Mars Rover, means of production, Myron Scholes, power law, punch-card reader, railway mania, Recombinant DNA, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, technological singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

The Sociology of Invention. Follett, Chicago. 1935. Grübler, Arnulf. Technology and Global Change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. 1998. Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology. Harper and Row, New York. 1977. Hiltzik, Michael A. Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age. HarperBusiness, New York. 1999. Hughes, Thomas P. Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. 1983. Hughes, Thomas P. Rescuing Prometheus. Pantheon Books, New York. 1998. Jewkes, John, David Sawers, and Richard Stillerman. The Sources of Invention.


pages: 252 words: 79,452

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O'Connell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cosmological principle, dark matter, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, double helix, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Extropian, friendly AI, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, impulse control, income inequality, invention of the wheel, Jacques de Vaucanson, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Lyft, Mars Rover, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, profit motive, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Skype, SoftBank, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge

With these invocations, he moves his arms downward, then outward to either side, before clasping his hands to his chest. He turns about the room, bestowing a gesture of esoteric benediction on the four points of the compass, speaking in each of these positions the hallowed name of a prophet of the computer age: Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace. Then he stands perfectly still, this priestly young man, arms outspread in a cruciform posture. “Around me shines the bits,” he says, “and in me is the bytes. The data, the code, the communications. Forever, amen.” This young man, I learned, was a Swedish academic named Anders Sandberg.


pages: 345 words: 75,660

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

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

For some, the answer was easy: “Find where we do lots of calculations and substitute computers for humans; they’re better, faster, and cheaper.” For other businesses, it was less obvious. Nonetheless, they experimented. But the fruits of those experiments took time to materialize. Robert Solow, a Nobel laureate economist, lamented, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”1 From this challenge came an interesting business movement called “reengineering.” In 1993, Michael Hammer and James Champy, in their book Reengineering the Corporation, argued that to use the new general-purpose technology—computers—businesses needed to step back from their processes and outline the objective they wanted to achieve.


pages: 242 words: 73,728

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Jaron Lanier, jitney, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post scarcity, post-work, Potemkin village, precariat, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, total factor productivity, Turing test, two tier labour market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

Yet, as the economist Chad Syverson has noted, for roughly a quarter century following its introduction, productivity growth was relatively slow. The same is true for the first information technology era, when computers started to become ubiquitous in businesses and homes. As the economist Robert Solow—hence the Solow residual—quipped in 1987, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” In most cases, productivity did speed up once innovators invented complementary technologies and businesses had a long while to adjust—suggesting that the innovation gains and job losses of our new machine age might be just around the corner. If so, mass unemployment might be a result—and a UBI might be a necessary salve.


pages: 267 words: 71,941

How to Predict the Unpredictable by William Poundstone

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Bernie Madoff, Brownian motion, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, centre right, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Edward Thorp, Firefox, fixed income, forensic accounting, high net worth, index card, index fund, Jim Simons, John von Neumann, market bubble, money market fund, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, proprietary trading, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Rubik’s Cube, statistical model, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, transaction costs

He was welcome to do that because he had published work of such phenomenal value to AT&T that it would have been petty for anyone to complain. Shannon was the godfather of our digital universe. His MIT master’s thesis described how symbolic logic could be encoded in electrical circuits, and how those circuits might compute using binary 0s and 1s rather than decimal digits. This was one of the founding documents of the computer age. Shannon spent a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. His first wife, Norma, poured tea for Albert Einstein one time, who “told me I was married to a brilliant, brilliant man.” That was before Shannon published the work for which he’s most renowned, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.”


pages: 280 words: 74,559

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

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

But besides those older judgements regarding the often zealous manner in which GDP was used, by the late 1980s another criticism began to emerge. Now, some said, it was no longer capable of even measuring economic growth properly. This was most famously expressed by the economist Robert Solow when he claimed in 1987 that ‘you can see the computer age everywhere but the productivity statistics.’ That conclusion was a response to the ‘productivity paradox’ which so troubled economists at the time – namely, how investment in information technology over the 1980s had a seemingly negligible impact on productivity measures, which actually slowed over the decade.


pages: 253 words: 80,074

The Man Who Invented the Computer by Jane Smiley

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Bletchley Park, British Empire, c2.com, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Henri Poincaré, IBM and the Holocaust, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Karl Jansky, machine translation, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Pierre-Simon Laplace, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Turing machine, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture

In his recent volume of essays, historian John Lukacs catalogs the ways in which, seventy years later, World War II is still shaping the world we live in, even though all the power relationships and ideologies then in play, among the Allies and the Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany, have shifted utterly. In the index of Lukacs’s book, no mention is made of the computer. But, as we will see, the Second World War was the sine qua non of the invention of the computer and the transformation of the nature of information and the nature of human thought that the computer age has brought about. However, we begin with another war, a small war in a place very far removed from Rock Island, Illinois. Chapter One John Vincent Atanasoff’s father, Ivan, was born in 1876, in the midst of a period of climaxing political unrest. His parents were landed peasants in the Bulgarian village of Boyadzhik (about eighty miles from the Black Sea and perhaps halfway between Istanbul and Sofia).


Raw Data Is an Oxymoron by Lisa Gitelman

23andMe, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fixed income, folksonomy, Google Earth, Howard Rheingold, index card, informal economy, information security, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Louis Daguerre, Menlo Park, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, RFID, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, social graph, software studies, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, text mining, time value of money, trade route, Turing machine, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks

At the Smithsonian, he has curated a number of exhibits concerning the interplay of computing and aerospace technology. He is the author of several books on the history of computing, including Reckoners: The Prehistory of The Digital Computer (Greenwood Press, 1983), Beyond the Limits: Flight Enters the Computer Age (MIT Press, 1989), A History of Modern Computing, 2nd ed. (MIT Press, 2003), and Internet Alley: High Technology in Tysons Corner (MIT Press, 2008). Ann Fabian teaches American history at Rutgers University. Her most recent book is The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead (University of Chicago Press, 2010).


pages: 268 words: 75,850

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems-And Create More by Luke Dormehl

3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, computer age, death of newspapers, deferred acceptance, disruptive innovation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Google Glasses, High speed trading, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kodak vs Instagram, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine readable, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, speech recognition, stable marriage problem, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, upwardly mobile, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator

“My belief is that this will one day become the norm,” Boyce says of the Quantified Self. “It will become a commodity, with its own sense of social currency.” Shopping Is Creating One of the chapters in Douglas Coupland’s debut novel Generation X, written at the birth of the networked computer age, is titled “Shopping Is Not Creating.”9 It is a wonderfully pithy observation about 1960s activism sold off as 1990s commercialism, from an author whose fiction books Microserfs and JPod perfectly lampoon techno-optimism at the turn of the millennium. It is also no longer true. Every time a person shops online (or in a supermarket using a loyalty card) their identity is slightly altered, being created and curated in such a way that is almost imperceptible.


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

In the same way, a transfer of transportation away from the internal combustion engine to electrification may be technically possible, but will require an integrated power supply system and refuelling points before it can be fully adopted. Concerns about the lack of productivity growth and, therefore, the misvaluation of companies associated with technology, were widespread in the 1980s. In 1987, Nobel Laureate Robert Solow argued that ‘you can see the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistics’.12 These concerns faded when many economies saw a dramatic improvement in productivity in the 1990s. But the weakness in productivity growth in many economies since the Great Recession and the financial crisis has once more stimulated this debate.


pages: 280 words: 76,638

Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking by Matthew Syed

adjacent possible, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, cognitive load, computer age, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, delayed gratification, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, invention of writing, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, market bubble, mass immigration, microbiome, Mitch Kapor, persistent metabolic adaptation, Peter Thiel, post-truth, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuart Kauffman, tech worker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, traveling salesman, vertical integration

Recombination is about cross-pollination, reaching across the problem space, bringing together ideas that have never been connected before. We might call these ‘rebel combinations’: merging the old with the new, the alien and the familiar, the outside and the inside, the yin and the yang. This trend is not slowing up but accelerating in the computer age, with its vast networks. Think of Waze. This is classically recombinant, combining a location sensor, data transmission device, GPS system and social network. Or take Waymo, the self-driving car technology company, which brings together the internal combustion engine, fast computation, a new generation of sensors, extensive map and street information, and many other technologies.14 Indeed, almost all tech innovations connect disparate ideas, minds, concepts, technologies, data-sets and more.


pages: 256 words: 73,068

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

(In Britain it was the miners looking for a 35% pay increase that triggered the 3-day week. Margaret Thatcher would smash them for that when she was in power in 1985. Looking back, it seems now that the 1970s were really the end-time years of the West’s Industrial Revolution. We were waiting for the Computer Age that wasn’t quite ready. Desktop computers didn’t appear till the mid-1970s, and they weren’t built by companies, but by guys in garages. Acceleration also leads to exhaustion – because humans aren’t a version of Moore’s Law, where the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every 2 years, increasing speed and lowering price.


pages: 305 words: 75,697

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

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

Paul David (1990) provided one well-known historical account of these characteristics of a GPT, comparing the spread of computer technology in the 1980s to the electric dynamo in the early twentieth century, by way of explaining the ‘productivity paradox’ Robert Solow (1987, 36) had complained about: ‘You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.’ While the ultimate impacts were therefore substantial, the impact took a long time to show through in GDP and productivity figures. Although some economists question whether digital technologies are in the same league as these past GPTs in terms of their broad impact (Gordon 2016; Bloom et al. 2020), my view is that digital will be as transformational as earlier GPTs: eventually talking of the digital economy will sound as strange as talking of the electricity economy.


pages: 246 words: 81,625

On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins, Sandra Blakeslee

airport security, Albert Einstein, backpropagation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, Necker cube, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, superintelligent machines, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Turing test

From the dawn of the industrial revolution, people have viewed the brain as some sort of machine. They knew there weren't gears and cogs in the head, but it was the best metaphor they had. Somehow information entered the brain and the brain-machine determined how the body should react. During the computer age, the brain has been viewed as a particular type of machine, the programmable computer. And as we saw in chapter 1, AI researchers have stuck with this view, arguing that their lack of progress is only due to how small and slow computers remain compared to the human brain. Today's computers may be equivalent only to a cockroach brain, they say, but when we make bigger and faster computers they will be as intelligent as humans.


pages: 282 words: 80,907

Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design by Alvin E. Roth

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Build a better mousetrap, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, computer age, computerized markets, crowdsourcing, deferred acceptance, desegregation, Dutch auction, experimental economics, first-price auction, Flash crash, High speed trading, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, law of one price, Lyft, market clearing, market design, medical residency, obamacare, PalmPilot, proxy bid, road to serfdom, school choice, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, two-sided market, uber lyft, undersea cable

Apple chose a “closed” operating system that allowed it to control which apps could be sold to iPhone users. Google, which came later to the game, opted for an “open” system, publishing the code so that any developer could build for it. These choices echoed similarly opposing strategic decisions made by Apple and Microsoft at the dawn of the personal computer age. Anybody could make software for the PC platform, but only Apple (or those developers it allowed to do so) could make software for its personal computer, the Mac. These choices allowed the market for PC software to grow thick much more quickly than the market for Mac software. But Apple’s decision to keep both its hardware and software on a proprietary standard eventually allowed it to reap huge profits.


pages: 287 words: 86,919

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization by Alexander R. Galloway

Ada Lovelace, airport security, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bretton Woods, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computer Lib, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Dennis Ritchie, digital nomad, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, John Conway, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, macro virus, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, OSI model, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, post-industrial society, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, semantic web, SETI@home, stem cell, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, the market place, theory of mind, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Yochai Benkler

., the confluence of the controller and the virtualization apparatus), the motherboard, and physical networks both intra (a computer’s own guts) and inter (an Ethernet LAN, the Internet). However, the niceties of hardware design are less important than the immaterial software existing within it. For, as Alan Turing demonstrated at the dawn of the computer age, the important characteristic of a computer is that it can mimic any machine, any piece of hardware, provided that the functionality of that hardware can be broken down into logical processes. Thus, the key to protocol’s formal relations is in the realm of the immaterial software. Record The first term in Net form is the record.


pages: 272 words: 83,378

Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto by Mark Helprin

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, computer age, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, Easter island, hive mind, independent contractor, invention of writing, Jacquard loom, lateral thinking, plutocrats, race to the bottom, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, the scientific method, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

And the third is screening: preventing any and all means of attack from penetrating an assiduously defended perimeter. The American tendency has been to focus on the second approach, because it is cheaper and easier than the other two. It should not be surprising that we deal with mortal peril by turning to systems analysis born of the computer age and entirely reliant upon probabilities rather than upon hard-won certainties. This has become our way of life, and its advocates, drunk on the bureaucratic elixir of information-getting, believe in it as if it were religion. Which they must, for in light of its fundamental ineffectiveness continual support requires nothing less than blind faith.


pages: 345 words: 84,847

The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World by David Eagleman, Anthony Brandt

active measures, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 13, Burning Man, cloud computing, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, microbiome, Netflix Prize, new economy, New Journalism, pets.com, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Simon Singh, skeuomorphism, Solyndra, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, X Prize

Music outside the Lines: Ideas for Composing in K-12 Music Classrooms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Hilmes, Michele. Hollywood and Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Hiltzik, Michael A. Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. Hofstadter, Douglas R., and Emmanuel Sander. Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking. New York: Basic Books, 2013. Holt, Rackham. George Washington Carver: An American Biography. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1943. Horgan, John, and Jack Lorenzo.


pages: 282 words: 81,873

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

Andreessen’s buzzword simply means taking a regulated service provided by traditional banks, such as making cash loans to individuals, and offering the same service online, where legal precedent did not apply and where regulators were often poorly prepared to police. Startups can offer deceptively low price points for consumers and higher profits for investors precisely because they do not follow the same rules as offline competitors—rules that were designed for the protection of investors and consumers alike. Prior to the computer age, “unbundled” lending went by many names: usury, gouging, loansharking. But old-fashioned brick-and-mortar loan sharks didn’t enjoy advantages like ample VC funding and catchy dot-com domains. All that was old is new again, and with Wall Street in great disrepute, the tech-focused venture capital firms can pass off “peer-to-peer” lending and “microloan” schemes with outrageous fees and effective interest rates as a humane alternative to traditional banking.


pages: 301 words: 85,126

AIQ: How People and Machines Are Smarter Together by Nick Polson, James Scott

Abraham Wald, Air France Flight 447, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, business cycle, Cepheid variable, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Edward Charles Pickering, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Flash crash, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Higgs boson, index fund, information security, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, late fees, low earth orbit, Lyft, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, mass incarceration, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Moravec's paradox, more computing power than Apollo, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, ransomware, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, speech recognition, statistical model, survivorship bias, systems thinking, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, young professional

And if you deviate from the grammar in even the tiniest of ways, like by misspelling a word or forgetting a semicolon, then the machine basically just gives you the middle finger, or as we like to write it, 00100. For decades, these were the only terms under which people and computers could have a successful conversation. As you’ll learn in this chapter, they’re a huge improvement over the way things were at the start of the computer age, when people were forced talk to computers in their native “binary” language of 0s and 1s. But these terms hardly let us use our full powers of language to get our message across. Of course, we can also get computers to do a few trifling things by pointing, clicking, swiping, etc. But that’s just so crude.


pages: 791 words: 85,159

Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid

Alvin Toffler, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cross-subsidies, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, Frank Gehry, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Gilder, George Santayana, global village, Goodhart's law, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Productivity paradox, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Y2K

New York: Columbia University Press. Hesse, Carla. 1997. "Humanities and the Library in the Digital Age." In What's Happened to the Humanities?, edited by Alvin Kernan, 107 21. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hiltzik, Michael A. 1999. Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age. New York: Harper Business. Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1977. The Age of Revolution, 1789 1848. London: Abacus. Hoggdon, Paul N. 1997. "The Role of Intelligent Agent Software in the Future of Direct Response Marketing." Direct Marketing 59 (9): 10 18. Hornett, Andrea. In preparation. "Cyber Wars: Organizational Conflicts of a Virtual Team."


pages: 260 words: 80,230

Everything That Makes Us Human: Case Notes of a Children's Brain Surgeon by Jay Jayamohan

computer age, David Attenborough, epigenetics, Great Leap Forward, stem cell

It’s how registrars learn. It’s exactly as the treating hospital explained. One minute the baby’s fine, the next minute she’s on the floor. Scans show a clot near the top of the brain. I’m in the theatre running an eye once again over the scans. In the old days they’d all be pinned up on the walls, but in the computer age I get to look at them one at a time on screen then whizz forward to the next. It’s cheaper than printing, I have no doubt, but far from as efficacious. Who has time to be flicking between images on a laptop? We begin to prepare to do the blood clot/AVM treatment. When the anaesthetist wheels the patient in, I do another check of the room.


pages: 283 words: 85,906

The Clock Mirage: Our Myth of Measured Time by Joseph Mazur

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, computer age, Credit Default Swap, Danny Hillis, Drosophila, Eratosthenes, Henri Poincaré, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Pepto Bismol, quantum entanglement, self-driving car, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, time dilation, twin studies

By the mid-eighteenth century, clockmakers were able to miniaturize clock mechanisms so much that fairly accurate mantelpiece clocks were possible, and reasonably accurate pocket watches were made available to the few wealthy folks who could afford them—class symbols in the West. Clock design improved with a need for accuracy, and commercial demands of more and more accuracy continued with every civilization’s advance of time, from the eras of global exploration and shipping to the Industrial Revolution to the computer age. It was a slow advance from one timepiece design to another. Pace kept up with need. By the end of the nineteenth century almost every household in economically advanced western countries had at least one clock. Time was in control of everything one did; increasingly available precision was establishing a new order of behavioral regiments while dictating utilitarian routines and habits.


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

The social networks that ruled were Sixdegrees, AIM, Friendster and most importantly MySpace, which was so hot that Google saw it as a breakthrough to get a three-year advertising agreement with the network in 2006, which was signed at a glamorous party on Pebble Beach with such guests as Bono and Tony Blair. Finally, Google got to hang out with the big boys. Apple, on the other hand, was a veteran of the personal computer age, but after a long crisis it had become a symbol of the fact that an early dominant position does not mean much in a fast-moving market. However, Steve Jobs had recently returned to the company, and the launch of the iPod at the end of 2001 gave Apple new hope. In 2003, the company was finally able to enjoy a modest annual profit.


