invention of writing

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

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

Our brains are wired that way, and it is that fact that allowed The Iliad and The Odyssey to be preserved in oral form before the invention of writing. This also explains why the opening theme songs for TV shows like Gilligan’s Island, The Beverly Hillbillies, and The Brady Bunch are forever etched into my mind, in spite of my not having seen those shows for decades. It is notable that those songs are stories themselves, even including the words “story” and “tale” in their lyrics. It is speculated that our oldest stories, like the epic of Gilgamesh, probably existed in oral form for millennia, until the invention of writing allowed them to be jotted down. We don’t know much about our earliest language other than what we can infer from our languages today.

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It would later be developed independently in what is modern-day Mexico. Writing changed humanity because for the first time, what a person knew could live after him or her, perfectly preserved. Knowledge could be flawlessly copied and transported around the world. Ideas could live outside a human mind! None of these benefits was the cause of the invention of writing. Writing in its earliest forms was about keeping track of assets and transactions. From there, it spread out to cover legal records, legal codes, and religious texts. Creative writing such as plays and poetry would come later. At first, very few of the planet’s ten million people could read, as would be expected.

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Before writing, if you wanted to know something, you had better remember it, because there was no way to write anything down. Ancient history brings us tantalizing hints of a time when we had better memories, while I struggle to remember my ATM PIN. But our memories didn’t degrade immediately with the invention of writing, because books were still uncommon. Now that most knowledge is a Google search away, our memories may further decay. Like the other pivotal technologies we have explored, writing also had concurrent new technologies it helped bring about or promote. The first of these was the wheel, which came along at the same time, about five thousand years ago.

Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Shaped the Modern World - and How Their Invention Could Make or Break the Planet by Jane Gleeson-White

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, British Empire, business cycle, carbon footprint, corporate governance, credit crunch, double entry bookkeeping, full employment, Gordon Gekko, income inequality, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Islamic Golden Age, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Mahbub ul Haq, means of production, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Ponzi scheme, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, source of truth, spice trade, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile

But the most significant advance occurred in around 3300 BC, when the record-keepers transformed the token-and-sealed-envelope system into something utterly new: they flattened out the clay balls and pressed the tokens into their flat surface—thus creating the world’s first clay tablets. The last step in the invention of writing was taken when the ancient traders realised they could simply draw the tokens’ shapes on the tablets with a stylus, thus bypassing the tokens altogether; in other words, the 3-D tokens could be represented by 2-D symbols. And so spheres became circles, cones became triangles, ovoids became ovals and writing was invented.

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Writing remained the exclusive domain of account-keepers until about 2000 BC, when it began to be used in funerary rituals to commemorate the dead, and was subsequently taken up by a range of wordmongers, including lawmakers, priests, historians and storytellers. Apart from its role in the invention of writing, accounting is significant for human civilisation because it affects the way we see the world and shapes our beliefs. To take this early example, the invention of token accounting in Mesopotamia was important not only because it facilitated economic exchanges and generated writing, ‘but because it encouraged people to see the world around them in terms of quantifiable outcomes’.

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abacus 19, 38, 40, 154 abbaco mathematics 40–1, 42, 44, 48, 56 schools 41, 44, 45, 63 texts 63, 64 ABC Learning 208–12 accountability 15, 141 accountancy (profession) 136, 142, 145, 146, 150–5, 158–9, 193, 199–200 enhanced role 203, 205–6 in need of reform 217 accountants 149, 150 increased workload 144, 145 invention of writing 11–12, 13–14 professional organisations 150–3 accounting 125–6, 215–16 arbitrary 236 art or science 156–7, 158 with clay tokens 12–13 for the Earth 249 father of 27–8, 34 firms 217 ‘good’ 125–6 governmental 120 green 244 international 189, 207 in modern era 141 origins 132, 133 principles-based 211 significance 14 standards 206–14 use of numbers 218 see also accountancy; accounts Accounting Standards Committee (UK) 206 accounts books for 99–100, 117–18, 119, 166, 170 meaning of 11, 218 with public offices 107–9 setting up 97 accrual accounting see corporate accounting Addison, Joseph 125 Adelard of Bath 39 Adler, Rodney 213 Aho, James 172 Ahrens, Frank 220 AIG 5 Alberti, Leon Battista 32, 58–61, 69, 117, 126, 171 algebra 38, 40, 41, 58, 67, 76 derivation of word 39 al-Haytham, Ibn 64 al-Khwarizmi, Muhammad ibn Musa 38–9, 66 Amazon rainforest 224 America see United States American Civil War 145 Amman, Jost 119 Anghiari, Battle of 30, 34 Anglo Irish Bank 5 Antwerp 119, 120 Arabic mathematics 18–19, 38–9, 63 Arabic numerals 18–19 Archimedes 37, 66, 73, 75 Aristotle 96, 172 arithmetic 20, 36, 38, 40, 41, 81 commercial 36, 41 Arte di Cambio (Guild of Money Changers) 26 Arthur Andersen & Co. 199, 204, 207, 208, 212, 214–15, 216, 217 Asia 22, 188 asset valuation 146, 218–19 astrology 29–30, 36, 38, 42 Athens 15 auditing 149, 200–1, 204, 215, 216 audit expectations gap 210 Augustine 35 Australia 153 corporate scandals 207–14 environmental accounting 233–6 Australian Bureau of Statistics 230, 232, 236 Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) 209–10, 213 Bacon, Roger 40 Badoer, Jachomo 52–5 bahi-khata 22 balance sheets 5, 219 Balfour, Robert 151–2 Bank of Credit and Commerce International 207 Bank of England 124 banking 25–6, 50, 54 bank accounts 109 bank transfers 54 bankruptcy 145, 150 barter 55, 60 Belcher, John 153 Bell Resources 208 Bellini, Gentile 56–7 Belmont Report (1979) 173 Bentley, Thomas 137, 138 Bible 116 Big Macs –4 bills of exchange 25, 53–4 biodiversity 9, 247–8 bioethics 173 Blake, William 154 Blanc, Louis 162–3 Boethius 38, 43 Bond, Alan 208 Book of Addition and Subtraction According to the Hindu Calculation 39 bookkeeping in Antwerp 119 early Renaissance 96 in Florence 21–2 Marx’s view 164–5 moral dimension of 124–6, 172 and planet Earth 8–9 texts 117, 118–21 Venetian 6–7, 27, 55, 56, 58, 67, 78, 92, 100, 117, 146 Botticelli 65 Bragadino, Domenico 58 Braudel, Fernand 61 Britain see United Kingdom Brougham, Henry 150 Brown, Richard 144 Brunelleschi 44 Bubble Act 142 Buffett, Warren 198, 200 Burckhardt, Jacob 59 Burroughs, William S. 203–4 Burton PLC 205 Bush, George W. 214, 215 business 96, 132, 136, 172 changes to 248 setting up 93–4, 96 see also commerce Byzantine Empire 18, 51 currency 55 Caetani, Daniele 89 calculating machines 203–4 California, electricity cuts Canada 153, 188 capital 101, 103, 143, 147, 231 international 253–4 regulation 144–5 see also human capital; natural capital capital accounts 112, 163, 166 capitalism 8, 29 derivation 162–3, 171 and double entry 159–60, 161–75 mercantile 170 modern era 183, 221, 224, 249 Sombart’s definition 162, 164 Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (Schumpeter) 169–70 Capitulare de Villis 16 carbon sequestration 240 Cardan, Girolamo 76 Carnegie, Andrew 156 Carruthers, Bruce G. 172–3 cash 101, 103, 122 cash-flow statements 5, 219 Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore 44, 59 Certified Public Accountants 157 Charlemagne 16–17, 38 Charles V 23 Chartered Accountants 152, 157 cheques 24–5 chess 87–8 Chiapello, Eve 163, 164, 171 Christian Church 38, 40, 51, 54, 59, 62, 68, 85 Christoffels, Jan Ympyn 119, 120, 121 Christofle, Charles 125 Churchill, Winston 183 Cicero 15, 126, 172 Clarke, Anthony 32–3 Clarke, Frank L. 203 clay tablets 13 clay token accounting 12–13, 14 climate change 232, 245 clocks 23 Code of Hammurabi 14 coinage 15 Columbus, Christopher 18 commerce 140, 167, 168, 173 13th century Florence 21 and art Italy, Dark Ages 6 medieval Europe 26, 42, 67, 96 recording transactions 14, 105–7, 108 and religion 24, 96 see also business Companies Act 1862 144 Companies Act 1900 149 Companies Act 1929 202 Constantinople 29, 34, 50, 52–3, 54, 61 consumption 179, 248 Cooper, William 145 Copernicus 167 copyright 63, 78 corporate accounting 193, 216 scandals 194–203, 206, 207–14, 215, 225 corporations 123, 144–9, 155, 199–200, 206 in need of reform 221–5 transparency cost accounting 138–9, 149, 156 cost-benefit analysis 250–1 costs fixed/variable 138 measuring 218–19 counting 19 credit see debit and credit entries Cremonensis, Jacobus 66 Crosby, Alfred W.

The Strange Order of Things: The Biological Roots of Culture by Antonio Damasio

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, biofilm, business process, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, double helix, Gordon Gekko, invention of the wheel, invention of writing, invisible hand, job automation, mental accounting, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, post-truth, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, Thomas Malthus

We know for certain that by 50,000 years ago such processes were well under way around the Mediterranean, in central and southern Europe, and in Asia, regions where Homo sapiens was present, though not without the company of Neanderthals. This was long after Homo sapiens first appeared, about 200,000 years ago or earlier.3 Thus we can think of the beginnings of human cultures as occurring among hunter-gatherers, well before the cultural invention known as agriculture, about 12,000 years ago, and before the invention of writing and money. The dates by which writing systems emerged in varied places are a good illustration of how multicentered were the processes of cultural evolution. Writing was first developed in Sumer (in Mesopotamia) and in Egypt, between 3500 and 3200 B.C. But a different writing system was later developed in Phoenicia and eventually used by Greeks and Romans.

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The form and efficiency of the response is another issue. The homeostatic benefits of philosophical inquiry and scientific observation are endless: in medicine, obviously, and in physics and chemistry as enablers of the technologies on which our world has long depended. They include the harnessing of fire, the invention of the wheel, the invention of writing, and the subsequent advent of written records external to the brain. The same applies to later innovations that are responsible for modernity, from the Renaissance onward, and, all along, to the ideas that have informed, for better and worse, the governance of empires and countries, as expressed, for example, in the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the Enlightenment, and more generally modernity.

