computer age

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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!

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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.

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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.

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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. —­—­—.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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?

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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’.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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“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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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., 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.

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.

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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?

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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/.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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“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.

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.

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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

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?

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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.

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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.

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?”

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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).

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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’.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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).

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.”

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.

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.* 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.

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.

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(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.

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.

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

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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. ———.

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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. ———.

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.

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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.

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., 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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.”

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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.

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.

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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).

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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.

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“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.

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.

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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.

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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).

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‘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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.”

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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.

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. ——— 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.

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.

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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.

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—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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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."

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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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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• • • “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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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).

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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