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

Knuth’s , which contained 4,500 “positive” and “negative” hyphenation patterns (for example, b-s, -cia, con-s, and -ment are potential hyphenation points but b-ly, -cing, io-n, and i-tin are not) extracted from Merriam-Webster’s Pocket Dictionary, along with a list of fourteen exceptional words, found 89 percent of all hyphenation points and placed almost none incorrectly.59 Reliable hyphenation had finally joined justification in the computer age. Computers enabled another innovation that even the most diligent of hand compositors would have been hard pressed to match. Whereas a Linotype operator focused exclusively on the single line at hand, and a hand compositor could jockey characters back and forth on the composing stick to adjust H&J over a few lines at a time, with the processing power of a computer behind it, could try every possible paragraph layout* in the search for the best overall combination of word spacing, letter spacing, and hyphenation.61 In order to compute the optimal paragraph layout, each decision made in setting a given text was assigned a “badness” score: marginal hyphens were bad, successive marginal hyphens worse; word and letter spaces were allowed to vary within a small range of values but excessive adjustment carried a penalty.


pages: 288 words: 86,995

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

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

Turing’s most important accomplishment came in 1936, just two years after he graduated from the University of Cambridge, when he laid out the mathematical principles for what is today called a “universal Turing machine”—essentially the conceptual blueprint for every real-world computer that has ever been built. Turing clearly understood at the very inception of the computer age that machine intelligence was a logical and perhaps inevitable extension of electronic computation. The phrase “artificial intelligence” was coined by John McCarthy, who was then a young mathematics professor at Dartmouth College. In the summer of 1956, McCarthy helped arrange the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence at the college’s New Hampshire campus.


pages: 708 words: 223,211

The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture by Brian Dear

air traffic controllers' union, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple Newton, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairchild Semiconductor, finite state, Future Shock, game design, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, lateral thinking, linear programming, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Palm Treo, Plato's cave, pre–internet, publish or perish, Ralph Nader, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, three-martini lunch, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

“Computer-Based Instruction in Nutrition.” NACTA Journal 18(4), 1974, 71–74. Paceley, C. “Dan Alpert Continues Shaping Technology and Education.” Physics Illinois News, Number 1, 2006, UIUC. ———. “The Innovation of PLATO Homework.” Physics Illinois News 1, 2006, 5, UIUC. Papert, S. “Computers and Learning,” in The Computer Age: A Twenty-Year Review, M. L. Dertousoz and J. Mosesm, eds. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1979, 73–86. ———. The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer. New York: Basic Books, 1993. ———. “Computer as Mudpie,” in Intelligent Schoolhouse: Readings on Computers and Learning, D. Peterson, ed.

Retrieved 2014-09-16 from http://www.dougengelbart.org/​firsts/​dougs-1968-demo.html. Engelbart, D., and B. English. “A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect,” in Proceedings of the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference, Vol. 33. San Francisco, December 9, 1968, 395–410. Hiltzik, M. Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age. San Francisco: HarperBusiness, 1999. Isaacson, W. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011. Kay, A. “An Early History of Smalltalk. HOPL-II.” The Second ACM SIGPLAN Conference on History of Programming Languages, Association for Computing Machinery, 1993, 69–95. ———. “The Reactive Engine.”


pages: 346 words: 89,180

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

Since the mid-1970s productivity growth in developed countries had been disappointingly low. This was despite the advent of widely hyped new computer technologies that were supposedly going to transform business for the better. Robert Solow, who contributed more to the study of economic growth than most, famously pointed out in 1987 that the impact of the Computer Age could be seen everywhere but in the productivity statistics (Solow 1987). Goaded by these criticisms, statistical agencies, led by the US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), began to examine their treatment of information and information technology more closely. They introduced two types of innovation.


pages: 355 words: 92,571

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets by John Plender

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, diversification, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Golden arches theory, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, money market fund, moral hazard, moveable type in China, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb and founder of the company that turned into the modern General Electric, only managed three months at school, where his teacher referred to him as ‘addled’ – a misjudgement that might rank in history with Emperor Joseph II of Austria telling Mozart that The Marriage of Figaro had too many notes. Edison was taught at home by his formidable mother, evidently to great effect. Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, left school in Edinburgh at fifteen, having achieved poor grades and been notable for frequent bunking off. More recently, in the computer age, Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, famously dropped out of Harvard University, while Michael Dell, who started his personal computer business in a dormitory room at the University of Texas at Austin, never completed his degree course. Steve Jobs, co-founding genius of Apple, dropped out of Reed College in Portland, Oregon.


pages: 340 words: 96,149

@War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex by Shane Harris

air gap, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Brian Krebs, centralized clearinghouse, Citizen Lab, clean water, computer age, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, don't be evil, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, Firefox, information security, John Markoff, Julian Assange, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, peer-to-peer, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Stuxnet, systems thinking, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

So they brought in a hacker. He was an ex–military officer and a veteran of the military’s clandestine cyber campaigns. He’d cut his teeth in some of the army’s earliest information-warfare operations in the mid-1990s, the kind designed to get inside an enemy’s head more than his databases. These were computer-age variants of classic propaganda campaigns; they required military hackers to know how to penetrate an enemy’s communications systems and transmit messages that looked as if they came from a trusted source. Later the former officer’s work evolved into going after insurgents and terrorists on the battlefields of Iraq, tracking them down via their cell phones and Internet messages.


pages: 327 words: 90,542

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash, 1929, Penguin, 1975. ——, The Age of Uncertainty, Houghton Mifflin, 1977. ——, The Affluent Society, Mariner, 1998. Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, Penguin, 2012. Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age, Harper Business, 1991. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, Vintage, 2005. Charles P. Kindleberger, Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crisis, Basic Books, 1978. Luuk van Middelaar, The Passage to Europe: How a Continent Became a Union, Yale University Press, 2013.


words: 49,604

The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business cycle, clean water, company town, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, Edward Glaeser, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, full employment, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, Mahbub ul Haq, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McJob, Meghnad Desai, microcredit, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, night-watchman state, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, pension reform, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, spinning jenny, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, Tragedy of the Commons, two tier labour market, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, working-age population

Impatient shoppers spend minutes waiting for an under-trained sales clerk to figure out how to enter a purchase on the terminal, which will control the inventory, and for their credit card to be validated. Economists have dubbed this the productivity puzzle. Nobel Laureate Robert Solow famously joked: ‘You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics’.7 So why have computers not generated extra growth in output? There are at least three answers: under-measurement of the output of industries using information technology; over-estimation of the importance of computers relative to all other types of capital equipment; and over-optimism about how quickly new technologies spread.


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

The innovations that music inspired turned out to unlock other doors in the adjacent possible, in fields seemingly unrelated to music, the way the “Instrument Which Plays by Itself” carved out a pathway that led to textile design and computer software. Seeking out new sounds led us to create new tools—which invariably suggested new uses for those tools. Legendary violin maker Stradivari’s workshop Consider one of the most essential and commonly used inventions of the computer age: the QWERTY keyboard. Many of us today spend a significant portion our waking hours pressing keys with our fingertips to generate a sequence of symbols on a screen or page: typing up numbers in a spreadsheet, writing e-mails, or tapping out texts on virtual keyboards displayed on smartphone screens.


pages: 273 words: 93,419

Let them eat junk: how capitalism creates hunger and obesity by Robert Albritton

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bretton Woods, California gold rush, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Food sovereignty, Haber-Bosch Process, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, land reform, late capitalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, South Sea Bubble, the built environment, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile

Consumers’ needs, wants and desires are almost totally socially constructed in their historical specificity. They are constructed by the actual array of commodities available, by their price, by the socioeconomic status of the consumer and by marketing or sociocultural practices that shape desires. American consumers in 1870 would not place an automobile high on their preference schedule, nor in the computer age would they likely pine for a mechanical typewriter. People might want to take public transportation to work if offered the option, but lacking adequate public transportation, they may be forced to struggle with gridlock every day in their personal car. The desire for a leopardskin coat is not likely to be high on the want list of poor women.


pages: 286 words: 90,530

Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think by Alan Grafen; Mark Ridley

Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, bioinformatics, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Dava Sobel, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, Haight Ashbury, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, loose coupling, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, phenotype, profit maximization, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, when PDP 8 and PDP 11 computers the size of a room had far less capacity than does a hand calculator today, and when you had to store your programs and data on reams of paper tape or enormous stacks of punch cards, Richard was right at the forefront of their use in recording and analysing behavioural data. He dragged us fellow members of the Animal Behaviour Group at Oxford into the computer age, teaching us how to write programs in machine code. He also invented the ‘Dawkins Organ’, an early event recorder that enabled one to record behavioural data as tones on a continuously running magnetic tape, to be subsequently decoded by one of those room-sized PDP 11s. I was one of the lucky first beneficiaries of this step change in data processing technology when I worked on Great Blue Herons at the University of British Columbia in the early 1970s.


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

We discovered a magical part of the brain that defies all laws of physics, and which therefore requires us to throw out all the science we have based on that physics for the last four hundred years.” No, one by one, the inner workings of the brain are revealed. And yes, the brain is a fantastic organ, but there is nothing magical about it. It is just another device. Since the beginning of the computer age, people have come up with lists of things that computers will supposedly never be able to do. One by one, computers have done them. And even if there were some magical part of the brain (which there isn’t), there would be no reason to assume that it is the mechanism by which we are intelligent.


pages: 299 words: 88,375

Gray Day: My Undercover Mission to Expose America's First Cyber Spy by Eric O'Neill

active measures, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, computer age, cryptocurrency, deep learning, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, fear of failure, full text search, index card, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, operational security, PalmPilot, ransomware, rent control, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Skype, thinkpad, Timothy McVeigh, web application, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, young professional

Today, the FBI’s internal counterintelligence and computer security programs hunt spies from within as voraciously as the men and women of the bureau investigate external threats. The counterintelligence walls that Hanssen dismantled over twenty-two years of espionage are now bulwarks of defense that leave few places for future moles to hide. Most important, the FBI leapt into the computer age. Programs to detect improper computer usage and to enforce “need to know” when accessing information prevent the abuse of databases that thrilled Hanssen. The FBI’s systems now audit access to critical cases in real time and sound an alarm when someone dips fingers where they don’t belong. The security exploits and self-name searching in the ACS that Hanssen routinely abused are things of the past.


pages: 309 words: 91,581

The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It by Timothy Noah

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, Branko Milanovic, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Gini coefficient, government statistician, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, manufacturing employment, moral hazard, oil shock, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, positional goods, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, refrigerator car, rent control, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, upwardly mobile, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

Yes, although the extent to which it’s occurring depends on how you pose the question. Certainly a great many of the better-paying jobs that the middle class previously depended on are gone forever. There’s more than one explanation as to why that occurred, but right now let’s consider the disruptions brought about by technological change. Our story begins at the dawn of the computer age in the 1950s, when long-standing worries that automation would create mass unemployment entered an acute phase. Economic theory dating back to the nineteenth century said that technological advances wouldn’t reduce net employment because the number of jobs wasn’t fixed; a new machine might eliminate jobs in one part of the economy, but it would also create jobs in another part.6 For example, someone had to be employed to make these new machines.


pages: 323 words: 90,868

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

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

This slice of history played out during a period that economist Tyler Cowen, of George Mason University, has labelled the ‘Great Stagnation’.8 A half-century of extraordinary gains in computing power somehow did not return humanity to the days of dizzying economic and social change of the nineteenth century. In 1987 the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow mused, in a piece pooh-poohing the prospect of a looming technological transformation, that the evidence for the revolutionary power of computers simply wasn’t there. ‘You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics’, he reckoned, and he had a point.9 Productivity perked up in the 1990s but wheezed out again in the 2000s. And that, some seemed to conclude, was all there was. In the 2000s Robert Gordon began posing a thought experiment to his audiences: would they, he wondered, prefer a world with all the available technology up to 2000, or one with all available technology up to the present day except for indoor plumbing?


pages: 336 words: 93,672

The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientists by Gary Marcus, Jeremy Freeman

23andMe, Albert Einstein, backpropagation, bioinformatics, bitcoin, brain emulation, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, Drosophila, epigenetics, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, Google Glasses, ITER tokamak, iterative process, language acquisition, linked data, mouse model, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, speech recognition, stem cell, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, twin studies, web application

Proof that we are not there yet—that we still haven’t “solved” the brain—comes from the fact that we are still apparently quite far from being able to build one. If we really understood the principles behind thought, we could build a machine capable of humanlike thinking. But so far we can’t. At the dawn of the computer age over half a century ago, expectations were high that computers would soon perform many of the same cognitive functions that humans do. Herbert Simon, one of the fathers of artificial intelligence (AI), predicted in 1965 that “machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do.”


pages: 382 words: 92,138

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

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

When so many ‘life science’ companies are focusing on their stock price rather than on increasing their side of the R in R&D, simply subsidising their research will only worsen the problem rather than create the type of learning that Rodrik (2004) rightly calls for. 1 From now on ‘pharma’ will refer to pharmaceutical companies, and Big Pharma the top international pharma companies. Chapter 2 TECHNOLOGY, INNOVATION AND GROWTH You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics. Solow (1987, 36) In a special report on the world economy, the Economist (2010a) stated: A smart innovation agenda, in short, would be quite different from the one that most rich governments seem to favor. It would be more about freeing markets and less about picking winners; more about creating the right conditions for bright ideas to emerge and less about promises like green jobs.


pages: 313 words: 91,098

The Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Air France Flight 447, attribution theory, bitcoin, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Dmitri Mendeleev, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Flynn Effect, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, hive mind, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, libertarian paternalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Peoples Temple, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Rodney Brooks, Rosa Parks, seminal paper, single-payer health, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Vernor Vinge, web application, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

Some people have always looked upon science and technology with distrust and apprehension, and despite the astonishing scientific progress in the last century, antiscientific thought is still strong today. At the extreme are self-identified “neo-Luddites,” like the participants in the Second Luddite Congress of 1996, a meeting organized around opposition to the “increasingly bizarre and frightening technologies of the Computer Age.” But you don’t have to look hard to find numerous mainstream examples, examples that represent serious danger to our future well-being. A reasonable skepticism toward science and technology is probably healthy for society, but antiscientific thinking can be dangerous when it goes too far. Perhaps the most important issue of our day is climate change, a debate suffused with antiscientific rhetoric.


Microserfs by Douglas Coupland

Apple Newton, Big Tech, Biosphere 2, car-free, computer age, El Camino Real, Future Shock, game design, General Magic , guns versus butter model, hive mind, Kevin Kelly, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, postindustrial economy, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence

Microsoft would have been heaven if my system had been operative and in place." SATURDAY New Year's Day, 1994 Abe left for SFO Airport and then we all went for a drive in the Carp - Karla, Ethan, Todd, Bug, and I. We drove past the home of Thomas Watson Jr., 99 Notre Dame Avenue, San Jose, California. Watson steered IBM into the computer age - and was made prez of the company in 1952. In 1953 he developed the first commercial storage device for computers. He died on a New Year's Eve. * * * On the radio we heard that Bill got married, on Lanai in Hawaii, and we all screamed so loudly that the Carp nearly went off the road. And apparently Alice Cooper was there.


pages: 350 words: 90,898

A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload by Cal Newport

Cal Newport, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, collaborative editing, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, fault tolerance, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Garrett Hardin, hive mind, Inbox Zero, interchangeable parts, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, Nash equilibrium, passive income, Paul Graham, place-making, pneumatic tube, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, work culture , Y Combinator

Sassone crunches the numbers and argues that the organizations he studied could immediately reduce their staffing costs by 15 percent by hiring more support staff, allowing their professionals to become more productive. To Sassone, this analysis provides a compelling answer to the stagnating productivity in the early personal computer age. “Indeed, in many instances firms have used technology to decrease, rather than to increase, intellectual specialization,” he writes. In the intervening decades, the non-specialization issues reported by Sassone have become even worse. Knowledge workers with highly trained skills, and the ability to produce high-value output with their brains, spend much of their time wrangling with computer systems, scheduling meetings, filling out forms, fighting with word processors, struggling with PowerPoint, and of course, above all, sending and receiving digital messages from everyone about everything at all times.


pages: 332 words: 93,672

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Within a decade, so the attendees prophesied, “scientists will be able to create new species and carry out the equivalent of 10 billion years of evolution in one year.” More than four decades later, the hopes and fears of the 1975 Asilomar conference are nowhere near to coming true. The roots of nearly a half-century of frustration reach back to the meeting in Königsberg in 1930, where von Neumann met Gödel and launched the computer age by showing that determinist mathematics could not produce creative consciousness. Von Neumann stepped forward to become the oracle of the age we are now consummating. Reflecting on the 1975 conference, the eminent chemist-biologist Michael Denton concludes, “The actual achievements of genetic engineering are rather more mundane . . . , a relatively trivial tinkering rather than genuine engineering, analogous to tuning a car engine rather than redesigning it, an exploitation of the already existing potential for variation which is built into all living systems. . . . ” Thousands of transgenic plants have been developed with results “far from the creation or radical reconstruction of a living organism.”14 All that the first Asilomar conference managed to achieve was triggering an obtuse paranoia about “genetically modified organisms” that hinders agricultural progress around the world.


pages: 293 words: 91,110

The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution by T. R. Reid

Albert Einstein, Bob Noyce, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, cotton gin, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, George Gilder, Guggenheim Bilbao, hiring and firing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, PalmPilot, Parkinson's law, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Turing machine, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

There I found the following: “In 1958 Kilby conceived the Monolithic Idea, that is, the concept of building an entire circuit out of germanium or silicon. . . . About this same time, Noyce . . . also had the monolithic-circuit idea.” This hit me like a bolt of lightning. For the first time I realized the obvious: This miraculous chip was a man-made miracle. All the marvels of the computer age, all the “electronic brains” and “artificial intelligence,” were simply products of the most powerful intelligence of all—the human brain. Beyond that, I was quite taken with the concept that an idea could have a name—“the monolithic idea”—and that two living Americans had conceived an idea that would change the world.


pages: 339 words: 92,785

I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict by Kenneth Payne

Abraham Maslow, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, classic study, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, functional programming, Geoffrey Hinton, Google X / Alphabet X, Internet of things, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loss aversion, machine translation, military-industrial complex, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological determinism, TED Talk, theory of mind, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, zero-sum game

Much of the research in AI has been driven (and funded) by organisations that are interested in using the product of the research for military purposes. It still is. On one view, the link between war and intelligence goes far deeper: the connection between intelligence and fighting stretches right back through evolutionary history.1 Violence shaped brains, for humans and other species alike. Now, in the computer age, the link persists. Computers themselves were developed in wartime, and those charged with national security were quick to grasp the military implications of machines that could act intelligently. Code-breaking, translation, imagery analysis, to say nothing of autonomous weapons—all were immediately seized upon as ripe for research.