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Among them were a powerful, image-based memory function capable of learning, recalling, and interrelating unique facts and events; an expansion of the imagination, reasoning, and symbolic thought capabilities such that nonverbal narratives could be generated; and the ability to translate nonverbal images and symbols into coded languages. The latter opened the way for a decisive tool in the construction of cultures: a parallel line of verbal narratives. Alphabets and grammars were the “genetic” tools of this latter and enabling development. The eventual invention of writing was the crowning entry into the toolbox of creative intelligence, an intelligence capable of being moved by feeling to respond to homeostatic challenges and possibilities. Fourth, a critical instrument of the cultural mind resides with a largely unsung function: play, the desire to engage in seemingly useless operations that includes the moving about of actual pieces of the world, real or in toy form; the moving of our own bodies in that world, as in dancing or playing an instrument; the moving of images in the mind, real or invented.

Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff

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

The digital media environment expresses itself in the physical environment as well; the production, use, and disposal of digital technologies depletes scarce resources, expends massive amounts of energy, and pollutes vast regions of the planet. Before we surrender to the notion that we live in a world entirely determined by our media, we must remember that the influence goes both ways: each of these media was itself the product of the society that invented it. The invention of writing may have made slavery easier to manage at scale. But writing may have itself arisen out of the preexisting need that tyrants of the period had to manage their hordes of slaves. We humans are partners with our media, both in their invention and in the ways we choose to respond to their influence.

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Everyone reincarnates, so if you do something bad to another person, you’ll have to meet them again. If you spoil the natural world, you will be reborn into it yourself. Time and history are nonexistent, and the individual is living in the constant present. As a result, everything and everyone is interdependent and emanating from the same, shared source of life. The invention of writing gave people the ability to record the past and make promises into the future. Historical time was born, which marked the end of the spirituality of an eternal present, and the beginning of linear religion and monotheism. Before the notion of a past and a future, it was difficult to explain how a single, all-powerful god could exist if there was still so much wrong with Creation.

Money: The Unauthorized Biography by Felix Martin

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Graeber, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invention of writing, invisible hand, Irish bank strikes, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, plutocrats, private military company, proprietary trading, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart transportation, South Sea Bubble, supply-chain management, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail

It was an epochal development: nothing less than the birth of literacy. Stimulating the invention of writing was no mean achievement on its own; but the increasing complexity of the Mesopotamian economies meant that the pressure to devise ever more efficient and flexible techniques was unrelenting. Reckoning number using the new, written symbols was certainly more efficient than shaping, firing, and then storing thousand upon thousand of little clay tokens. But both techniques still relied upon correspondence-counting—one token or symbol corresponding to each thing being counted. Soon after the invention of writing, however, another momentous improvement was made.

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Correspondence-counting requires no notion of abstract number; no concept, that is, of number separate from the things being counted. The new system did. Not only had Ur invented writing, it had almost simultaneously invented the concept of number—and thereby opened the way to the development of mathematics. The invention of writing and abstract number set the stage for the development of the third technology at the heart of Mesopotamian society: accounting. The hierarchical control of economic activity by clerical bureaucracies required a management information system: a technique for quantifying stocks and flows of raw materials and finished goods, for using these quantities in forward planning, and for checking that the plan was being correctly carried out on the ground.

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

Arks are mere wooden boxes to hold books and documents, and yet as such they symbolize the wisdom of the ages, of God’s promise for humanity.12 Bill Gates once identified the development of the transistor in 1947 as ‘a key transitional event in the advent of the information age’. Other key moments, according to historians, include the invention of writing, of double-entry bookkeeping, printing, the telegraph and the computer. What is notable in this list is that none of these are inventions that created new knowledge themselves, but are instead inventions that created new ways of accessing knowledge. It was not the machines – not the telegraph, not the printing-press, nor even the computer – that revolutionized the world, but the processes behind those machines: they were the software to the hardware of the printing-press or the telegraph or the computer.

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., 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.

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

King, as an emissary from quantland, says he offers an olive branch and cooperation. “My pitch,” he says, “is, We’re going to help you.” Still, the drift of things seems clear. Alex Pentland, a computational social scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, sees the promise of “a transition on a par with the invention of writing or the Internet.” The ranks of data scientists—people who wield their math and computing smarts to make sense of data—are modest compared to the workforce as a whole, but they loom large. Data science is hailed as the field of the future. Universities are rushing to establish data science centers, institutes, and courses, and companies are scrambling to hire data scientists.

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a “paradigm shift” in medicine: An interview on Nov. 1, 2013, with Dennis Charney. a “revolution” that is just getting under way: An interview on Jan. 31, 2012, with Gary King. “There is a war in every field”: An interview on Oct. 16, 2013, with Gary King. “a transition on a par with the invention of writing or the Internet”: From an article by Alex Pentland, “The Data-Driven Society,” Scientific American 309 (October 2013): 78–83. a school paper he wrote as a seven-year-old: I was given a copy of the original. His father, Glenn, a factory worker for General Motors: The descriptions of Hammerbacher’s upbringing and family life come from my conversations with Jeff and a lengthy interview on Oct. 14, 2013, with his parents, Glenn and Lenore.

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, c2.com, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, charter city, classic study, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer vision, cotton gin, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, George Gilder, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, life extension, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, Picturephone, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, rewilding, Richard Florida, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, silicon-based life, skeuomorphism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Vernor Vinge, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, yottabyte

We can decide that fairly applied laws, rather than nepotistic favoritism, is a good idea. We can outlaw certain punishments with treaties. We can encourage accountability with the invention of writing. We can consciously expand our circle of empathy. These are all inventions, products of our minds, as much as lightbulbs and telegraphs are. This cyclotron of social betterment is propelled by technology. Society evolves in incremental doses; each rise in social organization throughout history was driven by an insertion of a new technology. The invention of writing unleashed the leveling fairness of recorded laws. The invention of standard minted coins made trade more universal, encouraged entrepreneurship, and hastened the idea of liberty.

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A language-based culture accumulated stories and oral wisdom to disseminate to future generations. The learning of individuals, even if they died before reproducing, would be remembered. From a systems point of view, language enabled humans to adapt and transmit learning faster than genes. The invention of writing systems for language and math structured this learning even more. Ideas could be indexed, retrieved, and propagated more easily. Writing allowed the organization of information to penetrate into many everyday aspects of life. It accelerated trade, the creation of calendars, and the formation of laws—all of which organized information further.

Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time by James Suzman

agricultural Revolution, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, basic income, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, clean water, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, cyber-physical system, David Graeber, death from overwork, deepfake, do-ocracy, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, fake news, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kibera, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lateral thinking, market bubble, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, Parkinson's law, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-work, public intellectual, Rubik’s Cube, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, sharing economy, social intelligence, spinning jenny, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban planning, work culture , zoonotic diseases

Many of us not only spend our working lives in the company of colleagues, but also a fair portion of our lives outside of the workplace in their company too. Of these myriad new professions that emerged when people congregated in cities, two entirely new classes of work were especially important. The first was a by-product of the invention of writing, and the second of the emergence and increasing power of the merchants who controlled the allocation and distribution of energy and other resources procured from the countryside. All foraging and early Neolithic societies had rich visual cultures and communicated with one another by means of a host of symbols pregnant with meaning.

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There is, however, no debate about the fact that even if the ability to faithfully represent spoken words and complex ideas in the form of written symbols did not radically change the way people perceived the world around them, without it we would be deprived not only of much history, philosophy and poetry, but also of the tools necessary to develop complex abstract models that made most important discoveries in mathematics, the sciences and engineering possible. There is also no debate that the invention of writing led to a whole universe of new, previously unimaginable desk jobs and professions, from scribes to architects, many of which were high status not least because of the energy and effort that was invested in mastering literacy. ‘Put writing in your heart that you may protect yourself from hard labour of any kind,’ an Egyptian father famously said to his son as he dispatched him to school in the third millennium BC, adding that ‘the scribe is released from manual tasks’ and that it is ‘he who commands’.

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There is, however, no debate about the fact that even if the ability to faithfully represent spoken words and complex ideas in the form of written symbols did not radically change the way people perceived the world around them, without it we would be deprived not only of much history, philosophy and poetry, but also of the tools necessary to develop complex abstract models that made most important discoveries in mathematics, the sciences and engineering possible. There is also no debate that the invention of writing led to a whole universe of new, previously unimaginable desk jobs and professions, from scribes to architects, many of which were high status not least because of the energy and effort that was invested in mastering literacy. ‘Put writing in your heart that you may protect yourself from hard labour of any kind,’ an Egyptian father famously said to his son as he dispatched him to school in the third millennium BC, adding that ‘the scribe is released from manual tasks’ and that it is ‘he who commands’.

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, clean water, David Graeber, demographic dividend, demographic transition, deskilling, domesticated silver fox, facts on the ground, founder crops, invention of writing, joint-stock company, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, means of production, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, zoonotic diseases

There was apparently, prior to state formation, a proto- cuneiform in use a few centuries earlier in large urban institutions—presumably temples—for recording transactions and distributions. David Wengrow, personal communication, May 2015. 33. Nissen, “The Emergence of Writing in the Ancient Near East.” Nissen adds, “The emergence of writing as here elaborated, should by no means lead one to proclaim the invention of writing as one of the great intellectual steps taken by mankind. Its impact on intellectual life was not so sudden as to justify the differentiating of a dark ‘pre-historic’ age from bright history. By the time writing appeared, most of the steps toward a higher, civilized form of living had been taken.

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Interweaving Worlds: Systemic Interactions in Eurasia, 7th to 1st Millennia BC. Oxford: Oxbow, 2011. Wilkinson, Tony J. “Hydraulic Landscapes and Irrigation Systems of Sumer.” In Crawford, The Sumerian World, 33–54. Wilson, Peter J. The Domestication of the Human Species. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. Woods, Christopher. Visible Writing: The Invention of Writing in the Ancient Middle-East and Beyond. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Wrangham, Richard. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. New York: Basic, 2009. Yates, Robin D. S. “Slavery in Early China: A Socio-Cultural Approach.” Journal of East Asian Archaeology 5, nos. 1–2 (2001): 283–331.

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

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

Just like Elvis Presley, pharaoh too was a brand rather than a living organism. For millions of followers his image counted for far more than his fleshy reality, and they kept worshipping him long after he was dead. Left: © Richard Nowitz/Getty Images. Right: © Archive Photos/Stringer/Getty Images. Prior to the invention of writing, stories were confined by the limited capacity of human brains. You couldn’t invent overly complex stories which people couldn’t remember. With writing you could suddenly create extremely long and intricate stories, which were stored on tablets and papyri rather than in human heads. No ancient Egyptian remembered all of pharaoh’s lands, taxes and tithes; Elvis Presley never even read all the contracts signed in his name; no living soul is familiar with all the laws and regulations of the European Union; and no banker or CIA agent tracks down every dollar in the world.

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Hence the first phase of history involved an increase in the number and variety of human processors, at the expense of connectivity: 20,000 years ago there were many more Sapiens than 70,000 years ago, and Sapiens in Europe processed information differently to Sapiens in China. However, there were no connections between people in Europe and China, and it would have seemed utterly impossible that all Sapiens may one day be part of a single data-processing web. The second stage began with the Agricultural Revolution and continued until the invention of writing and money about 5,000 years ago. Agriculture speeded demographic growth, so the number of human processors rose sharply. Simultaneously, agriculture enabled many more people to live together in the same place, thereby generating dense local networks that contained an unprecedented number of processors.