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 computer chips we use today are integrated circuits containing the equivalent of millions of transistors packed onto less than a square inch of silicon. In a 1977 Scientific American article, Bob Noyce, one of the founders of Intel, compared the $300 microprocessor to ENIAC, the moth-infested mastodon from the dawn of the computer age. The wee microprocessor was not only more powerful, but as Noyce noted, "It is twenty times faster, has a larger memory, is thousands of times more reliable, consumes the power of a lightbulb rather than that of a locomotive, occupies 1/30,000 the volume and costs 1/10,000 as much. It is available by mail order or at your local hobby shop." 1946: A view inside a part of the ENIAC computer Of course, the 1977 microprocessor seems like a toy now.


pages: 360 words: 100,991

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence by Richard Yonck

3D printing, AI winter, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, backpropagation, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, ghettoisation, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of writing, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Loebner Prize, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Skype, social intelligence, SoftBank, software as a service, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing test, twin studies, Two Sigma, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Review, working-age population, zero day

This isn’t a problem that’s limited to just human beings. Many shortcomings of artificial intelligence correspond to an inability to know where to direct attention and focus. As this chapter will explore, the absence of an emotion-like function may be a key factor behind this. From the very beginning of the computer age, scientists and researchers have sought to create artificial intelligences, programs by which computers are able to perform some or all of the cognitive functions that people do. Early on it was thought this lofty goal would soon be in our grasp. After all, machines had already proven they were capable of churning through vast numerical tasks far more rapidly than any person ever could.


pages: 345 words: 100,135

Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work by Dr. Paul Babiak, Dr. Robert Hare

business process, computer age, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, fixed income, greed is good, job satisfaction, laissez-faire capitalism, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, old-boy network, risk tolerance, twin studies

Advances in computerization, in particular, have accelerated the rate of technological change affecting organizations and have led to dramatic social changes among the workforce as well. Some of this change has had a positive effect. The Internet has opened a whole new world of exploration and study. Commerce in the computer age has advanced to the point where people can shop or do their banking at home at any time of night or day, and small entrepreneurial companies have grown in number as markets opened up that were once thought out of reach. Education—on just about everything—is now available to a greater number of individuals around the globe.


pages: 352 words: 96,532

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon

air freight, Bill Duvall, Charles Babbage, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, conceptual framework, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, fault tolerance, Hush-A-Phone, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, natural language processing, OSI model, packet switching, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, The Soul of a New Machine

New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1974–1976. Langdon-Davies, John. NPL: Jubilee Book of the National Physical Laboratory. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1951. Lebow, Irwin. Information Highways & Byways: From the Telegraph to the 21st Century. New York: IEEE Press, 1995. Licklider, J. C. R. “Computers and Government.” In The Computer Age: A Twenty-Year View, edited by Michael L. Dertouzos and Joel Moses. MIT Bicentennial Series. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1979. ———. Libraries of the Future. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965. Padlipsky, M. A. The Elements of Networking Style and Other Essays & Animadversions of the Art of Intercomputer Networking.


Future Files: A Brief History of the Next 50 Years by Richard Watson

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Black Swan, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deglobalization, digital Maoism, digital nomad, disintermediation, driverless car, epigenetics, failed state, financial innovation, Firefox, food miles, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, hive mind, hobby farmer, industrial robot, invention of the telegraph, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, linked data, low cost airline, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, mass immigration, Northern Rock, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, pensions crisis, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, self-driving car, speech recognition, synthetic biology, telepresence, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing test, Victor Gruen, Virgin Galactic, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , Zipcar

Do you remember the predictions about the paperless office and the leisure society? Between 1999 and 2002 global use of paper increased by 22% and we now seem to have less spare time than ever. We are also sleeping less than we used to, down from 9 hours per day in 1900 to 6.9 hours today. Indeed, the benefits of the computer age can be seen everywhere except in the productivity statistics, because we are inventing new ways of making ourselves busy. Comfortably numb This obsession with “busyness” can be seen in the way the work ethic has invaded childhood. Children must be kept busy at all times. As a result, they are becoming overscheduled and we are creating a cohort that cannot think for itself, a generation of passive, risk-averse citizens and comfortably numb consumers with almost no imagination or self-reliance. 28 FUTURE FILES The Japanese word benriya loosely translates as conveniencedoers.


pages: 281 words: 95,852

The Googlization of Everything: by Siva Vaidhyanathan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data acquisition, death of newspapers, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full text search, global pandemic, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, libertarian paternalism, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pirate software, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, single-payer health, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, web application, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Solove could not have predicted the revelation in 2005 that the NSA was monitoring American phone calls through an illegal secret program that relied on the cooperation of the major telecommunication companies. 21. James Rule, Privacy in Peril (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 22. James Rule, Private Lives and Public Surveillance: Social Control in the Computer Age (New York: Schocken Books, 1974). NOT ES TO PAGES 97–103 237 23. Ibid. 24. In May 2008, Google announced it would deploy special tricycles to extend Street View to roads and alleys in which cars would have trouble navigating. The tricycle experiment began in Italy but was soon used throughout Europe.


pages: 309 words: 101,190

Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins, Lalla Ward

Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, computer age, Drosophila, Fellow of the Royal Society, industrial robot, invention of radio, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, phenotype, Robert X Cringely, stem cell, the long tail, trade route

Raup, in turn, was inspired by the celebrated D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, of the ancient and distinguished Scottish University of St Andrews, whose book, On Growth and Form (first published in 1919), has been a persistent, if not quite mainstream, influence on zoologists for most of the twentieth century. It is one of the minor tragedies of biology that D’Arcy Thompson died just before the computer age, for almost every page of his great book cries out for a computer. Raup wrote a program to generate shell form, and I have written a similar program to illustrate this chapter although—as might be expected—I incorporated it in a Blind Watchmaker-style artificial selection program. The shells of snails and other molluscs, and also the shells of creatures called brachiopods which have no connection with molluscs but superficially resemble them, all grow in the same kind of way, which is different from the way we grow.


pages: 348 words: 97,277

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Blythe Masters, business process, buy and hold, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, circular economy, cloud computing, computer age, computerized trading, conceptual framework, content marketing, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, informal economy, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, linked data, litecoin, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, market clearing, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, off grid, pets.com, post-truth, prediction markets, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Project Xanadu, ransomware, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, social web, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, the market place, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, web of trust, work culture , zero-sum game

Grigg worked in the field of cryptography, a science that dates way back to ancient times, when coded language to share “ciphers,” or secrets, first arose. Ever since Alan Turing’s calculating machine cracked the German military’s Enigma code, cryptography has underpinned much of what we’ve done in the computing age. Without it we wouldn’t be able to share private information across the Internet—such as our transactions within a bank’s Web site—without revealing it to unwanted prying eyes. As our computing capacity has exponentially grown, so too has the capacity of cryptography to impact our lives. For his part, Grigg believed it would lead to a programmable record-keeping system that would make fraud virtually impossible.


pages: 383 words: 98,179

Last Trains: Dr Beeching and the Death of Rural England by Charles Loft

Beeching cuts, computer age, Downton Abbey, full employment, high-speed rail, intermodal, Kickstarter, price mechanism, railway mania, Suez crisis 1956, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, urban planning

The key question here is, if the Freshwater branch closes will those using it who have started their journey in London continue to use the railway to reach Newport (in which case none of the contributory revenue is lost and the case for closure is strengthened), will they make the entire journey by road (in which case all the contributory revenue is lost and the economics of the other two services might be adversely affected to the point where the closure makes no sense) or will they go to Margate by train instead (in which case, the precise balance of lost and new revenue is virtually impossible to gauge)? When one considers that a resort might earn contributory revenue on a wide variety of routes, the complexity of the calculations involved in the pre-computer age becomes clear. The fact that figures for contributory revenue were gross revenue, and therefore took no account of the profitability of the services on which they were earned, adds another complication. The Isle of Wight lines might generate a large amount of additional traffic on the London–Portsmouth main line during the summer; but if that traffic required the provision of extra signalling, coaches, locomotives and staff that were only used on a few summer weekends, it was not necessarily profitable.


pages: 372 words: 101,174

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed by Ray Kurzweil

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anesthesia awareness, anthropic principle, brain emulation, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Dean Kamen, discovery of DNA, double helix, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, George Gilder, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, Jeff Hawkins, John von Neumann, Law of Accelerating Returns, linear programming, Loebner Prize, mandelbrot fractal, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

This unfinished document nonetheless remains a brilliant and prophetic foreshadowing of what I regard as humanity’s most daunting and important project. It was published posthumously as The Computer and the Brain in 1958. It is fitting that the final work of one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the last century and one of the pioneers of the computer age was an examination of intelligence itself. This project was the earliest serious inquiry into the human brain from the perspective of a mathematician and computer scientist. Prior to von Neumann, the fields of computer science and neuroscience were two islands with no bridge between them. Von Neumann starts his discussion by articulating the similarities and differences between the computer and the human brain.


pages: 417 words: 97,577

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Maslow's hierarchy, means of production, merger arbitrage, Metcalfe's law, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive investing, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, prediction markets, prisoner's dilemma, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, undersea cable, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, very high income, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, you are the product, zero-sum game

Audretsch, “Testing the Schumpeterian Hypothesis,” Eastern Economic Journal XIV, no. 2 (1988). 51. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/americas-most-successful-companies-are-killing-the-economy-2017-05-24. 52. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-12/google-has-made-a-mess-of-robotics. 53. http://blog.luxresearchinc.com/blog/2016/03/the-downfall-of-google-robotics/. 54. Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (HarperBusiness, 1999). 55. Barry C. Lynn, Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010). 56. https://qz.com/801706/innovation-guru-clayton-christensens-new-theory-will-help-protect-you-from-disruption/. 57. Frederic M. Scherer, “Technological Innovation and Monopolization” (October 2007).


pages: 418 words: 102,597

Being You: A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth

AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, backpropagation, carbon-based life, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, Filter Bubble, GPT-3, GPT-4, John Markoff, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Plato's cave, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, speech recognition, stem cell, systems thinking, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, TikTok, Turing test

Perception of the outside world is obviously useful for guiding action, but why should our internal physiological condition be built into our conscious lives from the ground up? Answering this question takes us back in history once again, but this time only to the mid twentieth century and to the neglected amalgam of computer science, artificial intelligence, engineering, and biology known as cybernetics. — In the 1950s, at the dawn of the computer age, the emerging disciplines of cybernetics and artificial intelligence (AI) were equally promising and in many ways inseparable. Cybernetics – from the Greek kybernetes, meaning ‘steersman’ or ‘governor’ – was described by one of its founders, the mathematician Norbert Wiener, as ‘the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine’.


The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite by Ann Finkbeiner

anthropic principle, anti-communist, Boeing 747, computer age, Dr. Strangelove, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, old-boy network, profit motive, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative

ARPA told Jason to hire young, smart scientists; to solve technical problems; to point out science that academics weren’t developing but that the military might use; to analyze but not to experiment. It anticipated that “minimum expenditures will be made for computers [and] assistants.” The prohibition on computers was a relic of the time, the beginning of the computer age when, said Hal Lewis, a primeval Jason, “we lost students to computers—they got mesmerized and forgot to do physics. You didn’t want this to be turning into a computer buffs’ organization.” The rationale for the prohibition on assistants, Lewis said, “was that Jason should be the work of the absolutely top physicists and one didn’t want to use their names when graduate students really did the work.”


pages: 329 words: 101,233

We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds by Sally Adee

air gap, airport security, anesthesia awareness, animal electricity, biofilm, colonial rule, computer age, COVID-19, CRISPR, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, hype cycle, impulse control, informal economy, Internet Archive, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, multilevel marketing, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, stem cell, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, traumatic brain injury

In 1941, just as Adrian was writing up his letter recommending Berger to the Nobel committee, the latter, mired in despair and depression, took his own life. After seventeen years of progress in EEG technology, the field stalled for another four decades. During this time, we decided that we’d rather send electricity into the brain than decipher the codes hiding in the natural kind. How we decided the brain was a computer At the dawn of the computer age—as engineers began to assemble the very first room-sized computing machines—those computers were also being built (and conceived of) as a kind of brain. In 1944, the electronics manufacturer Western Electric, in a glossy Life magazine ad for its new anti-aircraft guidance system, declared that “this electrical brain—the Computer—thinks of everything.”


pages: 502 words: 107,657

Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die by Eric Siegel

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, backtesting, Black Swan, book scanning, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data is the new oil, data science, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental subject, Google Glasses, happiness index / gross national happiness, information security, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lifelogging, machine readable, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mass immigration, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, personalized medicine, placebo effect, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shai Danziger, software as a service, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steven Levy, supply chain finance, text mining, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Mining the Web to Play ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’” UAI ’03, Proceedings of the 19th Conference in Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, Acapulco, Mexico, August 7–10, 2003, pages 337–345. http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1212/1212.2477.pdf. Regarding “Time flies like an arrow”: Gilbert Burck, The Computer Age and Its Potential for Management (Harper & Row, 1965). My (the author’s) PhD research pertained to the “have a car/baby” example (temporal meaning in verbs): Eric V. Siegel and Kathleen R. McKeown, “Learning Methods to Combine Linguistic Indicators: Improving Aspectual Classification and Revealing Linguistic Insights,” Computational Linguistics 26, issue 4 (December 2000). doi:10.1162/089120100750105957, http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?


pages: 319 words: 105,949

Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot by Mark Vanhoenacker

Airbus A320, Boeing 747, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, computer age, dark matter, digital map, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Joan Didion, John Harrison: Longitude, Louis Blériot, Maui Hawaii, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, phenotype, place-making, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, the built environment, transcontinental railway, Year of Magical Thinking

If I like a song or two about leaving New York, my preferred aerial song of the city would be one of arrival from far out at sea. The city looks as if a huge vase of pixels had been tipped over Manhattan, stacking and tumbling outward, flattening into the suburbs and gradually disappearing into the dark forests of the continent’s interior, as if in some computer-age myth of its foundation. The city’s bays and rivers glow in this reflected, electric gold; while further out the waters are themselves scattered with the constellated lights of vessels, as if an autumn storm had blown particles of light from the land where they first fell, onto the pitch-dark waters of the city’s maritime approaches.


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

Kay, “The Early History of Smalltalk,” ACM SIGPLAN Notices 28:3 (March 1993): 13. 3.Ibid. 4.Ibid. 5.Ambitious distributed computing projects like Microsoft’s .Net and IBM’s Websphere indicate the persistence of this goal. 6.Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age New York: Harper Business, 1999), p. 164. 7.Author interview with Robert Taylor, Woodside, Calif., June 17, 2003. 8.Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning, pp. 168–69. 9.Author interview, Adele Goldberg, San Francisco, Calif., July 15, 2001. 10.Author interview, Larry Tesler, Menlo Park, Calif., August 27, 2001. 8 | Borrowing Fire from the Gods 1.Fred Moore, letter to Dick Raymond and Point Agents, February 28, 1972, personal papers, courtesy of Irene Moore. 2.Fred Moore, personal journal, March 24, 1972. 3.Author interview, Dennis Allison, Palo Alto, Calif., July 28, 2001. 4.Gregory Yob, “Hunt the Wumpus,” in The Best of Creative Computing, vol. 1, ed.


pages: 389 words: 109,207

Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street by William Poundstone

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Albert Einstein, anti-communist, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, correlation coefficient, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Henry Singleton, high net worth, index fund, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, short selling, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, value at risk, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Ed told Vivian that Las Vegas was a great place for a bargain-priced vacation. He wanted to get a look at the casino roulette wheels in action. Just before this trip, a friend gave Thorp an article from the Journal of the American Statistical Association. It was an analysis of the game of blackjack. Until the computer age, it was impractical to calculate the exact probabilities in blackjack and many other card games. There are an astronomical number of possible arrangements of a deck of fifty-two cards. Unlike in the case of roulette, the blackjack player has decisions to make. The odds in blackjack therefore depend on what strategy the player uses.


pages: 375 words: 106,536

Lost at Sea by Jon Ronson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Columbine, computer age, credit crunch, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Easter island, Etonian, false memory syndrome, Gödel, Escher, Bach, income inequality, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, late fees, Louis Pasteur, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Skype, subprime mortgage crisis, telemarketer

And this is an industry that’s self-regulating. Why is that?” • • • LATER I HEAR the story of why it takes three days for an electronic transfer to clear. Transfers used to really take three days to clear, in the days they were delivered by carrier pigeon, or whatever. But now, in this computer age, they take an instant to clear, but they keep the three-day rule going so they can accrue three days of interest. The banks make tens of millions from these wheezes. • • • IN OCTOBER 2003 Matthew Barrett, the CEO of Barclays, was called before the Treasury Select Committee. He was asked about the small print.


pages: 382 words: 105,819

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing, by Thierry Bardini (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2000), tells the story of the genius who created the mouse, visualized a networked world of PCs, and gave the Mother of All Demos. Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age, by Michael A. Hiltzik (New York: HarperBusiness, 1999), takes the reader inside the research center in Palo Alto where Steve Jobs saw the future. Troublemakers: Silicon Valley’s Coming of Age, by Leslie Berlin (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), tells the story of the men and women, some well known, others obscure, who helped to build Silicon Valley.


pages: 383 words: 105,021

Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War by Fred Kaplan

air gap, Big Tech, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, computer age, data acquisition, drone strike, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, game design, hiring and firing, index card, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John von Neumann, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Morris worm, national security letter, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, packet switching, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stuxnet, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Wargames Reagan, Y2K, zero day

Two years earlier, Roberts had designed a communications link, over a 1200-baud phone line, between a computer at MIT’s Lincoln Lab, where he was working at the time, and a colleague’s computer in Santa Monica. It was the first time anyone had pulled off the feat: he was, in effect, the Alexander Graham Bell of the computer age. Yet Roberts hadn’t thought about the security of this hookup. In fact, Ware’s paper annoyed him. He begged Lukasik not to saddle his team with a security requirement: it would be like telling the Wright brothers that their first airplane at Kitty Hawk had to fly fifty miles while carrying twenty passengers.


pages: 319 words: 106,772

Irrational Exuberance: With a New Preface by the Author by Robert J. Shiller

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, banking crisis, benefit corporation, Benoit Mandelbrot, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, demographic transition, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity premium, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, experimental subject, hindsight bias, income per capita, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahbub ul Haq, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Milgram experiment, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, open economy, pattern recognition, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Small Order Execution System, spice trade, statistical model, stocks for the long run, Suez crisis 1956, survivorship bias, the market place, Tobin tax, transaction costs, tulip mania, uptick rule, urban decay, Y2K

There was an electrograph, a machine that transmitted pictures by wire (forerunner of the fax machine), and a tel-autograph, a machine that enabled one to transmit one’s signature over long distances (forerunner of credit card signatureverification devices). The exposition even offered a simulated trip to the moon on the airship Luna: the visitor could take a stroll through the streets and shops of the moon before returning to earth. In a sense, the high-tech age, the computer age, and the space age seemed just around the corner in 1901, though the concepts were expressed in different words than we would use today. People were upbeat, and in later years the first decade of the twentieth century came to be called the Age of Optimism, the Age of Confidence, or the Cocksure Era.


pages: 371 words: 108,317

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, bank run, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, connected car, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Filter Bubble, Freestyle chess, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, old-boy network, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, placebo effect, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, robo advisor, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, value engineering, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero-sum game

There were online bulletin boards, experimental teleconferences, and this place called the internet. The portal through the phone line opened up something both vast and at the same time human scaled. It felt organic and fabulous. It connected people and machines in a personal way. I could feel my life jumping up to another level. Looking back, I think the computer age did not really start until this moment, when computers merged with the telephone. Stand-alone computers were inadequate. All the enduring consequences of computation did not start until the early 1980s, that moment when computers married phones and melded into a robust hybrid. In the three decades since then, this technological convergence between communication and computation has spread, sped up, blossomed, and evolved.


pages: 387 words: 110,820

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bread and circuses, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, fear of failure, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, market design, means of production, mental accounting, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Pearl River Delta, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price discrimination, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, side project, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, washing machines reduced drudgery, working poor, yield management, zero-sum game

The supplier sent out the items the next day in containers tagged for scanning at the buyer’s distribution center where it was unloaded and routed to a truck for delivery to the designated store. To maintain efficiencies across their supply chains, discounters required that suppliers tag their products at the factory or warehouse, thereby pulling manufacturers and wholesalers—some kicking and screaming—into the stark new computer age. This just-in-time model reduced the problem of languishing inventory. It also meant that manufacturers had to play by the retailers’ rules, limiting their production to items that discounters could sell at low prices and in vast volumes. Options for both manufacturers and consumers narrowed: Manufacturers had much less discretion in what they could produce or how they could produce it, and consumers, although treated to what seemed like an ever-expanding variety of merchandise, were in fact being offered less variety and more variations on a theme.


pages: 289 words: 112,697

The new village green: living light, living local, living large by Stephen Morris

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, Buckminster Fuller, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, computer age, cuban missile crisis, David Sedaris, deindustrialization, discovery of penicillin, distributed generation, Easter island, energy security, energy transition, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Firefox, Hacker Conference 1984, index card, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Elkington, Kevin Kelly, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McMansion, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Negawatt, off grid, off-the-grid, peak oil, precautionary principle, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review

Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Acheiving Financial Independence. Joe Dominguez & Vicki Robin. Penguin Books, 1992. 254 chapter 8 : The Good Life Colophon T by Michael Potts raditionally, this is where the book designer would name the type fonts (Garamond Book, Times New Roman, and Kabel), and, in this computer age, the programs employed (Quark, Firefox, and PhotoPaint).Then the printer might tell about the printing process. (See this book’s last page.) This being a non-traditional book, I have saved myself a few pages to share the experience of designing this book. New Village Green is a hopeful plunge into a salty ocean of ideas.


pages: 379 words: 108,129

An Optimist's Tour of the Future by Mark Stevenson

23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, augmented reality, bank run, Boston Dynamics, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, clean water, computer age, decarbonisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nick Bostrom, off grid, packet switching, peak oil, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, X Prize

Written out as A’s, T’s, C’s and G’s on paper, it’d take up roughly the equivalent of two hundred volumes the size of the 1,000-page Manhattan phone book, and take nine and half years to read out loud (assuming you read ten letters a second and never slept, ate or went to the toilet while you were doing it). Which in our computer age isn’t actually that big a deal. It’s roughly three gigabytes of data – just over twice the amount in an iTunes movie download of the genetic comedy Twins starring Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger (whose scriptwriters, by the way, must have glanced over the science and said, ‘well, we won’t be needing that!’).


pages: 392 words: 108,745

Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think by James Vlahos

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TechCrunch disrupt, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

By World War II what had once been a far-fetched pursuit now seemed achievable. While it would take decades of additional work to produce more natural and realistic sounds, machines were undoubtedly gaining their voices. It took the advent of a whole new type of technology, however, for them to acquire something even more important: brains. Only in the computer age have talking objects become capable of anything more than the playing back of recorded messages. Of course, that a wondrous new invention—the electronic digital computer—would be adept at mathematical calculation was obvious from the jump. The 1936 paper by Alan Turing that first laid out a vision for such devices was titled, “On Computable Numbers.”


pages: 374 words: 111,284

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

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

In particular, they don’t conform to the traditional pattern of technological advance that has underpinned economic progress over the last two centuries, namely the replacement of human labor by machines. You would have thought that computerization most definitely did conform to this paradigm. Yet the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow famously remarked in 1987: “you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” 29 (Mind you, the pickup in US productivity in the late 1990s suggests that the gains from computers were real but, as with many other advances, delayed.) The American entrepreneur and venture capitalist, Peter Thiel, has put recent technological disappointment more pithily.


pages: 382 words: 105,166

The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations by Jacob Soll

accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, delayed gratification, demand response, discounted cash flows, double entry bookkeeping, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, High speed trading, Honoré de Balzac, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Scientific racism, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

The list of acronyms in the preceding paragraphs attests to the depersonalized character of twentieth-century accounting. It now was a subject only for the expertly informed, inscrutable even to the best educated citizen. Accountants now became synonymous not only with professional success but also with the dehumanizing large-scale number crunching of the mainframe computer age. Like postwar economic growth, the golden age of accounting did not last, and the role of the accountant as a leading, even gentlemanly, social figure and neutral arbiter of business and regulation soon enough began to erode. Competition between the auditing firms became fierce in the mid-1950s.


pages: 380 words: 109,724

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

The reaction is less intellectual than visceral. Life feels off. People feel stressed, behind, out of sorts, disconnected, lost. It’s not just the whacked-out politics of the current presidential administration, not just the political polarization, not just job anxieties, not just the upheaval of industrialism giving way to the computer age. It’s both more than that, and less. “I think if you zoom out, this is like 1946 in a sense that we’ve just invented this new, powerful, and very dangerous new technology,” says Harris. “We’ve developed a system of manipulating our own [social] system that is more powerful than the ability of even our own mind to track it.”26 On that score, it’s impossible not to be reminded of Mary Shelley, who wrote her famous Frankenstein in 1818 at a turbulent time—in many ways not unlike our own—that was causing romantics like her to declare a “crisis of feeling” as others before them had declared a crisis of faith.


pages: 419 words: 109,241

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below. abandonment ability bias Acemoglu, Daron adaptive learning systems admissions policies, conditional basic income and affective capabilities affective computing Age of Labor ALM hypothesis and optimism and overview of before and during twentieth century in twenty-first century Agesilaus AGI. See artificial general intelligence agoge agriculture Airbnb airborne fulfillment centers Alaska Permanent Fund Alexa algorithms alienation al-Khwarizmi, Abdallah Muhammad ibn Musa ALM (Autor-Levy-Murnane) hypothesis AlphaGo AlphaGo Zero AlphaZero Altman, Sam Amara, Roy Amazon artificial intelligence and changing-pie effect and competition and concerns about driverless vehicles and market share of network effects and profit and Andreessen, Marc ANI.


pages: 374 words: 110,238

Fall: The Mysterious Life and Death of Robert Maxwell, Britain's Most Notorious Media Baron by John Preston

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, computer age, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, G4S, global village, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, Jeffrey Epstein, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, the market place

Undeterred, he kept on repeating his claims that he was the most successful encyclopedia salesman the world had ever known. While some may have had their doubts, others were only too happy to cling to his coat-tails hoping to share in the spoils. Saul Steinberg was an American businessman who had made a fortune out of leasing IBM computers. Aged twenty-nine, he owned a twenty-nine-room house on Long Island and was reputed to have made more money more quickly than anyone else in America. Steinberg had heard a lot about Maxwell, and liked the sound of him. He may have been a brute, but he appeared to be a very successful brute. In the spring of 1969, Steinberg approached Maxwell with an offer.


pages: 405 words: 105,395

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator by Keith Houston

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, classic study, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Grace Hopper, human-factors engineering, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, machine readable, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Neil Armstrong, off-by-one error, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert X Cringely, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Home Computer Revolution, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, V2 rocket, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

Underwood was in a more parlous state than anyone had been willing to admit, leading Pero to declare that both factories and working practices would have to be demolished and rebuilt to Olivetti’s higher standards.35 Olivetti needed something to recapture the old magic. It had always been good at making mechanical devices, such as its typewriters and hand-cranked calculators; now, with the Elea 9003, it was also a player in the highest echelons of the computer age.36 As Roberto and Tchou discussed what they should do next, the answer seemed obvious: conquer the middle ground. What if a calculator could punch up, or a computer could punch down? Most companies that could afford computers kept a tight rein on them because of their extravagant costs, but the Olivetti pair imagined a device that occupied a desk, not a room, and that could be operated by the average office worker rather than the high priests of the computing department.37 One might almost call it a personal computer.


pages: 356 words: 106,161

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

But despite the fact that many of these items eventually become part of the basic basket of goods, their ultimate contribution to productivity is dubious at best; productivity growth in many Western countries has slowed down or even turned negative in the post-crisis years.17 When economist Robert Solow famously griped in 1987 that “you can see the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistics”, little did he imagine how much money people would be spending two decades later to have a mini-computer in their pockets whose main use was to flag a taxi or play Candy Crush. Figure 3.3: The winners and losers of globalization Notes: This is the elephant chart showing the growth in incomes across every ventile of world population, plus the top 1 percent.


pages: 872 words: 259,208

A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr

air freight, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brixton riot, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, congestion charging, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Etonian, falling living standards, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, floating exchange rates, full employment, gentleman farmer, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, loadsamoney, market design, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open borders, out of africa, Parkinson's law, Piper Alpha, post-war consensus, Red Clydeside, reserve currency, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War

Yet most people had in the end done well under her, not just the Yuppies and Essex boys, but also her snidest middle-class critics. Britons were on average much wealthier than they had been at the end of seventies. The country was enjoying bigger cars, a far wider range of holidays, better food, a wider choice of television channels, home videos, and the first slew of gadgets from the computer age. Yet this was not quite the Britain of today. More people smoked. The idea of smoke-free public areas, or smoking bans in offices and restaurants, was lampooned as a weird Californian innovation that would never come here. People seen talking to themselves with a wire dangling from one ear would have been considered worryingly disturbed.

After a spate of transport disasters there was a widespread feeling that large investment was needed in the country’s infrastructure. French and British engineers celebrated in 1990 when they met under the Channel. Mobile phone use was tiny by modern standards, mainly confined to commercial business travellers’ cars and a few much-mocked City slickers carrying objects the size of a brick. The computer age was further advanced. The Thatcher years had seen a glittering waterfall of new products and applications, most of them generated in California’s new ‘silicon valley’, a hotbed of computer inventiveness recognized by name as early as 1971. The revolutionary Apple II computer had been launched in 1977, followed by Tandys, Commodores and Ataris with their floppy disks and basic games.


pages: 524 words: 120,182

Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, dark matter, discrete time, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Long Term Capital Management, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paul Erdős, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, scientific worldview, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine

More technically, it is used to describe a vast array of phenomena ranging from the fiber-optic transmissions that constitute signals from one computer to another on the Internet to the tiny molecules that neurons use to communicate with one another in the brain. The different examples of complex systems I described in chapter 1 are all centrally concerned with the communication and processing of information in various forms. Since the beginning of the computer age, computer scientists have thought of information transmission and computation as something that takes place not only in electronic circuits but also in living systems. In order to understand the information and computation in these systems, the first step, of course, is to have a precise definition of what is meant by the terms information and computation.


pages: 347 words: 112,727

Rust: The Longest War by Jonathan Waldman

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Anton Chekhov, computer age, David Brooks, digital map, Exxon Valdez, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Golden Gate Park, index card, Isaac Newton, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, pez dispenser, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Works Progress Administration, Y2K

In early 1945 the US District Court for the Northern District of Ohio found Ball in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, and the Supreme Court, a few months later, affirmed the decision, which meant the end of the Ball brothers’ expansion. The brothers’ mustaches had gotten too big. The ruling made modernizing glass factories pointless; Ball’s only choice was to diversify. So Ball diversified, and how. The company got involved in every age: the plastics age, the computer age, the space age. Ball made display monitors, pressure cookers, Christmas ornaments, roofing, nursing bottles, prefab housing, battery shells, and a chemical for preserving vinyl LPs. In the early 1980s, Ball made about 12 billion pennies—or rather, 12 billion copper-plated zinc penny blanks for the US mints in San Francisco, Denver, Philadelphia, and West Point.


pages: 508 words: 120,339

Working Effectively With Legacy Code by Michael Feathers

business logic, c2.com, computer age, functional programming, HyperCard, index card, Mars Rover, Silicon Valley, web application

When I need to make changes in particularly tangled legacy code, I often spend time trying to figure out where I should write my tests. This involves thinking about the change I am going to make, seeing what it will affect, seeing what the affected things will affect, and so on. This type of reasoning is nothing new; people have been doing it since the dawn of the computer age. Programmers sit down and reason about their programs for many reasons. The funny thing is, we don’t talk about it much. We just assume that everyone knows how to do it and that doing it is “just part of being a programmer.” Unfortunately, that doesn’t help us much when we are confronted with terribly tangled code that goes far beyond our ability to reason easily about it.


pages: 395 words: 116,675

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, altcoin, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon tax, Columbian Exchange, computer age, Corn Laws, cosmological constant, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, Donald Davies, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Eben Moglen, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, endogenous growth, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fail fast, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, George Santayana, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, imperial preference, income per capita, indoor plumbing, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, land reform, Lao Tzu, long peace, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Necker cube, obamacare, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, twin studies, uber lyft, women in the workforce

And if Moore’s Law has continued through technological change-overs, then there’s no reason to think it will not happen again. When chips eventually reach their miniaturisation limit, the plummeting cost will continue in another technology. Nor is Moore’s Law the only such regularity to emerge in the computer age. Kryder’s Law says that the cost per performance of hard disk computer storage is rising exponentially, at 40 per cent a year. Cooper’s Law finds that the number of possible simultaneous wireless communications has doubled every thirty months since 1895, when Marconi first broadcast. These are largely independent of Moore’s Law.


pages: 490 words: 40,083

PostgreSQL: introduction and concepts by Bruce Momjian

computer age, Debian, Y2K

Figure 14.15 shows an example of CHECK constraints using a modified version of the friend table from Figure 3.2, page 13. This figure has many CHECK clauses: state Forces the column to be two characters long. CHAR() pads the field with spaces, so state must be trim()-ed of trailing spaces before length() is computed. age Forces the column to hold only positive values. gender Forces the column to hold either M or F. last_met Forces the column to include dates between January 1, 1950, and the current date. table Forces the table to accept only rows where firstname is not ED or lastname is not RIVERS. The effect is to prevent Ed Rivers from being entered into the table.


pages: 289 words: 113,211

A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation by Richard Bookstaber

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, butterfly effect, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, computer age, computerized trading, disintermediation, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global macro, implied volatility, index arbitrage, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market design, Mary Meeker, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, statistical arbitrage, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, UUNET, William Langewiesche, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Half a century after the limits of measurement and thus of physical knowledge were demonstrated by Heisenberg in the world of quantum mechanics, Lorenz piled on a result that showed how microscopic errors could propagate to have a stultifying impact in nonlinear dynamic systems. This limitation could come into the forefront only with the dawning of the computer age, because it is manifested in the subtle errors of computational accuracy. The essence of the butterfly effect is that small perturbations can have large repercussions in massive, random forces such as weather. Edward Lorenz was a professor of meteorology at MIT, and in 1961 he was testing and tweaking a model of weather dynamics on a rudimentary vacuumtube computer.


pages: 389 words: 119,487

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charlie Hebdo massacre, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, deglobalization, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, gig economy, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, job automation, knowledge economy, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, obamacare, pattern recognition, post-truth, post-work, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

For a general survey of methods, see: Jose David Fernández and Francisco Vico, ‘AI Methods in Algorithmic Composition: A Comprehensive Survey’, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 48 (2013), 513–82. 12 Eric Topol, The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine is in Your Hands (New York: Basic Books, 2015); Robert Wachter, The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2015); Simon Parkin, ‘The Artificially Intelligent Doctor Will Hear You Now’, MIT Technology Review 9 March 2016; James Gallagher, ‘Artificial intelligence “as good as cancer doctors”’, BBC, 26 January 2017. 13 Kate Brannen, ‘Air Force’s lack of drone pilots reaching “crisis” levels’, Foreign Policy, 15 January 2015. 14 Tyler Cowen, Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (New York: Dutton, 2013); Brad Bush, ‘How combined human and computer intelligence will redefine jobs’, TechCrunch, 1 November 2016. 15 Ulrich Raulff, Farewell to the Horse: The Final Century of Our Relationship (London: Allen Lane, 2017); Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 286; Margo DeMello, Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 197; Clay McShane and Joel Tarr, ‘The Decline of the Urban Horse in American Cities’, Journal of Transport History 24:2 (2003), 177–98. 16 Lawrence F.


pages: 424 words: 114,905

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

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

The previous books, examined in the light of where we are now, reveal his prescient vision. In Deep Medicine, Eric tells us we are living in the Fourth Industrial Age, a revolution so profound that it may not be enough to compare it to the invention of steam power, the railroads, electricity, mass production, or even the computer age in the magnitude of change it will bring. This Fourth Industrial Age, revolving around artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and Big Data, heralds a profound revolution that is already visible in the way we live and work, perhaps even in the way we think of ourselves as humans. It has great potential to help, but also to harm, to exaggerate the profound gap that already exists between those who have much and those who have less each passing year.


pages: 394 words: 117,982

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age by David E. Sanger

active measures, air gap, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, computer age, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Google Chrome, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, RAND corporation, ransomware, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

While the Ukrainians did not have defenses as sophisticated as many American utility companies, a quaint oddity in Ukrainian systems ultimately saved them from an even greater disaster. It turned out that their electric grid, built by the Soviets, was so antiquated that it wasn’t entirely dependent on computers. “They still had the big, old metal switches that ran the power grid back in the pre-computer age,” Ozment explained, as if admiring the simplicity of an original Ford Model A engine. The investigators reported that Ukrainian engineers got into their trucks and went scrambling from one substation to another, looking for switches that they could throw to route around the computers and turn the lights back on.