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Nevertheless, during the second phase centrifugal forces remained predominant. In the absence of writing and money, humans could not establish cities, kingdoms or empires. Humankind was still divided into innumerable little tribes, each with its own lifestyle and world view. Uniting the whole of humankind was not even a fantasy. The third stage kicked off with the invention of writing and money about 5,000 years ago, and lasted until the beginning of the Scientific Revolution. Thanks to writing and money, the gravitational field of human cooperation finally overpowered the centrifugal forces. Human groups bonded and merged to form cities and kingdoms. Political and commercial links between different cities and kingdoms also tightened.

Guns, germs, and steel: the fates of human societies by Jared M. Diamond

affirmative action, Atahualpa, British Empire, California gold rush, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, discovery of the americas, Easter island, European colonialism, founder crops, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, invention of movable type, invention of the wheel, invention of writing, James Watt: steam engine, Maui Hawaii, QWERTY keyboard, the scientific method, trade route

Somehow, the first scribes solved all those problems, without having in front of them any example of the final result to guide their efforts. That task was evidently so difficult that there have been only a few occasions in history when people invented writing entirely on their own. The two indisputably independent inventions of writing were achieved by the Su merians of Mesopotamia somewhat before 3000 B.C. and by Mexican Indians before 600 B.C. (Figure 12.1); Egyptian writing of 3000 B.C. and Chinese writing (by 1300 B.C.) may also have arisen independently. Proba- bly all other peoples who have developed writing since then have bor- rowed, adapted, or at least been inspired by existing systems.

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W I T H THE POSSIBLE exceptions of the Egyptian, Chinese, and Easter Island writing to be considered later, all other writing systems devised any- where in the world, at any time, appear to have been descendants of sys- tems modified from or at least inspired by Sumerian or early Mesoamerican writing. One reason why there were so few independent origins of writing is the great difficulty of inventing it, as we have already discussed. The other reason is that other opportunities for the independent invention of writing were preempted by Sumerian or early Mesoamerican writing and their derivatives. We know that the development of Sumerian writing took at least hun- dreds, possibly thousands, of years. As we shall see, the prerequisites for those developments consisted of several features of human society that determined whether a society would find writing useful, and whether the society could support the necessary specialist scribes.

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Thus, the developmental sequence of uses for alphabetic writing was the reverse of that for the earlier systems of logo- grams and syllabaries. THE L I M I T E D USES and users of early writing suggest why writing appeared so late in human evolution. All of the likely or possible indepen- dent inventions of writing (in Sumer, Mexico, China, and Egypt), and all of the early adaptations of those invented systems (for example, those in Crete, Iran, Turkey, the Indus Valley, and the Maya area), involved socially stratified societies with complex and centralized political institutions, whose necessary relation to food production we shall explore in a later chapter.

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

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

The innate human propensity to share such information, it seems, will take advantage of any available means to do so. For most of the one hundred thousand years or so since the dawn of language, however, the only available means to convey specific items of news was speech. A new way to exchange information with others only emerged five thousand years ago, with the invention of writing. The development of writing was pioneered not by gossips, storytellers, or poets, but by accountants. The earliest writing system has its roots in the Neolithic period, when humans first began to switch from a nomadic existence of hunting and gathering to a settled lifestyle based on agriculture.

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Rather than beginning with a salutation, such as “Dear so-and-so” or “To so-and-so,” Mesopotamian letters from this period begin with direct instructions to the scribe reading out the letter: “Say to so-and-so.” The ability to read and write was limited to a tiny fraction of the population for the first fifteen centuries after the invention of writing, for a number of reasons. Acquiring literacy required extensive training, which was time-consuming and expensive, and therefore available to only a small subset of the elite. And the scribal class that emerged wanted to protect its privileged position as an information priesthood. It had no interest in making literacy easier to acquire and thus more widely available.

The Descent of Woman by Elaine Morgan

back-to-the-land, Carrington event, David Attenborough, Drosophila, Fellow of the Royal Society, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Haight Ashbury, invention of writing, Norman Mailer, sexual politics, stakhanovite

It is a powerful medium for controlling behaviour; a toad tadpole is prevented from cannibalizing one of its own kind, not by elaborate appeasement gestures, but because a tadpole’s skin when even slightly wounded secretes a substance called by the Germans Shreckstoff—fear-substance—which frightens the daylights out of its conspecifics. Above all, it enables an animal to convey messages which can be deciphered in its absence and after quite a considerable time lapse—and we had to wait for the invention of writing before we found another way of doing that. The air around us is full of such signals, in the same way as—we have only recently discovered—the ‘silent’ oceans are loud with the singing of whales and the chattering of shrimps. How and when and why did we lose the power to intercept them? One reason is that we stayed too long in the trees.

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When living conditions are fairly rigorous, sex as a subject to worry about comes a long way down the list, after food and water and enemies and wild animals and evil spirits and sick children and trying to keep dry in the tropics and warm in Tierra del Fuego. Also, after homo became sapiens, age itself brought honour. One of the most vital factors in human evolutionary success was the power to accumulate knowledge, to profit not only from personal experience but from the experience of others, even of others long dead. Before the invention of writing this was made possible only by the long life and memory of older members of the tribe. When something ‘unprecedented’ happened—a flood, an epidemic, a plague of locusts—old men and women who had seen it all before could look back fifty or sixty years and ‘prophesy’: ‘The water will rise no farther than that rock’; or ‘Many will sicken but few will die’; or ‘If you do this, it will be of no avail’.

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

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

When you tape a television show or let an answering machine record an incoming call, you are converting synchronous communications into a more convenient form: "asynchronous" communications. It is human nature to find ways to convert synchronous communications into asynchronous forms. Before the invention of writing, 5,000 years ago, the only form of communication was the spoken word and audiences had to be in the presence of the speaker or they missed his message. Once the message could be written, it could be stored and read later by anyone, at his or her convenience. I am writing these words at home early in 1995, but I have no idea when or where you'll read them.

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I think Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who wrote so eloquently about how people came to think of railroad locomotives and other forms of technology as friendly, would applaud the information highway and dismiss as backward-looking those who resist it. Fifty years ago he wrote: "Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures—in this century as in others our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together. Do our dreamers hold that the invention of writing, of printing, of the sailing ship, degraded the human spirit?" The information highway will lead to many destinations. I've enjoyed speculating about some of these. Doubtless I've made some foolish predictions, but I hope not too many. In any case, I'm excited to be on the journey. AFTERWORD The information highway will have a significant effect on all of our lives in the years to come.

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future by John Brockman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asperger Syndrome, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, biofilm, Black Swan, bread and circuses, British Empire, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Danny Hillis, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, financial engineering, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Google Earth, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lone genius, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, social distancing, social graph, social software, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telepresence, the medium is the message, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yochai Benkler

I’m rereading Thucydides this winter and watching the way everything depended on whom you knew, where the messengers came, from and whether they were delayed en route, walking from one end of Greece to another. Thucydides was literate, but his world hadn’t absorbed that new technology yet. With the invention of writing, the eyes took on a new role. Knowledge wasn’t all in memory but was found in present, visual stimuli: the written word in one form or another. We have built a mighty culture based on all the things humankind can produce and the eye can study. What we could read in the traditional library of twenty-five years ago was orders of magnitude richer and more diverse than the most that any person could ever see, hear, or be told of in one lifetime.

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Even though I myself am a digital immigrant—I sometimes refer to myself as a digital paleolith—I now spend many hours a week thinking about the ways in which nearly all of us, young and old, are affected by being online, networked, and surfing or posting for so much of the day. I’ve become convinced that the “digital revolution” may be as epoch-making as the invention of writing or, certainly, the invention of printing or of broadcasting. While I agree with those who caution that it is premature to detail the effects, it is not too early to begin to think, observe, reflect, or conduct pivotal observations and experiments. Indeed, I wish that social scientists and/or other observers had been around when earlier new media debuted.

Information: A Very Short Introduction by Luciano Floridi

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, carbon footprint, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, digital divide, disinformation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of writing, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Laplace demon, machine translation, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Pareto efficiency, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, RFID, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Vilfredo Pareto

No records, no history, so history is actually synonymous with the information age, since prehistory is that age in human development that precedes the availability of recording systems. It follows that one may reasonably argue that humanity has been living in various kinds of information societies at least since the Bronze Age, the era that marks the invention of writing in Mesopotamia and other regions of the world (4th millennium BC). And yet, this is not what is typically meant by the information revolution. There may be many explanations, but one seems more convincing than any other: only very recently has human progress and welfare begun to depend mostly on the successful and efficient management of the life cycle of information.

Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible by William N. Goetzmann

Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, compound rate of return, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, delayed gratification, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, index fund, invention of the steam engine, invention of writing, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, means of production, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, wage slave

She established that tokens predated even the ancient city of Uruk. They appeared in prehistoric sites throughout the Near East as early as 7000 BCE. Whatever these things were—counters, game tokens, or mystical symbols, they were used by many different peoples and cultures long before the invention of writing. The objects are about the size of game pieces. Their stylization and simplification suggest that they were standardized for easy recognition—abstract and simple rather than realistic. A systematic organization of the tokens by form and place of discovery led Denise to a stunningly novel hypothesis.

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Schmandt-Besserat’s theory is not universally accepted—some scholars question the basic idea of a transition from tokens to writing and point out discrepancies in the notion of a temporal evolution from models to signs. For example, tokens were used for thousands of years in the ancient Near East—not just in the preliterate period. Why, for example, did the bullae system survive after the invention of writing? Also puzzling is that the widest variety of tokens appeared after the first writing began, not before—suggesting that the token and bullae system was alive, well, and developing in parallel to cuneiform. While tokens and bullae may have led to the discovery of writing, it appears that this technology continued to respond to needs that were not completely met with the written word.

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A government bond, for instance, is a contract between the government and the bondholder to guarantee a series of payments in the future. A share of stock is a contract between the shareholder and the corporation that guarantees participation in the profits of the firm and a right to vote on its management. Although contracts existed before the invention of writing—and even before the invention of bullae—the hollow clay balls and their tokens are arguably the earliest archaeological evidence of contracts. Each bulla evidently meant that someone made a promise to give some commodity—jars of honey, sheep, cattle, perhaps even days of work—to the temple.

Paper: A World History by Mark Kurlansky

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

Socrates was one of the interlocutors in Plato’s dialogues, and the question remains unresolved of how many of Socrates’s words were actually his and how many were Plato putting his own ideas into the mouth of Socrates. One of these works is Phaedrus, which is presented as a series of conversations between a young man and Socrates, an older man who is barefoot and slightly iconoclastic. One of its dialogues is titled “The Superiority of the Spoken Word. The Myth of the Invention of Writing.” Whether Socrates once expressed the ideas contained within the dialogue, perhaps to his young student Plato, or whether they represent Plato’s own reservations about the written word, or whether they are just an expression of other intellectuals’ reservations isn’t known. Among the thoughts expressed in the dialogue are: Shouldn’t we be exercising our memory?