The Fugitive Game: Online With Kevin Mitnick by Jonathan Littman

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, centre right, computer age, disinformation, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, information security, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mitch Kapor, power law, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Steven Levy, telemarketer

"There's a service. It's called "Protect My Friend Service," Mitnick chuckles. "You pay me a certain fee per month and I make sure nobody causes you problems." "Is this the Capone program?" "Yeah. It's a new program. It was developed throughout the years to protect stores and stuff, and now we're going into the computer age." Mitnick can't stop laughing. I can't either. "I think you really need this service!" Mitnick howls. "So what sort of services are provided?" Mitnick catches himself, holding back the laughter. "Don't print that shit because someone's actually going to believe it!" "There's nothing I can do, huh?"


pages: 463 words: 118,936

Darwin Among the Machines by George Dyson

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, British Empire, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, Donald Davies, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, IFF: identification friend or foe, independent contractor, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, launch on warning, low earth orbit, machine readable, Menlo Park, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, phenotype, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, spectrum auction, strong AI, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, zero-sum game

The scales are shifting both in distance and in time; the intelligence a large corporation once gathered for its annual report is now available to any small business using a personal computer to manage its day-to-day accounts. “We felt that the distinction between micro- and macro-economics, while appropriate in a non-computer age, was no longer necessary,”36 remarked economist Gerald Thompson, recalling his final collaboration with Oskar Morgenstern in 1975, two years before Morgenstern’s death. Money is a recursive function, defined, layer upon layer, in terms of itself. The era when you could peel away the layers to reveal a basis in precious metals ended long ago.


pages: 422 words: 113,830

Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism by Kevin Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency peg, diversification, Doha Development Round, energy security, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mobile money, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, peak oil, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

If Paulson wanted to keep the spotlight off the real culprits—the financial and mortgage giants with their leverage laboratories, multiple trillions worth of exotic mortgages, toxic CDOs, and Las Vegas-like credit swaps—then academician Bernanke at the Fed was a good partner. The narrow-gauge theory in which the economics Ph.D. had immersed himself basically ignored twenty-first-century mega-innovations and looked back seven decades to the crash of the 1930s and how that long-ago, pre-computer-age debacle might have been prevented. Too little of that outdated context applied more than seven decades later. Foremost among Bernanke’s economist heroes were the late Milton Friedman and the latter’s wife, Anna Schwartz. Some four decades earlier, they had coauthored a landmark volume entitled A Monetary History of the United States, which made them the preeminent theorists of how the Federal Reserve deserved principal blame for letting the circumstances of 1929-1933 deepen into depression—and also of how the Fed might have prevented that deflationary descent.


pages: 429 words: 114,726

The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise by Nathan L. Ensmenger

barriers to entry, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, deskilling, Donald Knuth, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, functional programming, future of work, Grace Hopper, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, loose coupling, machine readable, new economy, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, RAND corporation, Robert Gordon, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, sorting algorithm, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

As Michael Williams suggests in a recent volume edited by Raul Rojas and Ulf Hashagen called The First Computers (note the crucial use of the plural), any particular claim to the priority of invention must necessarily be heavily qualified: if you add enough adjectives you can always claim your own favorite.11And indeed, the ENIAC has a strong claim to this title: not only was it digital, electronic, and programmable (and therefore looked a lot like a modern computer) but the ENIAC designers—John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert—went on to form the first commercial computer company in the United States. The ENIAC and its commercial successor, the Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC), were widely publicized as the first of the “giant brains” that presaged the coming computer age. But even the ENIAC had its precursors and competitors. For example, in the 1930s, a physicist at Iowa State University, John Atanasoff, had worked on an electronic computing device and had even described it to Mauchly. Others were working on similar devices. During the Second World War in particular, a number of government and military agencies, both in the United States and abroad, had developed electronic computing devices, many of which also have a plausible claim to being if not the first computer, then at least a first computer.


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

Military-sponsored research-and-development teams on both sides of the Atlantic continued to work on digital computers of their own. A few of these independent research efforts grew out of Ballistics work. Others were connected with the effort to build the first nuclear fission and fusion bombs. Over a hundred years had passed between Babbage and Turing. The computer age might have been delayed for decades longer if World War II had not provided top-notch engineering teams, virtually unlimited funds, and the will to apply scientific findings to real-world problems at the exact point in the history of mathematics when the theory of computation made computers possible.


pages: 463 words: 115,103

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect by David Goodhart

active measures, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, computer age, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, deskilling, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shock, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postindustrial economy, precariat, reshoring, Richard Florida, robotic process automation, scientific management, Scientific racism, Skype, social distancing, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thorstein Veblen, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, young professional

Here is Turner from his 2018 paper Capitalism in the Age of Robots: In a world of ever increasing automation possibilities, we only need a very small number of very clever IT literate people to write all the code we need for all the robots, all the apps, and all the computer games, and we need only a miniscule fraction of the global population to drive inexorable progress towards ever more profound artificial intelligence and super intelligence. Three decades or more since we first began to talk of living in a computer age, the total number of workers employed in the development and production of computer hardware, software and applications, is still only 4 per cent of the total workforce in the US, and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts just 135,000 new jobs in software development over 2014 to 2024, versus 458,000 additional personal care aides, and 348,000 home health aides.


pages: 387 words: 119,244

Making It Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy by Iain Martin

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, call centre, central bank independence, computer age, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, deskilling, Edward Thorp, Etonian, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, interest rate swap, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, moral hazard, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, old-boy network, pets.com, proprietary trading, Red Clydeside, shareholder value, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, value at risk, warehouse robotics

They were shepherded by Cameron McPhail, a Glasgow University economics graduate and part of Mathewson’s small team who had worked on the original reorganisation leading to the night of the long knives. He would report to Tony Schofield and to Mathewson. Prior to joining the Royal Bank, McPhail had been living in San Francisco, promoting Scotland as an investment location and imbibing the spirit of the coming computer age. Mathewson wanted modern thinking to imbue their deliberations. The Royal Bank should be reorganised from top to bottom, he told them, in ways that controlled costs of course. The management consultants McKinsey were hired to assist the effort. In terms of the bank’s staff, a premium was put on having non-bankers involved, outsiders who had worked in other industries and who would not be swayed by old loyalties and ingrained traditions.


pages: 426 words: 117,775

The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child by Morgan G. Ames

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Benjamin Mako Hill, British Empire, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, clean water, commoditize, computer age, digital divide, digital rights, Evgeny Morozov, fail fast, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, hype cycle, informal economy, Internet of things, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Minecraft, new economy, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, SimCity, smart cities, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Hackers Conference, Travis Kalanick

The resulting illusions included newfound freedoms and potentials for computer-based self-governance, the inversion of traditional social institutions (putting, of course, computer-savvy hackers at the top), the flattening of bureaucracies, the end of geographic inequity, and a reboot of history.86 Even though computerization has largely entrenched existing power structures, these ideals of the computer age live on, especially among technologists who have not had much contact with those actively excluded from the technology world. Not coincidentally, this era of Gibson’s law-flouting “console cowboys” and Levy’s youthful hacker pranks occurred during the childhoods or early adulthoods of many of those involved with One Laptop per Child, and some, such as Papert and Negroponte, write about being active participants in the early stages of this world.


pages: 447 words: 111,991

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

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

This is what hominids did with flints. It is what pharaonic stonemasons did to the stone blocks of the pyramids. And it is what Michelangelo did when he chiselled a block of marble to create David. Today, we can do this at a grander scale and with greater precision, but the process is essentially the same. Even as the computer age heralded precise computerised machining, this was still a subtractive process: the early human’s hammering of flint on stone was replaced by a diamond cutter controlled by a computer. Of course, there are other methods of making stuff, such as using casts to mould metals or plastic. These have the advantage over chiselling in that they don’t waste any material.


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

Thomond and Fioina Lettice, “Allocating Resources to Disruptive Innovation Projects: Challenging Mental Models and Overcoming Management Resistance,” International Journal of Technology Management 44, nos. 1–2 (2008): 140. 54. Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (New York, HarperBusiness, 2000). 55. See, for example, Rachel Schurman and William A. Munro, Fighting for the Future of Food: Activists versus Agribusiness in the Struggle over Biotechnology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 56. Kenneth A. Oye, Kevin Esvelt, Evan Appleton, Flaminia Catteruccia, George Church, Todd Kuiken, Shlomiya Bar-Yam Lightfoot, Julie McNamara, Andrea Smidler, and James P.


pages: 485 words: 126,597

Paper: A World History by Mark Kurlansky

Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage, circular economy, clean water, computer age, Edward Snowden, Great Leap Forward, invention of the telephone, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, lone genius, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, moveable type in China, paper trading, planned obsolescence, trade route, Vannevar Bush

Lately, it has become popular to attribute the invention—as Walter Isaacson suggests in The Innovators and James Essinger affirms in Ada’s Algorithm—to Ada Lovelace, poet Lord Byron’s neglected and brilliant daughter. In the early nineteenth century, she wrote the first algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine. The computer age does seem to have its origins in the Industrial Revolution, and Ada Lovelace was probably the first to write about a machine that could be programmed to work on any problem. But her ideas were based on those of Charles Babbage, who had built a machine, the Difference Engine, that could make calculations.


pages: 481 words: 125,946

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence by John Brockman

Adam Curtis, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, bread and circuses, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, constrained optimization, corporate personhood, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, discrete time, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial engineering, Flash crash, friendly AI, functional fixedness, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information trail, Internet of things, invention of writing, iterative process, James Webb Space Telescope, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, loose coupling, machine translation, microbiome, mirror neurons, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Y2K

Today, the engineers who design the artificial-intelligence-based programs and robots have a tremendous influence over how we use them. As computer systems are woven more deeply into the fabric of everyday life, the tension between intelligence augmentation and artificial intelligence becomes increasingly visible. At the dawn of the computing age, Wiener had a clear sense of the significance of the relationship between humans and smart machines. He saw the benefits of automation in eliminating human drudgery, but he also clearly saw the possibility of the subjugation of humanity. The intervening decades have only sharpened the dichotomy he first identified.


pages: 288 words: 16,556

Finance and the Good Society by Robert J. Shiller

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, full employment, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market design, means of production, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, profit maximization, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social contagion, Steven Pinker, tail risk, telemarketer, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

When the information was nally prepared, the tapes mounted on the computer, and the data processed, the authority of the idea that speculation makes for perfect market prices was much enhanced. That same “CRSP tape,” considerably updated, is still the major source for daily prices of individual stocks going back to 1926. By bringing nancial analysis into the computer age, the e cient markets hypothesis gained the status of an icon, and as a result it led people to infer much—in fact too much—about the perfection of markets. The discovery that day-to-day uctuations in stock prices are di cult to forecast should have come as no big surprise: if there were a simple trading strategy that consistently o ered a pro t of as little as a tenth of a percent a day, it would yield annual returns of over 30%.


pages: 566 words: 122,184

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold

Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Dennis Ritchie, digital divide, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Eratosthenes, Fairchild Semiconductor, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Louis Daguerre, millennium bug, Multics, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture

Of course, the word has the normal meaning, "a small portion, degree, or amount," and that normal meaning is perfect because a bit—one binary digit—is a very small quantity indeed. Sometimes when a new word is invented, it also assumes a new meaning. That's certainly true in this case. A bit has a meaning beyond the binary digits used by dolphins for counting. In the computer age, the bit has come to be regarded as the basic building block of information. Now that's a bold statement, and of course, bits aren't the only things that convey information. Letters and words and Morse code and Braille and decimal digits convey information as well. The thing about the bit is that it conveys very little information.


pages: 353 words: 355

The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, Joel Hyatt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, centre right, classic study, clean water, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, Danny Hillis, dark matter, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, double helix, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, George Gilder, glass ceiling, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herman Kahn, hydrogen economy, industrial cluster, informal economy, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Productivity paradox, QR code, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

The Y2K crisis will also accelerate the shift from the problematic computer systems that are a legacy of the past to the newest generation of networked computer systems, which are a solid foundation going forward into the new century. These will be the new baseline for the twenty-first century computer age—and for the centuries that come next. The nature of crises In general is that they accelerate change. That's the silver living in entering what by most accounts is a situation that nobody wants to go through. Crises tend to clear the decks of old leaders and old ideas. These people and ideas are often rightfully blamed for helping create the crisis in the first place.


pages: 420 words: 124,202

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention by William Rosen

Albert Einstein, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, computer age, Copley Medal, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, delayed gratification, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, fudge factor, full employment, Higgs boson, independent contractor, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, iterative process, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, moral hazard, Network effects, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Simon Kuznets, spinning jenny, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, zero-sum game, éminence grise

The figures in question are J. Bradford deLong’s slightly different estimates. 4 The nineteenth-century French infant Numbers from UN and CIA Factbook. 5 A skilled fourth-century weaver Kirkpatrick Sale, Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution—Lessons for the Computer Age (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995). 6 But by 1900 In 1900, the average U.S. hourly wage was $0.22, and a loaf of bread cost about a nickel; in 2000, the average wage was $18.65, and a loaf of bread cost less than $1.79. 7 “[a]bout 1760, a wave of gadgets swept over England” T. S. Ashton, Industrial Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 8 “fizzled out” Joel Mokyr, “The Great Synergy: The European Enlightenment as a Factor in Modern Economic Growth,” April 2005, online article at http://faculty.weas.northwestern.edu/∼jmokyr/Dolfsma.pdf.


pages: 456 words: 123,534

The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution by Charles R. Morris

air freight, American ideology, British Empire, business process, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, colonial exploitation, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, en.wikipedia.org, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, if you build it, they will come, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, lone genius, manufacturing employment, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, refrigerator car, Robert Gordon, scientific management, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, undersea cable

It has placed the construction of machinery in the ranks of demonstrative science. The day will arrive when no school of mechanical drawing will be thought complete without teaching it.”33 Once again, however, Babbage was pointing directly to developments still far in the future. It was only with the onset of the postwar Computer Age that technologists began to execute their chip and other hardware designs in software so they could be tested and exercised without the expense of building physical components. And It Worked The tantalizing historical question for Babbage admirers was always whether his machines would actually have worked.


pages: 510 words: 120,048

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, augmented reality, automated trading system, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book scanning, book value, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, computer age, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, delayed gratification, digital capitalism, digital Maoism, digital rights, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, off-the-grid, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

If you turned it one way and started reading, it was what Che would have been reading in the jungle if he had been a computer nerd. Flip it upside down and around and you had a hippie wow book with visions of crazy psychedelic computation. Ted often said that if this book had been published in a font large enough to read, he would have been one of the most famous figures of the computer age, and I agree with him. The main reason for Ted’s obscurity, however, is that Ted was just too far ahead of his time. Even the most advanced computer science labs were not in a position to express the full radical quality of change that digital technology would bring. For instance, I first visited Xerox PARC when some of the original luminaries were still gathered there.


pages: 627 words: 127,613

Transcending the Cold War: Summits, Statecraft, and the Dissolution of Bipolarity in Europe, 1970–1990 by Kristina Spohr, David Reynolds

anti-communist, bank run, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, computer age, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, guns versus butter model, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, liberal capitalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nixon shock, oil shock, open borders, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shared worldview, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas L Friedman, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The revenue from Soviet oil exports and the provision of détente-era credits from the West had helped in the short term but oil prices collapsed in the mid-1980s while the credits built up a huge debt burden across Eastern Europe. A return to economic autarky was, however, not an option because the Soviet bloc needed continued access to the West in order to keep up technologically, especially in the dawning computer age, and also to placate ordinary people with more sophisticated consumer goods. The socio-economic malaise was exacerbated by imperial overstretch. With roughly a quarter of GDP being channelled into the armed forces and the military-industrial complex, manpower and resources were not available for the rejuvenation of the civilian economy.


Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences by Edward Tenner

air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, animal electricity, blue-collar work, Charles Babbage, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Edward Jenner, Exxon Valdez, gentrification, germ theory of disease, Herman Kahn, informal economy, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, machine translation, mass immigration, Menlo Park, nuclear winter, oil shock, placebo effect, planned obsolescence, Productivity paradox, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rising living standards, Robert X Cringely, safety bicycle, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, sugar pill, systems thinking, technoutopianism, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York: Basic Books, 1991), illustrate the sources of our ambiguity; Daniel Crevier, AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Intelligence (New York: Basic Books, 1993), blends sober realism with unquenchable optimism, as does Thomas K. Landauer, The Trouble with Computers (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995). And on the folklore of computer revenge effects, there is Karla Jennings, The Devouring Fungus: Tales of the Computer Age (New York: Norton, 199o). No history of the technology of sports exists. Probably the most influential interpretation of sports history is Allen Guttmann, From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978). Peter J. Brancazio, Sport Science: Physical Laws and Optimum Performance (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), is an excellent overview and reference, with some valuable points on the effects of technological change on sports.


pages: 444 words: 124,631

Buy Now, Pay Later: The Extraordinary Story of Afterpay by Jonathan Shapiro, James Eyers

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple Newton, bank run, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, book value, British Empire, clockwatching, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, diversification, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial deregulation, George Floyd, greed is good, growth hacking, index fund, Jones Act, Kickstarter, late fees, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, managed futures, Max Levchin, meme stock, Mount Scopus, Network effects, new economy, passive investing, payday loans, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Rainbow capitalism, regulatory arbitrage, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, short selling, short squeeze, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, tech bro, technology bubble, the payments system, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vanguard fund

Ten floors below him in the most coveted office building in Manhattan, Philippe Laffont’s Coatue Management ran US$16 billion of assets in his specialist technology hedge fund. While most hedge fund reception halls were decorated with expensive art, Coatue’s paid homage to tech nostalgia. A white cabinet displayed relics that were precursors to the dawning computer age: early Nintendo consoles, the first-ever Apple computer, and the Apple Newton, a clunky handheld device that was discontinued in 1998. Laffont had been an analyst around the same time as Coleman, but Robertson had passed him over for funds, instead backing Coleman, Lee Ainslie’s Maverick and Ole Andreas Halvorsen’s Viking Global.


pages: 431 words: 129,071

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us by Will Storr

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, bitcoin, classic study, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gamification, gig economy, greed is good, intentional community, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Mother of all demos, Nixon shock, Peter Thiel, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QWERTY keyboard, Rainbow Mansion, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech bro, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

But this new collective mood, so alien to the individualist American core, didn’t come without costs. Nightmares wafted in from the disturbed national subconscious. These were the years of Red Terror and McCarthyism in which the paranoid idea spread that America might tip into Communism. There was a similar feeling of rising dread over the coming computer age. It was feared the future would be a ‘technocracy’ in which freedom and individuality would be crushed and the population dominated by machines of coercion, conformity and control. Computers were seen as a war technology that would be co-opted by the collective powers of government and corporation and used against us.


pages: 474 words: 130,575

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

In this rebranded world, computers were the new communes: a digital frontier where the creation of a better world was still possible. In the parlance of today’s Silicon Valley, Brand “pivoted.” He transformed the Whole Earth Catalog into the Whole Earth Software Catalog and Whole Earth Review—magazines billed as “tools and ideas for the computer age.” He also launched the Good Business Network, a corporate consulting company that applied his counterculture public relations strategies to problems faced by clients such as Shell Oil, Morgan Stanley, Bechtel, and DARPA.31 He also organized an influential computer conference that brought together leading computer engineers and journalists.32 It was called, simply, “Hackers’ Conference” and was held in Marin County in 1984.


pages: 742 words: 137,937

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts by Richard Susskind, Daniel Susskind

23andMe, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Atul Gawande, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Bill Joy: nanobots, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clapham omnibus, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, death of newspapers, disintermediation, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lump of labour, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Metcalfe’s law, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Skype, social web, speech recognition, spinning jenny, strong AI, supply-chain management, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telepresence, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, Two Sigma, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, world market for maybe five computers, Yochai Benkler, young professional

While mathematicians call this ‘exponential growth’, professionals might simply think of it as explosive growth. This growth in processing power has already had profound effects. Michael Spence, a Nobel Laureate in economics, notes that Moore’s Law resulted in ‘roughly a 10-billion-times’ reduction in the cost of processing power in the first fifty years of the ‘computer age’ (which, he thinks, began roughly in 1950). Ray Kurzweil, in his books The Singularity is Near and How to Create a Mind, stresses that this will continue. According to Kurzweil, the ‘fundamental measures of information technology follow predictable and exponential trajectories’.19 In explaining exponential growth, he says that: the pace of change for our human-created technology is accelerating and its powers are expanding at an exponential pace.