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The second emperor, Shennong, established agriculture and trade and initiated a system of keeping accounts on string. The third Emperor, Huangdi, also known as the Yellow Emperor, frustrated by the limitations of recording everything with knotted string, ordered his officer Cangjie to come up with a better system, which led to the invention of writing. Cangjie had four eyes and taught writing to four students. The idea of Chinese characters came to him when a hoofprint of an unknown animal was dropped from the sky by a bird. Local hunters told him that this was an unseen creature, a kind of winged lion called a pixiu. Cangjie decided to interpret the hoofprint in a line drawing.

Money: 5,000 Years of Debt and Power by Michel Aglietta

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, circular economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, German hyperinflation, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shock, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, secular stagnation, seigniorage, shareholder value, special drawing rights, special economic zone, stochastic process, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, the scientific method, tontine, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, Washington Consensus

Anthropologists teach us that money has existed at least since human populations first became sedentary and the division of labour first appeared. Further, money acquired the capacity to express value in the form familiar to us today – that is, it defined a space of equivalence called accounting – once the state had centralised sovereignty over its members. The invention of writing and the invention of money as a unit of accounting go hand-in-hand. Starting out from this basis, we search here for an interpretative thread that provides, in very broad terms, an overview of the historical trajectory of money. In so doing, we ground our study in the most salient lessons of historical research.

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The great transformation of human societies, in the leap from the logic of the sacred to the logic of equivalence, arises as we become more distant from the sacred (Figure 2.1). This process represents the autonomisation of the political and of civil society. Its material basis is the building of cities, from Sumer onwards; it achieves its formal representation through the invention of writing and numbers. According to David Graeber, a movement of concentrated human settlement in Mesopotamia after 2500 BC gave rise to slavery, the foundation of the market.8 Since its origin, the market has oozed violence. Slavery is the ultimate violence. Indeed, slavery strips human relations of all ethics.

The Network Imperative: How to Survive and Grow in the Age of Digital Business Models by Barry Libert, Megan Beck

active measures, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, business intelligence, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, disintermediation, diversification, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, future of work, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of writing, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, late fees, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Oculus Rift, pirate software, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, software as a service, software patent, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Wall-E, women in the workforce, Zipcar

Remember the power of networks, and create one around you to help guide your company toward a more competitive and profitable future. To start, you could turn to a group of your peers, preferably those with some diversity in their thinking. Ask them to join you on this exciting journey. PRINCIPLE 1 TECHNOLOGY From Physical to Digital The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even printing. —Douglas Engelbart, internet pioneer PEOPLE OFTEN HAVE TROUBLE IDENTIFYING WHAT THEY REALLY VALUE, but priorities emerge during times of crisis. In the summer of 2015, waves of Syrians fled the civil war in their homeland. Although the refugees carried food, water, and money in their backpacks, for most of them, the most important survival asset was their smartphone.1 When these refugees enter a new country, the first to-do item is to get a new SIM card and get online.

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

By the beginning of the twentieth century, it seemed that only a system of purpose-built symbols could make logic work properly—free of error and paradoxes. This dream was to prove illusory; the paradoxes would creep back in, but no one could hope to understand until the paths of logic and mathematics converged. Mathematics, too, followed from the invention of writing. Greece is often thought of as the springhead for the river that becomes modern mathematics, with all its many tributaries down the centuries. But the Greeks themselves alluded to another tradition—to them, ancient—which they called Chaldean, and which we understand to be Babylonian. That tradition vanished into the sands, not to surface until the end of the nineteenth century, when tablets of clay were dug up from the mounds of lost cities.

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They began to see each other every day; he wrote sonnets for her, uncapitalized in the style of E. E. Cummings. She loved the way he loved words, the way he said Boooooooolean algebra. By January they were married (Boston judge, no ceremony), and she followed him to Princeton, where he had received a postdoctoral fellowship. The invention of writing had catalyzed logic, by making it possible to reason about reasoning—to hold a train of thought up before the eyes for examination—and now, all these centuries later, logic was reanimated with the invention of machinery that could work upon symbols. In logic and mathematics, the highest forms of reasoning, everything seemed to be coming together.

The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life by Robert Wright

agricultural Revolution, Andrei Shleifer, Apollo 13, Asian financial crisis, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, cotton gin, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Easter island, fault tolerance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the telegraph, invention of writing, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Marshall McLuhan, Multics, Norbert Wiener, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, social web, Steven Pinker, talking drums, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, your tax dollars at work, zero-sum game

You could in principle have started the Protestant Reformation via TV. (Luther was a preacher, after all, like Billy Graham.) But TV didn’t exist. Moreover, when TV was invented, the core similarities between video and the written word were concealed by the fact that, at the time, the two media had different economic properties. Since the invention of writing in ancient times, a series of innovations—paper, ink, mass-produced paper, the printing press, better printing presses, better mail service—had made this means of ending signals quite cheap. But the cost of producing and widely distributing video—whether movies or TV shows—was still high. In the case of TV, the preciousness of video was further heightened by the finiteness of the broadcast spectrum—a finiteness that led to government control of the medium via broadcast licensing.

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On the other hand, even long-standing trends move slowly at times and faster other times, and this may be one of the other times. With the coming of TV, the computer, the microcomputer, and allied technologies, this century has seen breakthroughs in information technology that rival all past such breakthroughs, even the inventions of writing, money, and the printing press. Given the centrality of information technology to non-zero-sumness, and the centrality of non-zero-sumness to social structure, is it possible that we are passing through a true threshold, a change as basic as the transitions from hunter-gatherer village to chiefdom, from chiefdom to ancient state?

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

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

They are sounds. You might ‘call’ them back— ‘recall’ them. But there is nowhere to ‘look’ for them. They have no focus and no trace (a visual metaphor, showing dependency on writing), not even a trajectory. They are occurrences, events. Think for a moment about how different law was before the invention of writing. Instead of precisely codified rules, communities lived according to customs, folkways, and habits. Acting lawfully meant behaving in a way that was generally understood to be decorous, seemly, and appropriate. There was no detailed regulation. Rules were rehearsed in the form of maxims, sayings, and poems.

…

Says the US Director of National Intelligence:33 In the future, intelligence services might use the [internet of things] for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials. Imperishable We tend to think of forgetting as a vice. We curse our poor memories when we lose our keys or forget to call our mother on her birthday (a mistake the wise son only makes once). In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates criticizes the invention of writing for its inevitable effect on men’s memories: For your invention will create forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it, through lack of practice at using their memory, as through reliance on writing they are reminded from outside by alien marks, not from within.34 Yet forgetting actually plays an important social function.35 Sometimes, in order to change and move on, we need to be able to put aside our old failures, regrets, embarrassments, and prejudices.

Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Lewis Galantiere

invention of writing

The energy I burn up in listening to him is dispensed in the same instant by a lake formed in the River Yser which, four thousand miles from him and five hundred from me, melts like snow in the action of the turbines. Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures - in this century as in others our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together. Do our dreamers hold that the invention of writing, of printing, of the sailing ship, degraded the human spirit? It seems to me that those who complain of man's progress confuse ends with means. True, that man who struggles in the unique hope of material gain will harvest nothing worthwhile. But how can anyone conceive that the machine is an end?

How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid by Franck Frommer

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, business continuity plan, cuban missile crisis, dematerialisation, disinformation, hypertext link, invention of writing, inventory management, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, new economy, oil shock, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, union organizing

PowerPoint did not invent the list, the use of which can be detected at the very beginnings of writing. In a pathbreaking study of the relationship between oral and written expression, the American anthropologist Jack Goody notes that “the making of tables, lists, and formulae” is characteristic of the earliest forms of writing.13 The invention of writing made it possible to provide a concrete, permanent, and “objective” medium for speech. This form of neutrality provided to language by writing is, however, a two-edged sword. At the outset, writing had two primary functions: preserving speech and shifting from the oral to the visual. The great interest of writing was its combinatorial aspect: words became autonomous units that could be shifted, extracted, changed, transposed, and so forth.

Fun Inc. by Tom Chatfield

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

Like society itself, media are better understood as a constantly evolving and interlocking system than as a discrete series of trends and ventures. There is competition within such a system, of course, sometimes of a brutally Darwinian nature. But there are also synergies and shared fundamentals, the most significant of which is the users themselves, whose natures have not shifted perceptibly over the millennia between the invention of writing and the present day, let alone between the creation of cinema and the birth of the games console. Older media must continue to adapt, and governments, societies and families must continue to support and value them. But the apparent war between different media is emphatically not a struggle for the human soul between debasing and ennobling tendencies.

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein

Alan Greenspan, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, back-to-the-land, bank run, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, break the buck, card file, central bank independence, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index card, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, life extension, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, Steven Levy, the new new thing, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs

This book is the story of the moments—full of surprise and delight and brilliance and insanity—that gave us money as we know it today. I INVENTING MONEY The origin of money isn’t what we thought it was; the story is more messy and bloody and interesting. Marriage and murder are part of it. So is the invention of writing. Money and markets grow up together, and they make people more free but also, sometimes, more vulnerable. CHAPTER 1 The Origin of Money Around 1860, a French singer named Mademoiselle Zélie went on a world tour with her brother and two other singers. At a stop at a small island in the South Pacific, where most people didn’t use money, the singers agreed to sell tickets in exchange for whatever goods the islanders could provide.

Jaws by Sandra Kahn,Paul R. Ehrlich

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, clean water, desegregation, Edward Jenner, epigenetics, Great Leap Forward, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Indoor air pollution, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, out of africa, randomized controlled trial, twin studies, Wall-E, women in the workforce

That in turn made it possible for some to specialize in non–food-producing activities—making tools (manufacturing), guarding camp and keeping order (soldiers), educating the young (teachers), placating evil spirits (priests)—building the foundations of what we think of as civilization. Agriculture freed part of the population from the critical activity of acquiring food, and then the invention of writing ended the dependence on the human brain for information storage; together these opened the door to the evolution of modern societies. That’s how we could end up with industrial diets, indoor living, books about eating, orthodontists, and authors hunched over computers. Anthropologists and archaeologists have documented the importance of diet diversity in human history1 and have shown that the advent of agriculture produced both dietary changes2 and new styles of eating.

Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything by Gordon Bell, Jim Gemmell

airport security, Albert Einstein, book scanning, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, full text search, information retrieval, invention of writing, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, language acquisition, lifelogging, Menlo Park, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, performance metric, RAND corporation, RFID, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Ted Nelson, telepresence, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, web application

Our greatest innovation was language, a unique system for representing, storing, and sharing knowledge. Language made us into the first and only truly cultural animal, able to share both highly specific and powerfully abstract bits of knowledge across societies and down through generations. The next great turning point in human development was the invention of writing, which it became necessary to invent as the needs of record keeping in agrarian city-states outstripped the limits of naked memory. Thanks to writing, human knowledge snow-balled over just a few thousand years and brought us most recently into the Information Age. Around the middle of the last century the digital computer joined our mnemonic arsenal and rapidly precipitated another epochal change in how we manage our knowledge.

Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking by Matthew Syed

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

In 2010, Ian Morris, a British archaeologist and historian, completed a seminal study into the history of innovation. He was nothing if not thorough. He examined development from 14,000 bc to today, carefully tabulating the consequences of every leap forward. The major episodes were not difficult to spot. The domestication of animals. The birth of organised religion. The invention of writing. Morris noted that each of these events had eloquent advocates when it came to the question: which single change had the greatest impact upon humanity? Morris wanted an objective answer so he painstakingly quantified the various breakthroughs on social development. This he defined as ‘a group’s ability to master its physical and intellectual environment to get things done’, an idea that correlates closely with economic growth.1 His data is striking for it shows that all the various innovations already mentioned did indeed influence social development.

Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto by Mark Helprin

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

Even as a child, I was intoxicated by the greatness of the written word, and took refuge in its power as the gift and protection of God. Like music, it is a direct route to the truths that lie beyond understanding, taking those who will follow to a height from which it is possible to see something too bright to comprehend. This attitude and belief has been preserved among the Jews since the invention of writing and the advent of revelation. It is so deeply ingrained in Jewish culture and nationality—apart from religion, where it is certainly not absent—that I am controlled by it atavistically and thus can never be a modern man. When I chose my profession, which I was sure would keep me poor all my life, I did so not because I wanted to copy the existence of Hemingway, F.

Cities: The First 6,000 Years by Monica L. Smith

Anthropocene, bread and circuses, classic study, clean water, diversified portfolio, failed state, financial innovation, gentrification, hiring and firing, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, New Urbanism, payday loans, place-making, Ponzi scheme, SimCity, South China Sea, telemarketer, the built environment, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

A Springboard for Everything In cities, people transformed their prior capacities into new inventions designed to make urban life easier and faster. Entrepreneurs supercharged architecture by creating new types of spaces, supercharged the economy by creating new strategies of production, and supercharged language through changes in the technology of expression, among which the most striking was the invention of writing. It was in Mesopotamia, the home of the world’s earliest cities, that we have evidence for the first writing in the form of clay tablets with tiny, wedge-shaped cuneiform impressions. The first scribes used their invention to keep accounts, augmented with a healthy dose of divine oversight.

The Dark Net by Jamie Bartlett

3D printing, 4chan, bitcoin, blockchain, brain emulation, carbon footprint, Cody Wilson, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, degrowth, deindustrialization, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, eternal september, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, global village, Google Chrome, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Lewis Mumford, life extension, litecoin, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mondo 2000, moral hazard, moral panic, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, pre–internet, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, slashdot, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

All information is derived from interviews I conducted with members of pro-ana websites, and is accurate to the best of my knowledge. I have also cloaked quotes where necessary. Conclusion Zoltan vs Zerzan TRANSFORMATIVE TECHNOLOGIES HAVE always been accompanied by optimistic and pessimistic visions of how they will change humanity and society. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates worried that the recent invention of writing would have a deleterious effect on the memories of young Greeks who, he predicted, would become ‘the hearers of many things and will have learned nothing’. When books began to roll off Johannes Gutenberg’s press, many suspected they would be ‘confusing and harmful’, overwhelming young people with information.

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Freud used the term ‘virtual’ to describe the space of mental life, of fantasies, dreams and desires. He defined drives, not as physical instincts, but as the mental representation of bodily impulses, which is to say that they virtualize physical realities. Meatspace was already virtual reality. All that we have added, first with the invention of writing, then with print and finally with digital writing, are new layers of virtualization. It is for this reason that Lacan defined all drives as potential death drives. If a drive is virtual, then, unlike an instinct, it can’t be satisfied. It spins on eternally, immortally, indifferent to decency, pleasure or organic survival.

Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace by Ronald J. Deibert

4chan, air gap, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Brian Krebs, call centre, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, connected car, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, digital divide, disinformation, end-to-end encryption, escalation ladder, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Hacker Ethic, Herman Kahn, informal economy, information security, invention of writing, Iridium satellite, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, South China Sea, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, Stuxnet, Ted Kaczynski, the medium is the message, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

“Hell is other people,” Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote in No Exit, and now teeming billions of them are potentially in your living room, or at least in your email inbox, that silent assassin. You cherish your privacy. Of course, there have been previous revolutions in communications technology that have upset the order of things and caused outrage and celebration. The alphabet, the invention of writing, the development of the printing press, the telegraph, radio, and television come to mind. But one of the many things that distinguishes cyberspace is the speed by which it has spread (and continues to spread). Those other technological innovations no doubt changed societies but in an “immersive” sense only over many generations, and more locally than not.

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI by John Brockman

AI winter, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, finite state, friendly AI, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, information retrieval, invention of writing, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, Loebner Prize, machine translation, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Picturephone, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, telerobotics, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, you are the product, zero-sum game

Fortunately for civilization, the more a person’s creativity is forced into a monomaniacal channel, the more it is impaired in regard to overcoming unforeseen difficulties, just as happened for thousands of centuries. The worry that AGIs are uniquely dangerous because they could run on ever better hardware is a fallacy, since human thought will be accelerated by the same technology. We have been using tech-assisted thought since the invention of writing and tallying. Much the same holds for the worry that AGIs might get so good, qualitatively, at thinking that humans would be to them as insects are to humans. All thinking is a form of computation, and any computer whose repertoire includes a universal set of elementary operations can emulate the computations of any other.

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

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

And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.36 While there may be some truth to what Plato says about writing’s impact on pre-literate society and oral memory, we’d be hard-pressed to find a voice today that genuinely believes the world would have been better off without the invention of writing. As with every technology, it’s been put to uses both good and bad, but in this instance the balance definitely seems to have been toward the positive. While it can be argued that some number of written works have contributed to the detriment of humankind through the ages, this can hardly be seen as justification for the elimination of writing as a whole.

Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom by Mary Catherine Bateson

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, Celebration, Florida, desegregation, double helix, estate planning, feminist movement, invention of writing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, urban renewal, War on Poverty, women in the workforce

Alfred Korzybski described our distinctive quality as “time binding,” a characteristic that includes the ability to recall the past and to plan for the future, as well as the capacity to recognize and analyze sequences of cause and effect, a capacity that is amplified as knowledge is developed and passed on from generation to generation.1 The invention of writing offered the possibility of time binding across millennia. Not only do human beings learn and teach but they do so across generations and across centuries. The accumulation of scientific knowledge and technological possibility, however, has created a process of accelerated change in which the challenge of keeping up from day to day has actually undermined our capacity for long-term thinking and vision even as it has increased the future costs of bad decisions taken in the present.

Extraterrestrial Civilizations by Isaac Asimov

Albert Einstein, Cepheid variable, Columbine, Eddington experiment, Edward Charles Pickering, Future Shock, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, invention of radio, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Louis Pasteur, Magellanic Cloud, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, time dilation

That gives us our twelfth figure: 12—The number of planets in our Galaxy on which a technological civilization has developed = 390,000,000. In other words, one star out of 770 in the Galaxy today has shone down on the development of a technological civilization. We can go a little bit further. Our own civilization, if we count from the invention of writing to the first venture into space, has lasted 5,000 years. If we want to be glowingly optimistic about it, we can suppose that our civilization will continue to last on Earth as long as the Earth can support life—for another 7.4 billion years—and that our level of technology will advance in all that time.* Suppose we say, then, that the average duration of a civilization is 7.4 billion years (we’ll have more to say about that later on in the book) and that space flight is reached in the first 5,000 years.

Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language by Robert McCrum

Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, colonial rule, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, invention of movable type, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, knowledge economy, Livingstone, I presume, Martin Wolf, Naomi Klein, Norman Mailer, Parag Khanna, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile

Printing introduces a crucial modern separation between spoken and written mass communications. In the digital twenty-first century you will not always find ink and paper, but you cannot escape the printed word; it defines our civilization. Printing has been described as ‘the third revolution’ in human communications, after the invention of writing and the alphabet. It began in the 1450s with Johannes Gutenberg, a German businessman from Mainz. 4 Before Gutenberg, books were costly, rare and handmade. The composition of a single volume was a laborious business, closer to an art than a craft. A single copy might take a month or two to produce (one 1,272–page commentary on the Bible took two scribes five years, 1453–8, to complete).

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium by Martin Gurri

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Ayatollah Khomeini, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Burning Man, business cycle, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, David Graeber, death of newspapers, disinformation, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, job-hopping, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Port of Oakland, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skype, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, too big to fail, traveling salesman, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional

The old hierarchies and systems are still very much with us. So let me return to my original point of departure: information. Information has not grown incrementally over history, but has expanded in great pulses or waves which sweep over the human landscape and leave little untouched. The invention of writing, for example, was one such wave. It led to a form of government dependent on a mandarin or priestly caste. The development of the alphabet was another: the republics of the classical world would have been unable to function without literate citizens. A third wave, the arrival of the printing press and moveable type, was probably the most disruptive of all.

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch by Lewis Dartnell

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, clean water, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, decarbonisation, discovery of penicillin, Dmitri Mendeleev, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, global village, Haber-Bosch Process, invention of movable type, invention of radio, invention of writing, iterative process, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Kim Stanley Robinson, lone genius, low earth orbit, mass immigration, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nuclear winter, off grid, Oklahoma City bombing, Richard Feynman, safety bicycle, tacit knowledge, technology bubble, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, “Ozymandias” (1818) TODAY, WITH THE INTERNET, ubiquitous wireless networks, and handheld smartphones, communication with one another anywhere in the world is effortless and instantaneous. We keep in touch via e-mail and Twitter, websites disseminate news and information, and we can access the wealth of human knowledge from the palm of our hand. But in a post-apocalyptic world you’ll need to return to more traditional communication technologies. WRITING Before the invention of writing, knowledge circulated among the minds of the living, conveyed only by the spoken word. Yet there is only so much data that can be stored in oral history, and the danger is that when people die ideas are lost forever. But once committed to a physical medium, thoughts can be stored faithfully, referred back to years later, and built up over time.

The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution by Richard Dawkins

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Boeing 747, classic study, complexity theory, delayed gratification, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, invention of writing, lateral thinking, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, nuclear winter, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, the High Line, the long tail, urban sprawl

The historical linguist can use the second of our two methods of reconstruction, tracing back renewed relics, in this case words. Modern English goes back via Middle English to Anglo-Saxon using the continuous literary tradition, through Shakespeare, Chaucer and Beowulf. But speech obviously goes back long before the invention of writing, and many languages have no written form anyway. For the earlier history of dead languages, linguists resort to a version of what I am calling triangulation. They compare modern languages and group them hierarchically into families within families. Romance, Germanic, Slavic, Celtic and other European language families are in turn grouped with some Indian language families into Indo-European.