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

Who could have predicted that the development of “labor-saving devices” had the effect of increasing the burden of housework for most women? Similarly, the introduction of computers into the workforce failed to produce expected productivity gains (Tetris was, perhaps, part of some secret Soviet plot to halt the capitalist economy). The Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow quipped that “one can see the computer age everywhere but not in the productivity statistics!” Part of the problem in predicting the exact economic and social effects of a technology lies in the uncertainty associated with the scale on which such a technology would be used. The first automobiles were heralded as technologies that could make cities cleaner by liberating them of horse manure.


pages: 416 words: 39,022

Asset and Risk Management: Risk Oriented Finance by Louis Esch, Robert Kieffer, Thierry Lopez

asset allocation, Brownian motion, business continuity plan, business process, capital asset pricing model, computer age, corporate governance, discrete time, diversified portfolio, fixed income, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate derivative, iterative process, P = NP, p-value, random walk, risk free rate, risk/return, shareholder value, statistical model, stochastic process, transaction costs, value at risk, Wiener process, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

We will, however, be using Rt in our subsequent reasoning. Example Let us calculate in Table 3.1 the quantities Rt and Rt∗ for a few values of Ct . The differences observed are small, and in addition, we have: 11 100 ln = 0.0039 + 0.0271 − 0.0794 − 0.0907 = −0.1391 12 750 2 3 An argument that no longer makes sense with the advent of the computer age. See, for example, the portfolio return shown below. 38 Asset and Risk Management Table 3.1 Classic and logarithmic returns Rt Rt∗ 0.0039 0.0273 −0.0760 −0.0864 0.0039 0.0271 −0.0794 −0.0907 Ct 12 750 12 800 13 150 12 150 11 100 3.1.1.2 Return on a portfolio Let us consider a portfolio consisting of a number N of equities, and note nj , Cj t and Rj t , respectively the number of equities (j ), the price for those equities at the end of period t and the dividend paid on the equity during that period.


pages: 454 words: 139,350

Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy by Benjamin Barber

airport security, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, computer age, Corn Laws, Corrections Corporation of America, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, global village, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Norbert Wiener, North Sea oil, off-the-grid, pirate software, Plato's cave, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, undersea cable, vertical integration, young professional, zero-sum game

Gore genuinely believes in the role of government as a regulator and equalizer, but after the elections of November 1994, there is little to suggest he will get much support in Congress or the nation. PART II. THE OLD WORLD OF JIHAD Chapter 10. Jihad vs. McWorld or Jihad via McWorld? 1. See David Gonzalez, “The Computer Age Bids Religious World to Enter,” The New York Times, July 24, 1994, Section 1, p. 1. 2. See Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987). I have explored the ironies of Bloom’s complaint elsewhere in An Aristocracy of Everyone: The Politics of Education and the Future of America (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993), Chapter 5. 3.


pages: 493 words: 136,235

Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves by Matthew Sweet

Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, computer age, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, game design, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Skype, South China Sea, Stanford prison experiment, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

Here, Marcus explained, brainwash candidates had been put under hypnosis, subjected to electric shocks, forced to eat their own excrement and endure sexual humiliation, and tortured until they whined like puppies. Once they had been reduced to mental pulp, the programming began. A literal kind of programming, following the rules of the computer age. Numbers linked to functions. Infinite loops of coded instructions, drilled into the subject by repetition, violence, the application of electrodes to bare skin. Finally, cyanide pills had been secreted inside their bodies, in order to eliminate the killers once they had fulfilled their programs.


The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect by Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Asilomar, Bayesian statistics, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John Snow's cholera map, Loebner Prize, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, Monty Hall problem, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, personalized medicine, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Plato's cave, prisoner's dilemma, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test

., Department of Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles, CA. Submitted to Communications of the ACM. Accessed online at https://arXiv:1707.04327. Domingos, P. (2015). The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World. Basic Books, New York, NY. Efron, B., and Hastie, T. (2016). Computer Age Statistical Inference. Cambridge University Press, New York, NY. Freedman, D., Pisani, R., and Purves, R. (2007). Statistics. 4th ed. W. W. Norton & Company, New York, NY. Hacking, I. (1990). The Taming of Chance (Ideas in Context). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. Hoover, K. (2008).


pages: 466 words: 127,728

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, complexity theory, computer age, credit crunch, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jitney, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, operational security, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, risk-adjusted returns, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Stuxnet, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, working-age population, yield curve

Friedrich Hayek, in his classic 1945 essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” written almost two hundred years after Adam Smith’s work, makes the same argument but with a shift in emphasis. Whereas Smith focused on individuals, Hayek focused on information. This was a reflection of Hayek’s perspective on the threshold of the computer age, when models based on systems of equations were beginning to dominate economic science. Of course, Hayek was a champion of individual liberty. He understood that the information he wrote about would ultimately be created at the level of individual autonomous actors within a complex economic system.


pages: 494 words: 142,285

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Lawrence Lessig

AltaVista, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, business process, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, dark matter, decentralized internet, Dennis Ritchie, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Erik Brynjolfsson, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, history of Unix, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, invention of hypertext, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, Larry Wall, Leonard Kleinrock, linked data, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, price mechanism, profit maximization, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, smart grid, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systematic bias, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

For the property obsessed, or those who believe that progress comes only from strong and powerful property rights, pause on this point and read it again: The most important space for innovation in our time was built upon a platform that was free. As Alan Cox, second only to Linus Torvalds in the Linux chain, puts it in an essay in response to Microsoft's attack on open code values: [M]ost of the great leaps of the computer age have happened despite, rather than because of, [intellectual property rights (IPR)]. [B]efore the Internet the proprietary network protocols divided customers, locked them into providers and forced them to exchange much of their data by tape. The power of the network was not unlocked by IPR. It was unlocked by free and open innovation shared amongst all.23 Not strong, perfect control by proprietary vendors, but open and free protocols, as well as open and free software that ran on top of those protocols: these produced the Net.


pages: 436 words: 76

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor by John Kay

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, business cycle, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer age, constrained optimization, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Phillips curve, popular electronics, price discrimination, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, second-price auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , yield curve, yield management

"The Penn World Table (Mark 5): An Expanded Set of International Comparisons, 1950-1988." Quarterly journal of Economics 106 (2) (May): 327-68. Hicks, ] . R 19 3 9. Value and Capital: An Inquiry into Some Fundamental Principles of Economic Theory. Revised ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1946. Hiltzik, M.A. 1999. Dealers of Lightning: Xerox Pare and the Dawn of the Computer Age. New York: Harper Business. Hinsley, F. H., and A. Stripp, eds. 1993. Codebreakers: The Inside Story ofBletchley Park. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hirsch, F. 1976. Social Limits to Growth. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Hirschman, A. 0. 1970. Exit) Voice) and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms) Organizations) and States.


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

World’s Fairs in 1939 and again in 1964 offered the experience of a future America where a benevolent corporation would address every need imaginable. AT&T, GM, and the U.S. Rubber Company sponsored utopian pavilions with names such as Pool of Industry and the Avenue of Transportation. Corporations would take us into the automobile age, the space age, and even the computer age. No matter the sponsor, the overarching message was the same: American-style corporatism would create a bright future for us all. The intelligentsia played along. Former socialist academics and Nazi expatriates alike were finding easy money in the form of research grants from both the military and industry if they recanted their prior socioeconomic theories and promoted the new corporatism.


pages: 493 words: 145,326

Fire and Steam: A New History of the Railways in Britain by Christian Wolmar

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Beeching cuts, carbon footprint, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, Crossrail, financial independence, hiring and firing, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, low cost airline, railway mania, rising living standards, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, strikebreaker, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, union organizing, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, working poor, yield management

Households were separated; homes were desecrated by the emissaries of the law.’31 While there is no small measure of Victorian hyperbole in this account, it demonstrates quite clearly that the middle classes invested far more in the railways than in goods such as cotton or corn which tended to be traded only by professional investors and speculators. There may have been a range of newspapers covering the railway industry, but there was nothing like the availability of information in today’s computer age. Therefore there was no immediate panic as the price of stock began to go down as a result of the higher interest rates, but the process was steady and irreversible. Against an index value of 100 in 1840, railway shares had risen to 149 at the peak when interest rates rose and then fell back to 95.5 by 1848 and to 70.4 two years later.


pages: 377 words: 21,687

Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight by David A. Mindell

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 1960s counterculture, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Charles Lindbergh, computer age, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Gene Kranz, interchangeable parts, Lewis Mumford, Mars Rover, more computing power than Apollo, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Silicon Valley, sparse data, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, The Soul of a New Machine

Bibliography 315 Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. Cernan, Eugene, and Don Davis. The Last Man on the Moon: Astronaut Eugene Cernan and America’s Race in Space, 1st ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Ceruzzi, Paul. Beyond the Limits: Flight Enters the Computer Age. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989. Chaikin, Andrew. A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts. New York: Penguin Books, 1998. Chandler, Alfred Dupont. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1977. Cheatham, Donald C., and Floyd Bennett.


pages: 409 words: 129,423

Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World by Oliver Morton

Apollo 11, Charles Babbage, classic study, Colonization of Mars, computer age, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Kim Stanley Robinson, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, planetary scale, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, sexual politics, the scientific method, trade route, undersea cable, V2 rocket, Works Progress Administration

The television producer Gene Roddenberry combined the two ideas into a “final frontier”: Star Trek’s conflation of physical exploration with the search for knowledge was profoundly influential, making space travel the dominant metaphor for the creation of scientific and technological novelty. Space enthusiasts have been using frontier imagery relentlessly ever since. As the historian Patricia Nelson Limerick has pointed out, this use has been consistently self-deluding and ill-informed, but that hasn’t put an end to it.* The computer age became yet another new frontier when William Gibson’s idea of “cyberspace” gave it a sense of dimensionality; its pioneering freedoms of expression were upheld by an Electronic Frontier Foundation that had frequent recourse to the rhetoric of the Wild West. I’m fairly sure Zubrin would laugh in scorn at the idea that a computer screen could be a frontier.


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

Investors are inevitably drawn to firms able to generate high earnings and revenue growth. But empirical data show this pursuit of growth often leads to subpar returns. To illustrate how growth does not necessarily translate into superior returns, imagine for a moment that you are an investor in 1950, at the dawn of the computer age. You have $1,000 to invest and are given the choice of two stocks: Standard Oil of New Jersey (now ExxonMobil) or a much smaller, promising new company called IBM. You will instruct the firm you choose to reinvest all dividends paid back into new shares, and you will put your investment under lock and key for the next 62 years, to be distributed at the end of 2012 to your great-grandchildren or to your favorite charity.


pages: 573 words: 142,376

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

Brand missed the irony when summarizing the demise: “All this was good people doing work for good service to the customers, but so structured it threatened our fundamental service.”[8] * * * At the end of 1972, Brand had defiantly announced in his Rolling Stone article on Spacewar!: “Ready or not, computers are coming to the people.”[9] It would be another decade, however, before he would acquire his own computer. When it arrived, the machine was a Kaypro II, one of the last successful entries in the hobbyist period of the personal computer age. It was what was referred to as a “luggable” computer, about the size and weight of a heavy sewing machine. It was modeled after the earlier Osborne 1, which had revolutionized the neophyte industry by bundling a complete suite of business software for less than $2,000—word processing, database, spreadsheet, and, most significantly, a communications program that connected the machine to a device known as a modem.


pages: 1,079 words: 321,718

Surfaces and Essences by Douglas Hofstadter, Emmanuel Sander

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Flynn Effect, gentrification, Georg Cantor, Gerolamo Cardano, Golden Gate Park, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, l'esprit de l'escalier, Louis Pasteur, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Norbert Wiener, place-making, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, theory of mind, time dilation, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

Much like the concept hump for Mica, the concept of a solid desk — a piece of furniture — was, for adults who grew up before the era of personal computers, a category with an old town, a downtown, and suburbs, like so many other categories. To make this vivid, we can cite a dictionary definition dating back to the pre-computer age. In particular, the following enormous and admirable vintage-1932 dictionary: FUNK & WAGNALLS New Standard Dictionary [Reg. U. S. Pat. Off.] OF THE English Language UPON ORIGINAL PLANS DESIGNED TO GIVE, IN COMPLETE AND ACCURATE STATEMENT, IN THE LIGHT OF THE MOST RECENT ADVANCES IN KNOWLEDGE, IN THE READIEST FORM FOR POPULAR USE, THE ORTHOGRAPHY, PRONUNCIATION, MEANING, AND ETYMOLOGY OF ALL THE WORDS, AND THE MEANING OF IDIOMATIC PHRASES, IN THE SPEECH AND LITERATURE OF THE ENGLISH- SPEAKING PEOPLES, TOGETHER WITH PROPER NAMES OF ALL KINDS, THE WHOLE ARRANGED IN ONE ALPHABETICAL ORDER PREPARED BY MORE THAN THREE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY SPECIALISTS AND OTHER SCHOLARS defined the word “desk” as follows: desk, n. 1.

Thus once we have two “rival” categories of desk, this allows us to put our finger on the essence of the original category by constructing a more abstract concept of desk. Much as acquiring a second language allows one to understand the nature of one’s native language more clearly, the emergence of computer-age desks has helped us gain a newer and deeper understanding of our old category desk. The advent of home computers changed the venerable old concept of desk, making it no longer associated with one indivisible concept. The emergence of three new types of desks — hard-desk, soft-desk, and general-desk — has allowed us to perceive more clearly an essence, hidden up till then, of the original old category.


pages: 570 words: 158,139

Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism by Elizabeth Becker

airport security, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, BRICs, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, computer age, corporate governance, Costa Concordia, Deng Xiaoping, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, global village, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, Masdar, Murano, Venice glass, open borders, out of africa, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, statistical model, sustainable-tourism, the market place, union organizing, urban renewal, wage slave, young professional, éminence grise

The country that literally invented the Internet and modern computing finally had a barebones national travel website a decade behind the rest of the world, but at least the United States was back in the game. This new tourism website is underwritten by a new fee charged foreign tourists, not the American taxpayer. It took two years, but in May 2012, the Discover America website was in business. For the first time since the dawn of the computer age, foreigners could go to one website and find what the United States had to offer. No more guessing at things like the name of the national railroad (Amtrak). With the door open this far, the industry pushed even harder. They were too close to their goal of catching up from that lost decade. Now the association lobbied for the last piece of the puzzle: to improve the visa process by making it easier to apply, and to reduce the waiting time for approval.


pages: 479 words: 144,453

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

23andMe, Aaron Swartz, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, call centre, Chekhov's gun, Chris Urmson, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, computer age, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, European colonialism, experimental subject, falling living standards, Flash crash, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, lifelogging, low interest rates, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, stem cell, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, ultimatum game, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

If you cannot make up your mind, or if you make a mistake, the computer has passed the Turing Test, and we should treat it as if it really has a mind. However, that won’t really be a proof, of course. Acknowledging the existence of other minds is merely a social and legal convention. The Turing Test was invented in 1950 by the British mathematician Alan Turing, one of the fathers of the computer age. Turing was also a gay man in a period when homosexuality was illegal in Britain. In 1952 he was convicted of committing homosexual acts and forced to undergo chemical castration. Two years later he committed suicide. The Turing Test is simply a replication of a mundane test every gay man had to undergo in 1950 Britain: can you pass for a straight man?


pages: 573 words: 157,767

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds by Daniel C. Dennett

Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Build a better mousetrap, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, deep learning, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fermat's Last Theorem, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, information retrieval, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John von Neumann, language acquisition, megaproject, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

That is, innovations in memes that made them more effective reproducers in brains that were not yet well designed for dealing with them could provide the early “proof of concept” that would underwrite, in effect, the more expensive and time-consuming genetic adjustments in brain hardware that would improve the working conditions for both memes and their hosts. This basic pattern has been echoed hundreds of times since the dawn of the computer age, with software innovations leading the way and hardware redesigns following, once the software versions have been proven to work. If you compare today’s computer chips with their ancestors of fifty years ago, you will see many innovations that were first designed as software systems, as simulations of new computers running on existing hardware computers.


pages: 554 words: 158,687

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

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

The weakness of productivity growth underscores the relatively poor results of GDP growth during the period, shown in figure 2. Looking more closely at figure 6, from the middle of the 1970s to the middle of the 1990s, productivity growth was broadly flat or declining, including in the US, the leading country in introducing the new technologies of the era.14 Robert Solow observed that ‘You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics’, and his quip became the ‘Solow Paradox’ characteristic of the new era.15 After 1995, however, significant technological improvements in the microprocessor industry and faster productivity growth in general seemed to materialize for the US economy.


pages: 650 words: 155,108

A Man and His Ship: America's Greatest Naval Architect and His Quest to Build the S.S. United States by Steven Ujifusa

8-hour work day, big-box store, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, company town, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, interchangeable parts, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Mercator projection, Ronald Reagan, the built environment, trade route

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that he underwent “a serious operation for internal troubles,” and that his family was “not permitted to see or talk to him because the physicians deemed that it would be taxing the patient’s strength.”2 William Warren Gibbs recovered, but two years later the family had another scare when the family’s rented Haverford house caught fire. Motorists leapt out of their cars to help the Gibbs brothers drag out what they could. The household was eventually put back together.3 The Gibbs brothers managed to salvage their plans and get back to work. Like the garage inventors of the computer age, the brothers did not let surroundings distract them. Within a year or so, they were ready to present preliminary drawings for a duo of ocean liners. Judged by the standards Gibbs would set in the years to come, the designs were awkward and derivative, a hodgepodge of visual features from predecessors, and a four-stacked silhouette echoing British liners.