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What else, they ask, could account for such a sudden change? It is not as silly as it sounds to suggest that language arose suddenly. Nobody thinks writing goes back more than a few thousand years, and everyone agrees that brain anatomy didn't change to coincide with anything so recent as the invention of writing. In theory, speech could be another example of the same thing. Nevertheless, my hunch, supported by the authority of linguists such as Steven Pinker, is that language is older than the Leap. We'll come back to the point a million years further into the past, when our pilgrimage reaches Homo ergaster(erectus).

Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past by David Reich

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, carbon credits, Easter island, European colonialism, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, invention of agriculture, invention of the wheel, invention of writing, mass immigration, meta-analysis, new economy, out of africa, phenotype, Scientific racism, sparse data, supervolcano, the scientific method, transatlantic slave trade

Coanalyzing them with present-day Britons, including those from the “People of the British Isles” study, we expect to be able to connect the dots between the past and the present in this one small part of the world. Ancient DNA studies with large numbers of samples also offer the promise of being able to estimate human population sizes at different times in the past, a topic about which we have almost no reliable information from the period earlier than the invention of writing, but which is important for understanding not just human history and evolution but also economics and ecology. In a population of many hundreds of millions (such as the Han Chinese), a pair of randomly chosen people is expected to have few if any shared segments of DNA within the last forty generations because they descend from almost entirely different ancestors over this period.

The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet by Justin Peters

4chan, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Alan Greenspan, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Bayesian statistics, Brewster Kahle, buy low sell high, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, Free Software Foundation, global village, Hacker Ethic, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Lean Startup, machine readable, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Open Library, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, profit motive, RAND corporation, Republic of Letters, Richard Stallman, selection bias, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, social web, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

Using a Teletype terminal,27 Hart typed it up in capital letters—computers did not yet support lowercase text28—saved the document on a hard-drive pack, and informed the other network users that the Declaration of Independence was now available in computerized format.29 It was the first e-book. Years later, Hart would burnish this act into legend—the genesis of a movement that would eventually spread across the world, one that would “undoubtedly become the greatest advance to human civilization and society since the invention of writing itself.”30 At the time, though, it seemed less like an opening salvo than a misfire; just another unnoticed folk song. (According to Hart, the Declaration was accessed only six times.)31 The upload had its most profound effect on the uploader himself, Michael Hart, who was convinced that he had hit on something big, even if, or perhaps because, no one else shared his optimism.

Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything by David Bellos

Bletchley Park, Clapham omnibus, Claude Shannon: information theory, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Etonian, European colonialism, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, invention of the telephone, invention of writing, language acquisition, machine readable, machine translation, natural language processing, Republic of Letters, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, speech recognition

What we probably meant in the distant past when we asserted that something was “literally true” in order to emphasize that it was really true, true to a higher degree than just being true, was that it was among those rare things that were worthy of being “put into letters,” of being written down. All the uses of literal with respect to meaning and translation implicitly value writtenness more highly than oral speech. They are now among the surviving linguistic traces of the fantastic change in social and cultural hierarchies that the invention of writing brought about. They carry the shadow of the early stages of literacy in the Mediterranean basin between the third and first millennia B.C.E., when alphabetic scripts first arose together with the texts that through translation and retranslation have shaped and fed Western civilization ever since.

The Future of Money by Bernard Lietaer

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, banks create money, barriers to entry, billion-dollar mistake, Bretton Woods, business cycle, clean water, complexity theory, corporate raider, currency risk, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, diversification, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, full employment, geopolitical risk, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, Golden Gate Park, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, invention of the telephone, invention of writing, John Perry Barlow, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Norbert Wiener, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, post-industrial society, price stability, Recombinant DNA, reserve currency, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Future of Employment, the market place, the payments system, Thomas Davenport, trade route, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, working poor, world market for maybe five computers

They are transforming what money is, who creates it, what it means, what emotions it encourages, and how people will behave towards each other and the environment when using it. We know that the technological changes that have the most radical revolutionary impact on societies are those that change the tools by which people relate to each other. Fundamental shifts in civilisation have been traced back to the invention of writing, the alphabet and to the printing press. The breathtaking social, political and economic implications of the invention of the telephone, car, and television are classic examples of such shifts that occurred during the 20th century. Changes in the nature of money will have at least as great an impact as any of the above examples.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

‘Ultimately we will need to change the operating system at the heart of major corporations,’ Kelly acknowledges. ‘But if we begin there, we will fail. The place to begin is with what’s doable, what’s enlivening – and what points toward bigger wins in the future.’69 Who will own the robots? ‘The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing,’ said Douglas Engelbart, the acclaimed American innovator in human–computer interaction. He may well turn out to be right. But the significance of this revolution for work, wages and wealth hinges on how digital technologies are owned and used. So far, they have generated two opposing trends whose implications are only just beginning to unfold.

The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel by Nicholas Ostler

barriers to entry, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, open economy, precautionary principle, Republic of Letters, Scramble for Africa, statistical model, trade route, upwardly mobile, Wayback Machine

By now, the historical record has enough such nations to form a few judgments about the careers and likely destinies of lingua-franca communities grown on this basis, the voluntary exchange of goods for profit. The recording of commercial transactions is accepted as one of the fundamental uses of literacy—even perhaps the original motive for the invention of writing— so in principle one might expect the history of such languages to be well documented. In practice, the rec ords of such languages—which would include Phoenician, Aramaic, Greek, Sabir (the eponymous Lingua Franca of the Mediterranean), Sogdian, Persian, Portuguese, Malay, Nahuatl, Mobile Trade Language, Chinook Jargon, Tupi (Lingua Geral do Brasil), Swahili, as well as French and English— if they were ever written down, have only tended to survive if they were noncommercial.

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

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

The truly significant developments in thought will arise, as they always have, in a biotechnical symbiosis. This distinctively human story is easy to follow in the body (wheeled transport is one of many mechanical inventions that have enabled human skeletons to become lighter) but is probably just as present in the brain (the invention of writing as a form of external intellectual storage may have reduced selection pressure on some forms of innate memory capacity while stimulating others). In any case, the separate terms human and machine produce their own Denkraumverlust—a loss of thinking space encouraging us to accept as real an unreal dualism.

Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie T. Chang

anti-communist, Deng Xiaoping, estate planning, fake news, financial independence, Great Leap Forward, index card, invention of writing, job-hopping, land reform, Mason jar, mass immigration, new economy, PalmPilot, Pearl River Delta, risk tolerance, Shenzhen special economic zone , special economic zone, vertical integration

On different journeys, I saw people carrying an ancient TV set, a wicker basket of electric cables, a mud-encrusted bucket of stonemason’s tools, and a murderous-looking wrench a yard long. Once I saw a young woman with a six-foot-long broomstick handle. Bus stops were unmarked, and there were never signs showing the routes. You had to ask: Information was conveyed by word of mouth, as if we lived in ancient times before the invention of writing. Twice I bought city maps with bus schedules but both times the routes were already out of date; things were happening too quickly to be written down. The other passengers were as confused as I was, often calling out the names of stops that had already passed and making panicked departures.

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Airbnb, Anton Chekhov, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Broken windows theory, call centre, data science, David Graeber, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Easter island, experimental subject, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Garrett Hardin, Hans Rosling, invention of writing, invisible hand, knowledge economy, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, nocebo, placebo effect, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey

How many crimes, how many wars, how many murders, how many misfortunes and horrors, would that man have saved the human species, who pulling up the stakes or filling up the ditches should have cried to his fellows: Be sure not to listen to this imposter; you are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth itself to nobody! Ever since the birth of that cursed civil society, Rousseau argued, things had gone wrong. Farming, urbanisation, statehood – they hadn’t lifted us out of chaos, but enslaved and doomed us. The invention of writing and the printing press had only made matters worse. ‘Thanks to typographic characters,’ he wrote, ‘the dangerous reveries of Hobbes […] will remain for ever.’ In the good old days before bureaucrats and kings, Rousseau believed that everything was better. Back when humans existed in a ‘state of nature’ we were still compassionate beings.

Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World by Anthony Sattin

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, digital nomad, Donald Trump, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, invention of writing, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, Jessica Bruder, Khartoum Gordon, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nomadland, open borders, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, spinning jenny, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, traveling salesman

There are of course reasons for the omission, not least being the challenge of writing the history of people who have not left monuments or manuscripts. But many nomads have at least left, or preserved, their own stories. Some of their stories relate to events that happened, others are complete fantasies, while many sit somewhere between the two. As all humans did before the invention of writing, nomads tell stories to keep alive their histories, myths and their sense of self. These stories try to make sense of the world and their place in it, perhaps while sitting around a fire, as the night fills with the sounds of wild animals and the sky sugars with stars. The obvious risk to an oral tradition is that when cultures vanish, their stories might go with them and this seems to have happened at Göbekli Tepe.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond

agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, Atahualpa, Boeing 747, Columbian Exchange, correlation coefficient, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, European colonialism, Great Leap Forward, invention of gunpowder, invention of the wheel, invention of writing, language acquisition, longitudinal study, out of africa, phenotype, planned obsolescence, Scientific racism, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, the long tail, the scientific method, trade route

Some of that slowdown may have developed recently, around the time of the Great Leap Forward, since quite a few Cro-Magnons lived into their sixties while few Neanderthals passed forty. Slow aging is crucial to the human lifestyle because the latter depends on transmitted information. As language evolved, far more information became available to us to pass on than previously. Until the invention of writing, old people acted as the repositories of that transmitted information and experience, just as they continue to do in tribal societies today. Under hunter-gatherer conditions, the knowledge possessed by even one person over the age of seventy could spell the difference between survival and starvation or defeat for a whole clan.

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, British Empire, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, context collapse, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, gentrification, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of writing, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, loose coupling, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Streisand effect, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Writing, for example, is among the earliest technologies that changed the relationship between our words and the passage of time.11 We are so used to writing that it is difficult to imagine societies without it and to realize that writing is a technology that shapes our society. Before the invention of writing (a long process rather than a single breakthrough), people relied on memory in passing on knowledge or stories. This affected the type of content that could be effectively transmitted over time and space; for example, a novel or an encyclopedia can exist only in a society with writing. An oral culture—a culture without any form of writing—is more suited for poetry with repetitions and proverbs, which are easier to remember without writing down, that are committed to memory and passed on.