pages: 514 words: 153,274

The Cobweb by Neal Stephenson, J. Frederick George

air gap, Ayatollah Khomeini, computer age, cuban missile crisis, friendly fire, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Neal Stephenson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Snow Crash, uranium enrichment, éminence grise

about the authors Neal Stephenson is the author of THE SYSTEM OF THE WORLD, THE CONFUSION, QUICKSILVER, CRYPTONOMICON, THE DIAMOND AGE, SNOW CRASH, and other books and articles. J. Frederick George is a historian and writer living in Paris. Also by Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George INTERFACE Praise for Interface also by Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George “A Manchurian Candidate for the computer age.” —Seattle Weekly “Qualifies as the sleeper of the year, the rare kind of science-fiction thriller that evokes genuine laughter while simultaneously keeping the level of suspense cranked to the max.” —San Diego Tribune “Complex, entertaining, frequently funny.” —Publishers Weekly Now available wherever Bantam Books are sold.


pages: 339 words: 57,031

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, book value, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Californian Ideology, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War

“Gender Differences in Computer-Mediated Communication: Bringing Familiar Baggage to the New Frontier.” Paper presented at the American Library Association Annual Convention, Miami, FL, 1994. Hiltz, Starr Roxanne, and Murray Turoff. The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1978. Hiltzik, Michael A. Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age. New York: HarperBusiness, 1999. Hipschman, David. “Who Speaks for Cyberspace?” Posted September 14, 1995, to Web Review at http://www.gnn.org (site now discontinued); reposted December 5, 1995, to http://www.balikinos.de/dokfest/1995/reviewof.htm (accessed July 16, 2005). Hitt, Jack, and Paul Tough.


pages: 486 words: 150,849

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

What’s more, because “any worker who now performs his task by following specific instructions can, in principle, be replaced by a machine,” that was bound to happen and accelerate, so “labor will become less and less important. I do not see that the new industries can employ everybody who wants a job.” For a few years, Leontief had refrained from publicly sharing his dark analogy about the inevitable process he foresaw, but with the mass computer age arriving—10 percent of Americans owned a PC and 1 percent were on the Internet in 1983—he decided on candor. What happened to horses in America during his lifetime, he wrote, when we went from owning 26 million in 1915 to owning 3 million in 1960, would happen to human workers as we entered the twenty-first century.


pages: 661 words: 156,009

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

I am not aware of much sober scholarship on this particular transition from East Coast government to Silicon Valley private business, although much of the dated rhetoric that pits state against corporations can be found in popular accounts, such as Michael Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (New York: Harper Business, 1999), and L. Gordon Crovitz, “Who Really Invented the Internet?” Wall Street Journal (July 22, 2012), https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390444464304577539063008406518. 28. Judy O’Neill, “Interview with Paul Baran,” Charles Babbage Institute, OH 182 (February 5, 1999), Menlo Park, CA, accessed September 15, 2017, http://www.gtnoise.net/classes/cs7001/fall_2008/readings/baran-int.pdf. 29.


pages: 467 words: 149,632

If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, company town, computer age, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, data science, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, fake news, game design, George Gilder, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, index card, information retrieval, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Perry Barlow, land reform, linear programming, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Peter Thiel, profit motive, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog

Griese, “Rosser Reeves and the 1952 Eisenhower TV Spot Blitz,” Journal of Advertising 4 (1975): 30. “Stevenson Bids Eggheads Unite,” New York Herald Tribune, March 23, 1954. “National Affairs: The Third Brother,” Time, March 31, 1958. Ira Chinoy, “Battle of the Brains: Election-Night Forecasting at the Dawn of the Computer Age” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2010). At first, IP was merely sharing research he had already conducted. Jack Shea to Thomas K. Finletter, February 28, 1956, encloses a “first draft of a study by de Sola Pool on impressions of Eisenhower and Stevenson through TV and radio media in the 1952 campaign.


Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Abraham Wald, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, dark matter, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, Ford Model T, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, IFF: identification friend or foe, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, planetary scale, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, SETI@home, social graph, speech recognition, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture

“They fight against popular creationism, but at the same time they fight fanatically for their own creationism,” he noted in 1984.4 Alfvén divided his later years between La Jolla, California, where he held a position as professor of physics at UC–San Diego, and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, where he had been appointed to the School of Electrical Engineering in 1940, just in time to witness the arrival of the computer age firsthand. Sweden’s BESK (Binär Elektronisk Sekvens Kalkylator) was a first-generation copy of the IAS machine, becoming operational in 1953. It had faster memory and arithmetic, partly through clever Swedish engineering (including the use of 400 germanium diodes) and partly through reducing the memory of each Williams tube to 512 bits.


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

‘Characterizing Quantum Supremacy in Near-Term Devices’. sarXiv, 5 Apr. 2017 <https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.00263> (accessed 28 Nov. 2017). Bollen, Johan, Huina Mao, and Xiao-Jun Zeng. ‘Twitter Mood Predicts the Stock Market’.arXiv,14 Oct.2010 <https://arxiv.org/pdf/1010.3003. pdf> (accessed 1 Dec. 2017). Bolter, J. David, Turing’s Man:Western Culture in the Computer Age. London: Duckworth, 1984. Bolukbasi, Tolga, Kai-Wei Chang, James Zou, and Venkatesh Saligrama. ‘Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddings’. arXiv, 21 Jul. 2016 <https://arxiv.org/ pdf/1607.06520.pdf> (accessed 3 Dec. 2017). Bonchi, Francesco, Carlos Castillo, and Sara Hajian.


pages: 589 words: 167,680

The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism by Steve Kornacki

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, computer age, David Brooks, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Future Shock, illegal immigration, immigration reform, junk bonds, low interest rates, mass immigration, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, power law, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, women in the workforce

Perot was a guest on CNN’s Larry King Live, which, in seven years on the air, had become the cable network’s signature show. On February 20, King’s guest for the full hour was Perot. Plenty of people already knew his name. He’d been dubbed America’s first populist billionaire, a folksy Texan who’d created a data processing company at the dawn of the computer age, sold it to General Motors for $2.4 billion, then gotten GM to cough up $750 million more to get him off its board. Perot had a deep sense of patriotism, a flair for showmanship, and bottomless disgust with government bureaucracy. During the Vietnam War, he paid for Christmas gift baskets for Americans being held captive, then flew to Hanoi and stood outside a prison demanding to deliver them personally.


Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom by van K. Tharp

asset allocation, backtesting, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, commodity trading advisor, compound rate of return, computer age, distributed generation, diversification, dogs of the Dow, Elliott wave, high net worth, index fund, locking in a profit, margin call, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, passive income, prediction markets, price stability, proprietary trading, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Tax Reform Act of 1986, transaction costs

French economist George Anderla has measured changes in the rate of information flow with which we human beings must cope. He has concluded that information flow doubled in the 1,500 years between the time of Jesus and Leonardo da Vinci. It doubled again by the year 1750 (that is, in about 250 years). The next doubling took only about 150 years to the turn of the century. The onset of the computer age reduced the doubling time to about 5 years. And, with today’s computers offering electronic bulletin boards, DVDs, fiber optics, the Internet, and so on, the amount of information to which we are exposed currently doubles in about a year or less. Researchers estimate that humans, with what we currently use of our brain potential, can take in only 1 to 2 percent of the visual information available at any one time.


Digital Accounting: The Effects of the Internet and Erp on Accounting by Ashutosh Deshmukh

accounting loophole / creative accounting, AltaVista, book value, business continuity plan, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, currency risk, data acquisition, disinformation, dumpster diving, fixed income, hypertext link, information security, interest rate swap, inventory management, iterative process, late fees, machine readable, money market fund, new economy, New Journalism, optical character recognition, packet switching, performance metric, profit maximization, semantic web, shareholder value, six sigma, statistical model, supply chain finance, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, telemarketer, transaction costs, value at risk, vertical integration, warehouse automation, web application, Y2K

Information-intensive industries will certainly benefit from the coming standardization. Copyright © 2006, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited. 88 Deshmukh Chapter IV Electronic Data Interchange What is Electronic Data Interchange? Before the dawn of the computer age, intra- and inter-business activities, especially purchasing and selling of products and services, were paper-intensive. Paper documents such as purchase orders, invoices, shipping notices, and bills of lading needed to be prepared in multiple copies. These copies had to be approved, signed, preserved in files for a certain duration, forwarded to trading partners and processed in a myriad of ways.


pages: 665 words: 159,350

Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else by Jordan Ellenberg

Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, autonomous vehicles, British Empire, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, East Village, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, Elliott wave, Erdős number, facts on the ground, Fellow of the Royal Society, Geoffrey Hinton, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, government statistician, GPT-3, greed is good, Henri Poincaré, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Bachelier, machine translation, Mercator projection, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, Milgram experiment, multi-armed bandit, Nate Silver, OpenAI, Paul Erdős, pets.com, pez dispenser, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, side hustle, Snapchat, social distancing, social graph, transcontinental railway, urban renewal

That’s more than the number of . . . okay, actually, it’s more than the number of anything in the universe, and it is certainly not a number of things you’re going to comb through one by one and write little W’s, L’s, and D’s next to. In principle, yes; in reality, no. This phenomenon of computations we know exactly how to do, but don’t have time to do, is a somber minor-key motif that sounds through the whole history of computer-age mathematics. Back to prime factorization for a second. We’ve already seen that you can carry that out without much real thought. If you start with a number like 1,001, you just have to find a number that divides it up evenly, and if you can’t find one, 1,001 is prime. Does 2 work? No, 1,001 can’t be split in half. 3?


pages: 555 words: 163,712

War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis From the Middle East by Gershom Gorenberg

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, computer age, defense in depth, European colonialism, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, plutocrats, Scientific racism, undersea cable

THE REASON THAT Welchman’s book upset his heirs at the NSA and GCHQ, historian Nigel West argued, was that Welchman had stressed that in theory Enigma was “impregnable if it had been used properly.” German mistakes and failure to follow simple security rules had created the openings Bletchley Park exploited. His book, therefore, was not just about how an archaic cipher from before the computer age was cracked. It was a warning to contemporary enemies to tighten security.26 If they took note, their encryption could become unbreakable. Yet Welchman was partly mistaken, and so were the agencies frightened by his book. Welchman’s error was in underestimating what Rejewski had achieved before the war.


pages: 622 words: 169,014

Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, basic income, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Doomsday Clock, Elon Musk, experimental subject, Ford paid five dollars a day, heat death of the universe, lone genius, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair

Science fiction had set its stories in the future or in space because that was where the action was, and Astounding had begun to take itself seriously as prophecy only after its core assumptions were already in place, with its best guesses arising mostly by chance. With so much wild speculation, some of it was bound to be correct—even if the man at the helm had often steered in the wrong direction. Yet if the future—from atomic energy to the space race to the computer age, which would threaten the existence of the very magazines from which it had emerged—felt like science fiction, it was largely because the prophecy had fulfilled itself. It had inspired countless readers to enter the sciences, where they set themselves, consciously or not, to enacting its vision.


pages: 613 words: 181,605

Circle of Greed: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Lawyer Who Brought Corporate America to Its Knees by Patrick Dillon, Carl M. Cannon

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, collective bargaining, Columbine, company town, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, desegregation, energy security, estate planning, Exxon Valdez, fear of failure, fixed income, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, illegal immigration, index fund, John Markoff, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, margin call, Maui Hawaii, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, Michael Milken, money market fund, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, power law, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, the High Line, the market place, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

In the meantime new technologies being developed in California were making it ever so much easier to commit fraud, to manipulate financial markets, and to filch on a massive scale. Lerach and his partners would be waiting for these bandits too, using the same technologies against them. FOR BILL LERACH AS for the rest of the country, the Computer Age was ushered in with the faint beep, beep, beep sound of the Soviet satellite Sputnik that circled the globe in 1957 to general amazement and not a small amount of panic. Lerach’s father initially thought it a communist hoax, but he and his wife and sons joined the other families on Kennedy Avenue, including Gene Carney’s, to peer into the October sky looking for the thing.


The Rough Guide to Jamaica by Thomas, Polly,Henzell, Laura.,Coates, Rob.,Vaitilingam, Adam.

buttonwood tree, call centre, Caribbean Basin Initiative, centre right, colonial rule, computer age, ghettoisation, jitney, John Gilmore, Kickstarter, post-work, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sustainable-tourism, trade route

Though none were rawer than Yellow, who added energetic stage performances and self-deprecating humour to the expletives, other DJs – fuelled by a positive response from their Jamaican audience – emulated his lewd approach, and sexually explicit lyrics – or “slackness” – began to proliferate. In 1985, Wayne Smith’s hit Under Me Sleng Teng – voiced for a King Jammy’s rhythm of the same name – heralded the start of the computer age in the dancehall. Studios switched from analogue to digital recording formats, and producers seized upon computerized rhythms as a quicker and cheaper way of putting out a record. The mixing board had become an instrument unto itself, with a new breed of producers like Bobby Digital, Donovan Germaine, Mikey Bennett, Dave Kelly, Jeremy Harding and Patrick Roberts becoming the Reids and Dodds of the 1990s and DJs becoming the island’s biggest stars.


The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan by Robert Kanigel

Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, British Empire, computer age, Copley Medal, creative destruction, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filipino sailors, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, Mahatma Gandhi, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, the market place, upwardly mobile

Barbara first encountered the name of Ramanujan in late 1987, a time when magazines and newspapers in the United States, India, and Britain were full of articles marking the hundredth anniversary of his birth. Like Mahalanobis in King’s College Chapel, Barbara was smitten. First, with the sheer romance of his life—the story in it. But also with how today, years after his death and long into the computer age, some of his theorems were, as she put it later, being “snatched back from history.” “Ramanujan who?” I said when my agent, Vicky Bijur, told me of Barbara’s interest in a biography of him. Though skeptical, I did some preliminary research into his life, as recorded by his Indian biographers.


The Big Score by Michael S. Malone

Apple II, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, creative destruction, Donner party, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, game design, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, lone genius, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, packet switching, plutocrats, RAND corporation, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, Teledyne, The Home Computer Revolution, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yom Kippur War

After the 360 there wasn’t much competition. It was the most successful computer ever introduced up to its time, and with its direct (and compatible) descendant, the 370 Series, it became the largest-selling computer family in history. It can be argued that the 360 Series changed the world. With it the computer age arrived. Computers now had a future. Now a company could acquire, say, the low-end Model 20 and, as it grew, graduate to increasingly powerful models, right up to the 360 Model 91, which was 500 times as powerful as the Model 20—yet the firm could still hang the same printers and tape drives on its newest 360 Model and run the same software.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

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

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

Moreover, much of the growth in both patenting and research spending is driven by new patents in electronics, communication, and software, the fields that were supposed to propel us forward. But look a little closer, and the fruits of the digital revolution are much harder to see. In 1987, Nobel Prize winner Robert Solow wrote: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics,” pointing out the small gains from investments in digital technologies. Those more optimistic about computers told Solow that he had to be patient; productivity growth would soon be upon us. More than thirty-five years have passed, and we are still waiting.


pages: 829 words: 187,394

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve

The Northwestern economist lamented that the digital revolution ‘provided new opportunities for consumption on the job and in leisure hours rather than a continuation of the historical tradition of replacing human labor with machines’.18 Gordon’s concerns recall a famous comment made by MIT economist Bob Solow in 1987, that ‘you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.’ The Nobel laureate Solow spoke too soon. Not long afterwards US productivity growth picked up, assisted presumably by advances in information technology. As Gordon’s book The Rise and Fall of American Growth went to press in early 2016 (its publication facilitated by digital technologies), the internet continued to disrupt countless industries while the media fanned fears of an impending ‘second machine age’, in which robots replace human workers.


pages: 700 words: 201,953

The Social Life of Money by Nigel Dodd

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, German hyperinflation, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Herbert Marcuse, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kula ring, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mental accounting, microcredit, Minsky moment, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, National Debt Clock, Neal Stephenson, negative equity, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, postnationalism / post nation state, predatory finance, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, remote working, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Scientific racism, seigniorage, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Veblen good, Wave and Pay, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Above all, it would be a world in which people never feel compelled to hide their money in freezers. * * * 1 Breton 1969: 18. 2 The idea of a moneyless world usually breaks down over the prospect of finding people to barter with (the double coincidence of wants problem), but some commentators believe that this hitch is much less of a problem in the computer age. For example, David Birch argues that “we can resolve the long chain of intermediate coincidences, minimising each step by search, in a few milliseconds. In this way, it is possible to imagine trades taking place with Google replacing Bank of England notes,” see “Imagine there’s no money,” http://fw.ifslearning.ac.uk/Archive/2011/October/Comment/Imaginetheresnomoneydavidbirch.aspx, accessed May 10, 2013. 3 Simmel uses the phrase in relation to socialism: “For by declaring war upon this monetary system, socialism seeks to abolish the individual’s isolation in relation to the group” (Simmel 2004: 346). 4 Utopianism is by no means unambiguously positive, of course, and what seems utopian from one perspective can be dystopian from another.


Statistics in a Nutshell by Sarah Boslaugh

Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Bayesian statistics, business climate, computer age, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, experimental subject, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, income per capita, iterative process, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, linear programming, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, p-value, pattern recognition, placebo effect, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, publication bias, purchasing power parity, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, six sigma, sparse data, statistical model, systematic bias, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Two Sigma, Vilfredo Pareto

Both are possible, but a more logical explanation is that people over the age of 65 are more likely not to be employed and more likely to have a diagnosis of arthritis. To test the hypothesis that age distribution is the reason for the observed differences in rate of arthritis diagnosis by employment status, we need to compute age-adjusted rates of arthritis by using a standard population. First, we need to calculate age-specific rates for employed and unemployed individuals, as in Figure 15-15. Figure 15-15. Age-specific rates of arthritis diagnosis Looking at the age distribution and age-specific rates for the employed versus unemployed populations, we see that for each age group, the rates of arthritis are somewhat higher in the unemployed group than in the employed group (the opposite pattern from that seen when data from all the age categories is combined).


pages: 781 words: 226,928

Commodore: A Company on the Edge by Brian Bagnall

Apple II, belly landing, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computer Lib, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Firefox, Ford Model T, game design, Gary Kildall, Great Leap Forward, index card, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Ken Thompson, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, packet switching, pink-collar, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, vertical integration

The machine had Japanese Katakana characters in place of many of the PETSCII characters and it booted up to black text on a pink background as opposed to the familiar blue colors. It sold for a price of 99,800 yen (approximately $400 US). Commodore users in Japan received support from a magazine called Vic! The Magazine for Computer Age. Computing with the portable C64. Although the C64 was unable to dominate the Japanese marketplace, it was responsible for keeping Japan from entering the North American market. In a broadcast of Computer Chronicles, Tramiel told his hosts, “As far as the Japanese are concerned, I was able to keep those people out of the US market and almost the world market for the past seven years. … What I’m trying to do is come out with the best product, the best quality, and the best price and by doing so, I keep those people out.


pages: 735 words: 214,791

IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black

Bletchley Park, book value, card file, computer age, family office, ghettoisation, government statistician, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, profit motive, stock buybacks, Transnistria

Changing perspective was perhaps the dominant reason why the relationship between IBM and the Holocaust has never been explored. When I first wrote The Transfer Agreement in 1984, no one wanted to focus on assets. Now everyone talks about the assets. The formative years for most Holocaust scholarship was before the computer age, and well before the Age of Information. Everyone now possesses an understanding of how technology can be utilized in the affairs of war and peace. We can now go back and look at the same documentation in a new light. Many of us have become enraptured by the Age of Computerization and the Age of Information.


pages: 846 words: 232,630

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, assortative mating, buy low sell high, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, finite state, Garrett Hardin, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, junk bonds, language acquisition, Murray Gell-Mann, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test

Of course, Darwin is the man who painstakingly uncovered a host of jaw-dropping complexities in the lives and bodies of barnacles, orchids, and earthworms, and described them with obvious relish. Had he had a prophetic dream back in 1859 about the wonders of DNA, he would no doubt have reveled in it, but I wonder if he could have recounted it with a straight face. Even to those of us accustomed to the "engineering miracles" of the computer age, the facts are hard to encompass. Not only molecule-sized copying machines, but proofreading enzymes that correct mistakes, all at blinding speed, on a scale that super-computers still cannot match. "Biological macromolecules have a storage capacity that exceeds that of the best present-day information stores by several orders of magnitude.


pages: 915 words: 232,883

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, big-box store, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, death of newspapers, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, fixed income, game design, General Magic , Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, profit maximization, publish or perish, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, The Home Computer Revolution, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

There have been analogous situations in history, when an era is shaped by the relationship and rivalry of two orbiting superstars: Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr in twentieth-century physics, for example, or Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton in early American governance. For the first thirty years of the personal computer age, beginning in the late 1970s, the defining binary star system was composed of two high-energy college dropouts both born in 1955. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, despite their similar ambitions at the confluence of technology and business, had very different personalities and backgrounds. Gates’s father was a prominent Seattle lawyer, his mother a civic leader on a variety of prestigious boards.


pages: 976 words: 235,576

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game

As the economist Robert Solow, whose work on economic growth won him the Nobel Prize, once wryly admitted, it is “somewhat embarrass[ing] . . . that what everyone feels to have been a technological revolution, a drastic change in our productive lives, has been accompanied everywhere . . . by a slowing-down of productivity growth, not by a step up. We can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” Robert Solow, “We’d Better Watch Out,” New York Times, July 12, 1987 (reviewing Stephen S. Cohen and John Zysman, Manufacturing Matters: The Myth of the Post-Industrial Economy). Conclusion: What Should We Do? “a thousand years of successful German history”: The phrase comes from Alexander Gauland, the head of the populist Alternativ für Deutschland.


pages: 869 words: 239,167

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind by Jan Lucassen

3D printing, 8-hour work day, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-work, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, demographic transition, deskilling, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, European colonialism, factory automation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, mass immigration, means of production, megastructure, minimum wage unemployment, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, pension reform, phenotype, post-work, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, reshoring, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, stakhanovite, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, two and twenty, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

Himself the son of a pharmacist, he observes that ‘most pharmacists are employed only because the law says that there has to be a pharmacist present to dispense drugs’.30 Think also of the proliferation of the legal profession (especially private law experts in the Anglo-Saxon tradition),31 or of specialists in detecting, fighting and preventing cyber-crime – the other side of the shining medallion of digitization. Without striving for completeness, think also of the flexibilization of work that requires much greater coordination, the fight against burn-out and other work stress complaints. The same applies to the demands of éducation permanente in the computer age. If everyone must constantly upskill in order to stay up to date, then many more ‘upskillers’ are necessary, including specialists in digital support. Apparently, we need more inspectors, controllers and supervisors, more auditors of auditors of auditors and so on, ad infinitum, in the private and in the public sectors, both in the position of wage worker and in that of the hired-in freelancer.


Global Catastrophic Risks by Nick Bostrom, Milan M. Cirkovic

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, availability heuristic, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black Swan, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charles Babbage, classic study, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, death of newspapers, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, Doomsday Clock, Drosophila, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, false flag, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, means of production, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, P = NP, peak oil, phenotype, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, South China Sea, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, The Turner Diaries, Tunguska event, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Y2K

., 1 04(5). http: J jwww.historycooperative.orgjjournalsjahr/ 1 04.5 jah001 582.html Russell, P. ( 1 983). The Global Brain: Speculation on the Evolutionary Leap to Planetary Consciousness (Los Angels: Tarcher) . Sale, K. (200 1 ) . Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessonsfor the Computer Age (New York, NY: Basic Books). Schaefer, N.A. (2004). Y2K as an endtime sign: apocalypticism in America at the fin­ de-millennium. ]. Popular Cult., 38( 1 ) , 82-105. Schmidhuber, ) . (2006) . New millennium AI and the convergence of history. In Duch, W. and Mandziuk, J. (eds.), Challenges to Computational Intelligence (Berlin: Springer). http:/ Jarxiv.orgjabsjcs.AI /0606081 Seidensticker, B. (2006).


pages: 764 words: 261,694

The Elements of Statistical Learning (Springer Series in Statistics) by Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani, Jerome Friedman

algorithmic bias, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, computer age, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, data science, G4S, Geoffrey Hinton, greed is good, higher-order functions, linear programming, p-value, pattern recognition, random walk, selection bias, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, stochastic process, The Wisdom of Crowds

Estimating the error rate of a prediction rule: some improvements on cross-validation, Journal of the American Statistical Association 78: 316–331. Efron, B. (1986). How biased is the apparent error rate of a prediction rule?, Journal of the American Statistical Association 81: 461–70. 706 References Efron, B. and Tibshirani, R. (1991). Statistical analysis in the computer age, Science 253: 390–395. Efron, B. and Tibshirani, R. (1993). An Introduction to the Bootstrap, Chapman and Hall, London. Efron, B. and Tibshirani, R. (1996). Using specially designed exponential families for density estimation, Annals of Statistics 24(6): 2431–2461. Efron, B. and Tibshirani, R. (1997).


pages: 893 words: 282,706

The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time by Hunter S. Thompson

anti-communist, back-to-the-land, buy low sell high, complexity theory, computer age, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Easter island, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Francisco Pizarro, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, job automation, land reform, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, Ronald Reagan, urban decay, urban renewal, urban sprawl

Yet neither Sturmthal nor Godwin would have balked for an instant at the prospect of climbing into the cockpit of the thing and pushing it as high and hard as it could possibly go. The Air Force has been trying for 20 years to croak the image of the wild-eyed, full-force, "aim it at the ground and see if it crashes" kind of test pilot, and they have finally succeeded. The vintage-'69 test pilot is a supercautious, super-trained, superintelligent monument to the Computer Age. He is a perfect specimen, on paper, and so confident of his natural edge on other kinds of men that you begin to wonder -- after spending a bit of time in the company of test pilots -- if perhaps we might not all be better off if the White House could be moved, tomorrow morning, to this dreary wasteland called Edwards Air Force Base.


pages: 913 words: 265,787

How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apple Newton, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, experimental subject, feminist movement, four colour theorem, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gregor Mendel, hedonic treadmill, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, income per capita, information retrieval, invention of agriculture, invention of the wheel, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lake wobegon effect, language acquisition, lateral thinking, Linda problem, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Necker cube, out of africa, Parents Music Resource Center, pattern recognition, phenotype, Plato's cave, plutocrats, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sexual politics, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, Turing machine, urban decay, Yogi Berra

Our brains are adapted to that long-vanished way of life, not to brand-new agricultural and industrial civilizations. They are not wired to cope with anonymous crowds, schooling, written language, government, police, courts, armies, modern medicine, formal social institutions, high technology, and other newcomers to the human experience. Since the modern mind is adapted to the Stone Age, not the computer age, there is no need to strain for adaptive explanations for everything we do. Our ancestral environment lacked the institutions that now entice us to nonadaptive choices, such as religious orders, adoption agencies, and pharmaceutical companies, so until very recently there was never a selection pressure to resist the enticements.


pages: 956 words: 288,981

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2011 by Steve Coll

airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boycotts of Israel, centre right, colonial rule, computer age, disinformation, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, illegal immigration, index card, Islamic Golden Age, Khyber Pass, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, women in the workforce

Gushing oil revenue poured into every bureaucratic nook and cranny in the kingdom. Saudi Arabia’s five-year government budget from 1969 to 1974 was $9.2 billion. During the next five years it was $142 billion. Just a generation removed from nomadic poverty, the kingdom was on a forced march to the computer age. Turki wired up the General Intelligence Department offices inside the kingdom and in thirty-two embassies and consulates abroad. All the software, however, failed to detect the violent plot by the crazed Juhayman al-Utaybi to seize Mecca in November 1979. With its echoes of the Ikhwan revolt put down by Abdul Aziz, the Mecca uprising rattled all of the Saudi security agencies.


Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy

active measures, air freight, airport security, bread and circuses, centre right, clean water, computer age, Exxon Valdez, false flag, flag carrier, Live Aid, old-boy network, operational security, plutocrats, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent control, rolodex, superconnector, systems thinking, urban sprawl

Thanks, Jimmy." Werner lifted his phone and dialed the international number. "Mr. Tawney, please," he told the operator. "It's Gus Werner calling from FBI Headquarters in Washington." "Hello, Gus. That was very fast of you," Tawney said, half in his overcoat and hoping to get home. "The wonders of the computer age, Bill. I have a possible hit on this Serov guy. He flew from Heathrow to Chicago yesterday. The flight was about three hours after the fracas you had at Hereford. I have a rental car, a hotel hill, and a flight from Chicago to New York City after he got here." "Address?" "We're not that lucky.


pages: 931 words: 79,142

Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming by Peter Van-Roy, Seif Haridi

computer age, Debian, discrete time, Donald Knuth, Eratosthenes, fault tolerance, functional programming, G4S, general-purpose programming language, George Santayana, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Menlo Park, natural language processing, NP-complete, Paul Graham, premature optimization, sorting algorithm, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Therac-25, Turing complete, Turing machine, type inference

[34] Nicholas Carriero and David Gelernter. Linda in context. Communications of the ACM, 32(4):444–458, 1989. Nicholas Carriero and David Gelernter. Coordination languages and their significance. Communications of the ACM, 35(2):96–107, February 1992. [35] [36] [37] Paul E. Ceruzzi. Beyond the Limits: Flight Enters the Computer Age. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1989. Emmanuel Chailloux, Pascal Manoury, and Bruno Pagano. Développement d’applications avec Objective Caml. O’Reilly & Associates, Paris, 2000. [38] Randy Chow and Theodore Johnson. Distributed Operating Systems and Algorithms. Addison-Wesley, San Francisco, CA, 1997


pages: 1,009 words: 329,520

The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. by William D. Cohan

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Carl Icahn, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, deal flow, diversification, Donald Trump, East Village, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, interest rate swap, intermodal, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land bank, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Michael Milken, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short squeeze, SoftBank, stock buybacks, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, Yogi Berra

BETWEEN 1966 AND 1969, investment banking fees soared, mirroring the merger boom across Wall Street. The year 1970 would be very different. On Wall Street a full-fledged crisis was brewing, with brokerages becoming overwhelmed by an explosion in the volume of equities traded, without having the back-office capability to handle the increased paperwork. While the problem sounds mundane in the computer age, it was anything but boring for those involved. Even the most prescient firms suffered. The New York Stock Exchange quickly figured out it had a major problem. To get a handle on how to solve the crisis of failing firms and to salvage as many of them as possible, the exchange created the Surveillance Committee of the New York Stock Exchange, loosely referred to as the Crisis Committee.


pages: 1,263 words: 371,402

The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection by Gardner Dozois

augmented reality, Bletchley Park, carbon tax, clean water, computer age, cosmological constant, David Attenborough, Day of the Dead, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, financial independence, game design, gravity well, heat death of the universe, jitney, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, lolcat, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Neal Stephenson, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Paul Graham, power law, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Skype, stem cell, theory of mind, time dilation, Turing machine, Turing test, urban renewal, Wall-E

I believe you, Daniel.” Daniel had had some experience reading the Phites’ body language directly, and to him Primo seemed reasonably calm. Perhaps when you were as old as he was, and had witnessed so much change, such a revelation was far less of a shock than it would have been to a human at the dawn of the computer age. “You created this world?” Primo asked him. “Yes.” “You shaped our history?” “In part,” Daniel said. “Many things have been down to chance, or to your own choices.” “Did you stop us having children?” Primo demanded. “Yes,” Daniel admitted. “Why?” “There is no room left in the computer.


The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, computer age, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Georg Cantor, hedonic treadmill, Henri Poincaré, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, Necker cube, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, randomized controlled trial, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Schrödinger's Cat, social intelligence, social web, source of truth, stem cell, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury

From the analytic point of view, as Steiner says, one has constantly to attempt to ‘jump “outside” and beyond the speaker’s own shadow’.65 One must never also lose sight of the interconnected nature of things, so that Heidegger’s project is in this, too, opposed to Descartes, who limited himself to viewing objects singly: ‘if one tries to look at many objects at one glance, one sees none of them distinctly’.66 Heidegger reached naturally towards metaphor, in which more than one thing is kept implicitly (hiddenly) before the mind, since he valued, unusually for a philosopher, the ambiguity of poetic language. He lamented the awful Eindeutigkeit – literally the ‘one-meaningness’, or explicitness – to which in a computer age we tend: both Wittgenstein and Heidegger, according to Richard Rorty, ‘ended by trying to work out honourable terms on which philosophy might surrender to poetry’.67 Wittgenstein’s work became increasingly apophthegmatic: he repeatedly struggled with the idea that philosophy was not possible outside of poetry.68 And Heidegger ultimately found himself, in his last works, resorting to poetry to convey the complexity and depth of his meaning.


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

But not in their wildest dreams do they expect the messy data from history to be so well behaved. The data we are looking at come from a ragbag of deadly quarrels ranging from the greatest cataclysm in the history of humanity to a coup d’état in a banana republic, and from the dawn of the Industrial Revolution to the dawn of the computer age. The jaw drops when seeing this mélange of data fall onto a perfect diagonal. Piles of data in which the log of the frequency of a certain kind of entity is proportional to the log of the size of that entity, so that a plot on log-log paper looks like a straight line, are called power-law distributions.51 The name comes from the fact that when you put away the logarithms and go back to the original numbers, the probability of an entity showing up in the data is proportional to the size of that entity raised to some power (which translates visually to the slope of the line in the log-log plot), plus a constant.


Germany by Andrea Schulte-Peevers

Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, capitalist realism, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, computer age, credit crunch, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, haute couture, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Eisenman, place-making, post-work, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, Skype, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, white picket fence

Established by the local founder of Nixdorf computers (since swallowed by bigger corporations), it displays calculating machines, typewriters, cash registers, punch-card systems, manual telephone exchanges, accounting machines and other time-tested gadgets, although the heart of the museum clearly belongs to the computer age. Most memorable is the full-scale replica of Eniac, a room-sized vacuum-tube computer developed for the US Army in the 1940s. These days, the data it held would fit onto a barely-there microchip. There are plenty of machines to touch, push and prod as well as computer games and a virtual-reality theatre.


pages: 1,993 words: 478,072

The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans by David Abulafia

Admiral Zheng, Alfred Russel Wallace, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, colonial rule, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, land reform, lone genius, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, megacity, new economy, out of africa, p-value, Peace of Westphalia, polynesian navigation, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, wikimedia commons, yellow journalism

From the human perspective the late nineteenth century was a period of free movement, another possible indication of globalization, but early in the twentieth century this was challenged by restrictions imposed – not necessarily for economic reasons – by a number of governments, notably that of the United States, which forgot the words written on the Statue of Liberty.3 These arguments, cogent as they are, do depend on a particular definition of globalization, and the new globalization of the years around 2000, based on the astonishing technological achievements of the computer age, undoubtedly has a different character to the globalization visible around 1900. Yet the twentieth century saw a complete transformation in the character of ocean shipping, with the development of cruise lines at the start of the century, the loss of passenger services once jet traffic across the oceans had become safe, and, most importantly, the container revolution, which made it possible to send goods through ports without any need to unload them there, one consequence of which was the rise of new or revived ports such as Rotterdam and Felixstowe and the eclipse of old ones such as Liverpool and London.


pages: 1,060 words: 265,296

Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David S. Landes

Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, book value, British Empire, business cycle, Cape to Cairo, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, computer age, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, Francisco Pizarro, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, new economy, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, out of africa, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Robert Solow, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

And France, the country, remained one of the world's most beautiful places to visit, a work of natural and man-made art, a tourist paradise. By the 1990s France had one of the highest standards o f living in the world, with income a quarter again as high as that o f old rival Great Britain. The old staples had slumped; France did not learn to mass-produce the high-tech devices o f the computer age. But wine and cheese and fabrics and fashions remained. One sticking point, source o f weakness as well as strength: the French are proud. They have their way of doing things and, unlike the British, do not take easily to loss o f power. This makes them poor learners o f foreign ways. They have their own way.


pages: 1,799 words: 532,462

The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication From Ancient Times to the Internet by David Kahn

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, end-to-end encryption, Fellow of the Royal Society, heat death of the universe, Honoré de Balzac, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Maui Hawaii, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, pattern recognition, place-making, planned obsolescence, Plato's cave, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, positional goods, Republic of Letters, Searching for Interstellar Communications, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, trade route, Turing machine, union organizing, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

Cryptanalysis still has room—indeed, may have more room than ever before—for flair, intuition, experience, individual brilliance. The computers at N.S.A. are—as they are wherever computers are used—the tools of their operators, not their replacements. They are robot cryptanalysts to a very limited degree. Thus, in the last half of the twentieth century, in the flowering of the computer age, cryptanalysis often comes down to exactly the same problem that four centuries earlier faced the West’s first great cryptanalyst, Giovanni Soro of Venice: Does x stand for a or o? The quality of the systems N.S.A. attacks varies greatly from country to country. Competence in cryptology, as in other fields of endeavor, seems to vary in direct proportion to the technological knowledge and the economic wealth of a country.