The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars by Jo Marchant

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, complexity theory, Dava Sobel, Drosophila, Easter island, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, founder crops, game design, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, overview effect, Plato's cave, polynesian navigation, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, trade route

We learned in chapter 2 how the origin of farming, around 8000 BC, was a key turning point in human history: people were no longer part of nature, they were beginning to shape and control it. A few millennia later, these same fertile plains between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers—an area known as Mesopotamia*—witnessed another great human revolution: the invention of writing. The earliest written tablets known were produced by the Sumerian civilization of southern Mesopotamia, at the end of the fourth millennium BC. Their cuneiform script was later adopted by the Babylonians and Assyrians and spread farther north. By allowing everything from debts and taxes to the will of the king to be permanently recorded, the written word supported the machinery and bureaucracy of ever more complex cities, states and even empires.

How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by Ryan North

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, George Santayana, germ theory of disease, GPS: selective availability, Great Leap Forward, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, megastructure, minimum viable product, moveable type in China, placebo effect, safety bicycle, sugar pill, the scientific method, time dilation, trade route, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

That prevents you from accidentally teaching others how to read this text, which may be something worth considering, especially since your current temporal circumstances have conspired to make this book the most insanely valuable and dangerous item on the planet. Though the idea behind writing is simple—store invisible noises by transforming them into visible shapes—the invention of writing was actually an incredibly difficult thing for humans to do. It’s so difficult, in fact, that across all of human history, it has happened a grand total of two times: in Egypt and Sumer around 3200 BCE. in Mesoamerica between 900 and 600 BCE. Writing shows up in other locations, such as China in 1200 BCE, but this is a result of the Egyptians culturally contaminating the Chinese.4 Similarly, Egyptian and Sumerian script developed at very close to the same time, and while visually quite distinct, they share many of the same influences.

Future Shock by Alvin Toffler

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, East Village, Future Shock, global village, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, information retrieval, intentional community, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open immigration, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, social intelligence, Teledyne, the market place, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, urban renewal, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

And we thus come to the crux of the accelerative process in society, for the engine is being fed a richer and richer fuel every day. KNOWLEDGE AS FUEL The rate at which man has been storing up useful knowledge about himself and the universe has been spiraling upward for 10,000 years. The rate took a sharp upward leap with the invention of writing, but even so it remained painfully slow over centuries of time. The next great leap forward in knowledge—acquisition did not occur until the invention of movable type in the fifteenth century by Gutenberg and others. Prior to 1500, by the most optimistic estimates, Europe was producing books at a rate of 1000 titles per year.

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson

airport security, Colonization of Mars, Great Leap Forward, invention of writing, invisible hand, John von Neumann, lateral thinking, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, oil shale / tar sands, rolodex, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology

"Stick out your arms," he'd say, "straight out at your sides," and when he had you in the appropriate cruciform position he'd say, "Left index finger to right index finger straight across your heart, that's the history of the Earth. You know what human history is? Human history is the nail on your right-hand index finger. Not even the whole nail. Just that little white part. The part you clip off when it gets too long. That's the discovery of fire and the invention of writing and Galileo and Newton and the moon landing and 9/11 and last week and this morning. Compared to evolution we're newborns. Compared to geology, we barely exist") Then the NASA voice announced, "Ignition," and Jason sucked air between his teeth and turned his head half away as nine of ten boosters, hollow tubes of explosive liquid taller than the Empire State Building, detonated skyward against all logic of gravity and inertia, burning tons of fuel to achieve the first few inches of altitude and vaporizing seawater in order to mute a sonic event that would otherwise have shaken them to pieces.

Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide by Joshua S. Goldstein

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, blood diamond, business cycle, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, death from overwork, Doomsday Clock, failed state, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of writing, invisible hand, land reform, long peace, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, selection bias, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Tobin tax, unemployed young men, Winter of Discontent, work culture , Y2K

But “warfare, with spear, club, stone knife, and wooden shield (unlike the others, clearly a specialized fighting rather than a hunting device) had been widespread. . . .” Dating of fortifications at Jericho (6000 B.C.) and Catal Huyuk in Anatolia (7000 B.C.) show “that Neolithic men were waging organized warfare centuries before the invention of writing or the discovery of how to work metal.” Going back further, to Neanderthals who lived more than thirty thousand years ago, “more than 5 percent of . . . burials show violence of one form or another. This is about as high a rate of evidence for violent deaths as is found for much more recent skeletal samples from around the world.

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

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

When we consider whether memes are replicated faithfully enough to permit the accumulation of adaptations, we should include the enhancing technology in culture just as we do with genes. A lot of evolutionary R&D went into improving the replication machinery of DNA during the first billion or so years of life. The invention of writing has similarly boosted the fidelity of linguistic transmission, and it was the product of many minds in many places over several millennia. Few if any of the “inventors” of writing had—or needed to have—a clear vision of the “specs” of the machine they were inventing, the “problem” they were “solving” so elegantly.

Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis by Jared Diamond

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, carbon tax, clean water, correlation coefficient, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, interchangeable parts, invention of writing, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, medical malpractice, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-work, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

Radio rose to saturation from 1923 to 1937, and TV from 1948 to 1955. The biggest change has been the more recent rise of the internet, cell phones, and text messaging. We use radio and TV for information and entertainment, and the telephone and those more recent electronic media for those same purposes plus communication. But, before the invention of writing, all human information and communication used to be face-to-face, by people either talking to each other or else watching/hearing performers together (speakers, musicians, and actors). While the motion picture theaters that arose after 1900 didn’t provide face-to-face entertainment, they at least got people out of their houses into social groups, and were often enjoyed with friends as a straightforward extension of enjoying live speakers, musicians, and actors with friends.

A World Beneath the Sands by Toby Wilkinson

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, battle of ideas, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, conceptual framework, distributed generation, financial independence, invention of writing, New Journalism, public intellectual, Right to Buy, Suez canal 1869, trade route, traveling salesman

By careful observation, he came to a developed understanding of their purpose and age: ‘They have all been raised with the same intention; that is to say, to serve for sepultures … we must absolutely throw back the first epocha of the pyramids into times so remote in antiquity, that vulgar chronology would find a difficulty to fix the era of them.’14 Indeed, noting the absence of hieroglyphic inscriptions, he deduced that the pyramids must have been built before the invention of writing. (He was wrong on this point, but his reasoning was sound.) Norden even dared to critique Greaves’s Pyramidographia, then the last word on the Giza monuments. On Norden’s journey up the Nile, he visited most of the major sites. Luxor Temple was buried in sand up to the shoulders of the seated colossi of Ramesses II flanking the entrance,15 but Norden could see enough to describe the monument as ‘these superb ruins’.16 At Karnak, like generations of travellers since, he was plagued by crowds asking for bakhshish.17 He was fascinated, not only by the monuments, but by the manners and customs of the ancient Egyptians, making a particular study of mummification ‘in order to render the art of Egyptian embalmings more intelligible’.18 Norden and Pococke may well have passed each other on the river, or in the backstreets of Cairo, but it is not known if they actually met during their sojourn in the land of the pharaohs.

Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Cepheid variable, classic study, Commentariolus, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, delayed gratification, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, planetary scale, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, source of truth, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, time dilation, Wilhelm Olbers

Also located is the remnant of the Vela supernova, which blazed forth in the southern skies some six to eight thousand years ago, casting long shadows across the plains of Eden. (The word Eden is Sumerian for “flatland,” and is thought to refer to the fertile, rock-free plains of the Tigris-Euphrates.) The Sumerians identified that supernova with the god Ea (in Egypt, Seshat), whom they credited with the invention of writing and agriculture. The Ea myth thus suggests that the creation of agriculture and the written word were attributed by the ancients to the incentive provided by the sight of an exploding star. 5 THE WORLD IN RETROGRADE Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world; all knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it….

The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth by Michael Spitzer

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, Asperger Syndrome, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Ford Model T, gamification, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hive mind, horn antenna, HyperCard, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loose coupling, mandelbrot fractal, means of production, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, out of africa, planetary scale, power law, randomized controlled trial, Snapchat, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, talking drums, technological singularity, TED Talk, theory of mind, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, Yom Kippur War

You spread exhaustion with the stormwinds, while your own feet remain tireless. With the lamenting balaj drum a lament is struck up.16 Enheduanna in her ferocity comes across like a character from Game of Thrones: Daenerys Targaryen, ‘stormborn’ rider of dragons. Except that Enheduanna really existed, which we know thanks to the Sumerians’ invention of writing, originally a modest tool for administering flood defences on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates.17 Hence to the Mesopotamians’ long list of contributions to world civilisation – cuneiform script, mathematics (including the sexagesimal system), astronomy (including the prediction of lunar eclipses), medicine, irrigation and the twelve-month calendar – we can add composer.

Insight Guides South America (Travel Guide eBook) by Insight Guides

Airbnb, anti-communist, Atahualpa, bike sharing, call centre, centre right, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, COVID-19, digital nomad, Easter island, European colonialism, failed state, Francisco Pizarro, invention of writing, Kickstarter, land reform, urban planning, urban renewal

But most academics today agree that the first settlers came from Polynesia, bringing sweet potato, sugar cane, and bananas to the fertile soil. Left in total isolation for centuries, the settlement prospered and spread. Its people created not only the remarkable stone moai, but also rongorongo, what appears to be a script and what may well be one of only a handful of independent inventions of writing in all of humanity. The first Europeans arrived on Easter Sunday in 1722, giving the island its name. Dutch Admiral Roggeveen spent a day ashore, recording (unlike later accounts) that the statues were upright, the lands were neatly cultivated, and “whole tracts of woodland” were visible.

Sex, Time, and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution by Leonard Shlain

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, British Empire, Columbine, delayed gratification, double helix, experimental subject, Flynn Effect, George Santayana, Great Leap Forward, invention of writing, Lao Tzu, Marshall McLuhan, open borders, out of africa, sexual politics, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, the medium is the message

All three Western religions emphatically insisted that goddesses did not exist. Eve, Mary, and Fatima were mortals, and although some may have worshipped them, these figures never possessed the power to resurrect the dead, a quite routine function for goddesses of old. I hypothesized in that book that the invention of writing, particularly alphabetic writing, reconfigured the brain of anyone who learned the new skill in such a way as to reinforce the masculine animus at the expense of the feminine anima. Reading and writing superseded speaking and listening, and strengthened the power of the already dominant left brain and right hand over the right brain and left hand.

When Cultures Collide: Leading Across Cultures by Richard D. Lewis

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, business climate, business process, colonial exploitation, corporate governance, Easter island, global village, haute cuisine, hiring and firing, invention of writing, Kōnosuke Matsushita, lateral thinking, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open borders, profit maximization, profit motive, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, trade route, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Wood, stone and metal were all rare or entirely absent in Mesopotamia; the raw material that epitomizes Mesopotamian civilization is clay. It is visible in the almost exclusively mud-brick architecture, and in the number and variety of clay figurines and pottery artifacts, none more important than the clay tablets that led to the invention of writing. 424 WHEN CULTURES COLLIDE Mesopotamia was inventive: the potter’s wheel, architectural techniques, irrigation, elaborate drainage and, above all, writing gave the region superiority over neighbors in terms of power and advantageous trade. The Sumerians, the original owners of writing, set up large, compact social organizations.

The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall by Mark W. Moffett

affirmative action, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, California gold rush, classic study, cognitive load, delayed gratification, demographic transition, Easter island, eurozone crisis, George Santayana, glass ceiling, Howard Rheingold, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, Kevin Kelly, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, World Values Survey

Yet barring a disability such as agoraphobia or monophobia (a fear of crowds and of being alone, respectively), people existing cheek by jowl exhibit few pathologies.9 Proximity is just one, very low-tech, way for people to stay in tune with the identity of others. Even still, it is not essential. After all, part of the population of any state must live in rural areas to cultivate the crops. Societies developed other methods of maintaining contact throughout their realms. The domestication of the horse in Eurasia, the invention of writing by Mesopotamians and of ocean-going ships by Phoenicians, the long-distance roads of the Inca and Romans, the printing press in Europe—all such innovations promoted the stability and expansion of societies. In addition to facilitating the transport of goods and the extended control of central authority, such innovations improved the spread of information—and notably, information about identity.

Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society by Nicholas A. Christakis

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Cass Sunstein, classic study, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, deep learning, different worldview, disruptive innovation, domesticated silver fox, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, epigenetics, experimental economics, experimental subject, Garrett Hardin, intentional community, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, iterative process, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, joint-stock company, land tenure, language acquisition, Laplace demon, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, microbiome, out of africa, overview effect, phenotype, Philippa Foot, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replication crisis, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social intelligence, social web, stem cell, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, ultimatum game, zero-sum game

The fundamental changes wrought by the agricultural revolution were mirrored by parallel changes in the way humans thought about nature and their place in it. The domestication of animals and plants implied human mastery over (or at least stewardship of) the natural world. Urbanization and the transformation of natural landscapes, the construction of religious monuments, and, of course, the invention of writing, commerce, and technology—all of these developments served to distance people from a natural world that must have seemed increasingly wild and dangerous, a place to be restrained and controlled. In time, dominating nature or willfully separating from it came to be seen as the source of a good life.

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott

agricultural Revolution, Boeing 747, business cycle, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, deskilling, facts on the ground, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, invention of writing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, post-Fordism, Potemkin village, price mechanism, profit maximization, Recombinant DNA, road to serfdom, scientific management, Silicon Valley, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, working poor

At its most extreme, this strategy is analogous to that of tracking body counts during the Vietnam War-a technique that offered at least one precise measure, it was thought, for military progress. 36. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, p. 99. 37. Ibid., p. 302. 38. Ibid., p. 125. Thus in the Phaedrus, Socrates, speaking through Plato, deplores the invention of writing and claims that books cannot reply to questions. He argues for the organic unity of a work of art, one whose arguments and style should take into account the prospective audience. In his Seventh Letter, Plato writes that his deepest teachings are not written. See R. B. Rutherford, The Art of Plato: Ten Essays in Platonic Interpretation (London: Duckworth, 1996). 39.

The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History by Greg Woolf

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, capital controls, classic study, Columbian Exchange, demographic transition, Dunbar number, Easter island, endogenous growth, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, global village, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, joint-stock company, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, social intelligence, social web, the strength of weak ties, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

“Globalisation and Roman Imperialism: Perspectives on Identities in Roman Italy.” In The Emergence of State Identities in Italy in the First Millennium B.C., edited by Edward Herring and Kathryn Lomas, 213–225. London: Accordia Research Institute. Woods, Christopher, ed. 2010. Visible Language: Inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East and Beyond. Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Woolf, Greg. 1993. “Rethinking the Oppida.” Oxford Journal of Archaeology 12 (2): 223–234. Woolf, Greg. 1994. “Power and the Spread of Writing in the West.” In Literacy and Power in the Ancient World, edited by Alan Bowman and Greg Woolf, 84–98.

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrew Keen, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clapham omnibus, colonial rule, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, index card, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Open Library, Parler "social media", Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snapchat, social graph, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, trolley problem, Turing test, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Yochai Benkler, Yom Kippur War, yottabyte

Key advances in the history of one individual communicating with another include the development of postal services, the telegraph, the telephone, the mobile phone, email and the smartphone. The smartphone has given access to the ‘mobile internet’, where one-to-one converges with one-to-many and all other variants, including many-to-many and many-to-one. One-to-many has a long prehistory in the invention of writing, inscribed on tablets of stone or clay (as were, for example, the edicts of the third-century-B.C.E. Indian emperor Ashoka), on paper (in China, around the second century C.E.), the handwritten scroll and, by the third century C.E., the codex—a handwritten book with pages you turn. A great leap forward along this line was the development of printing with movable type, which was originally invented in China in the eleventh century, using ceramic type, with metal type being developed in Korea some two centuries later.

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning by Jeremy Lent

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, different worldview, Doomsday Book, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Metcalfe's law, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, scientific management, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, ultimatum game, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, wikimedia commons

Mesopotamian firsts It was in the turbulent cities of Mesopotamia that many of the conceptual foundations of modern civilization were invented. The Mesopotamians were responsible for the first libraries and maps and for devising new disciplines such as mathematics, medicine, chemistry, botany, and zoology.34 Perhaps their most resounding achievement was the invention of writing, the first in human history. In contrast to the Shang, whose writing system revolved around divining the intentions of the ancestors, and the Egyptians, whose hieroglyphs record prayers to the gods, the earliest cuneiform of the Mesopotamians had a more prosaic purpose: bookkeeping. The Mesopotamians came up with writing as an ingenious form of keeping track of things, of making lists of such items as receipts of tribute, itemization of war booty, distribution of rations, and payments to officials.35 In their attempts to organize the world around them, the Mesopotamians were far ahead of any other civilization.

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J. Levitin

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anton Chekhov, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, big-box store, business process, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Exxon Valdez, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, GPS: selective availability, haute cuisine, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, human-factors engineering, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, impulse control, index card, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, information security, invention of writing, iterative process, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, pre–internet, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, shared worldview, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

The increased trade in these cities put a strain on individual merchants’ memories and so early writing became an important component of recording business transactions. Poetry, histories, war tactics, and instructions for building complex construction projects came later. Prior to the invention of writing, our ancestors had to rely on memory, sketches, or music to encode and preserve important information. Memory is fallible, of course, but not because of storage limitations so much as retrieval limitations. Some neuroscientists believe that nearly every conscious experience is stored somewhere in your brain; the hard part is finding it and pulling it out again.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, banks create money, behavioural economics, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, David Graeber, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, double entry bookkeeping, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, George Gilder, informal economy, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, means of production, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, oil shock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit motive, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, seigniorage, sexual politics, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, upwardly mobile, urban decay, working poor, zero-sum game

Promissory notes usually circulated within merchant guilds, or between inhabitants of the relatively well-off urban neighborhoods where people knew one another well enough to trust them to be accountable, but not so well that they could rely on one another for more traditional forms of mutual aid.6 We know even less about the marketplaces frequented by ordinary Mesopotamians, except that tavern-keepers operated on credit, and hawkers and operators of market stalls probably did as well.7 The origins of interest will forever remain obscure, since they preceded the invention of writing. The terminology for interest in most ancient languages is derived from some word for “offspring,” causing some to speculate that it originates in loans of livestock, but this seems a bit literal-minded. More likely, the first widespread interest-bearing loans were commercial: temples and palaces would forward wares to merchants and commercial agents, who would then trade them in nearby mountain kingdoms or on trading expeditions overseas.8 The practice is significant because it implies a fundamental lack of trust.

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, assortative mating, buy low sell high, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, finite state, Garrett Hardin, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, junk bonds, language acquisition, Murray Gell-Mann, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test

The peculiarities of human psychology (and human digestion, for that matter, as the Mornay-sauce example shows) are important eventually, but they don't stand in the way of a scientific analysis of the phenomenon in question. In fact, as Sperber himself has persuasively argued, we can use higher-level principles as levers to pry open lower-level secrets. Sperber points to the importance of the invention of writing, which initiated major changes in cultural evolution. He shows how to reason from facts about preliterate culture to facts about human psychology. (He prefers to think of cultural transmission along the lines of epidemiology rather than genetics, but the direction of his theory is very much the same as Dawkins' — to the point of near-indistinguishability when you think of what the Darwinian treatment of epidemiology looks like; see Williams and Nesse 1991) Here is Sperber's "Law of the Epidemiology of Representations": In an oral tradition, all cultural representations are easily remembered ones; hard to remember representations are forgotten, or transformed into more easily remembered ones, before reaching a cultural level of distribution.

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

additive manufacturing, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Brewster Kahle, Brownian motion, business cycle, business intelligence, c2.com, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, coronavirus, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, factory automation, friendly AI, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hype cycle, informal economy, information retrieval, information security, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, linked data, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, phenotype, power law, precautionary principle, premature optimization, punch-card reader, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, semantic web, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, two and twenty, Vernor Vinge, Y2K, Yogi Berra

That is one of many profound limitations of the biological paradigm we now use for our thinking, a limitation we will overcome in the Singularity. . . . on Work If every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, if the shuttle could weave, and the pick touch the lyre, without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not need servants, nor masters slaves. —ARISTOTLE Before the invention of writing, almost every insight was happening for the first time (at least to the knowledge of the small groups of humans involved). When you are at the beginning, everything is new. In our era, almost everything we do in the arts is done with awareness of what has been done before and before. In the early post-human era, things will be new again because anything that requires greater than human ability has not already been done by Homer or da Vinci or Shakespeare.

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

Thomas Jefferson explained the power of language with the help of an analogy: “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”30 The potency of language as the original sharing app was multiplied by the invention of writing (and again in later epochs by the printing press, the spread of literacy, and electronic media). The networks of communicating thinkers expanded over time as populations grew, mixed, and became concentrated in cities. And the availability of energy beyond the minimum needed for survival gave more of them the luxury to think and talk.

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra

Mandeville’s book,” wrote Adam Smith in 1759, “to represent every passion as wholly vicious [that is, a mere matter of profit-making prudence and self-interest] which is so in any degree and any direction.”24 And so down to Marxian and Samuelsonian and Beckerian economics. Contrary to the prudence-only model, we have always known, and have recorded since the invention of writing, that intrinsic virtues beyond prudence—love, justice, temperance, and the rest—are parts of what motivate adults. Internalization of ethics beyond having a profitable career is the way children become ethical adults. As the psychologists put it, the “internal locus of control,” as against an external one, is what characterizes maturity and professionalism.25 “Incentivizing” sounds tough and businesslike and is taught relentlessly in modern business schools, to the point of recommending that their faculty members be assessed for their scholarship by the “impact factor” of journals they publish in rather than by actually reading and assessing what they have written.26 But it is at best a partial account of humanity, and tends to corrupt its internal locus.