Continuations

NOTE: I am resuming posting excerpts from my draft book World After Capital. The previous post introduced the Knowledge Loop. Today’s post covers the promise and peril of a Digital Knowledge Loop and also wraps up Part Two of the book.The Promise and Peril of the Digital Knowledge LoopThe zero marginal cost and universality of digital technologies are already impacting the three phases of learning, creating and sharing, giving rise to a Digital Knowledge Loop. This Digital Knowledge Loop hold...

NOTE: I am continuing to post excerpts from my book World After Capital. The following is on the Knowledge Loop. Unfortunately I am dealing with a gitbook issue, so this revised text is not yet live on the book website.The Knowledge LoopAlready today knowledge has made possible something extraordinary: by means of the innovations of the Industrial Age we can, in principle, meet everyone’s basic needs. But we cannot stop here. We need to generate additional knowledge to solve the problems we h...

NOTE: Today’s excerpt from World After Capital dives deeper into human knowledge and why it is so powerful.The Power of KnowledgeHave you watched television recently? Eaten food that had been stored in a refrigerator? Accessed the Internet? Played games on your smartphone? Driven in a car? These are all things that billions of people around the world have access to and often use daily (there are over 2 billion smartphone users). Many of us take these capabilities for granted and rarely do we ...

Today we are celebrating Labor Day, a day that was originally started by Labor Unions in the early 1880s. At the time it was not a public holiday but rather took the form of a walkout demonstration or general strike. The demands were for shorter hours, safer work and higher pay. It has become easy and fashionable to be critical of unions but historically making labor more expensive was a key to success for Western economies. Why? Because making labor more expensive simultaneously resulted in ...

I have been thinking about the value implications of embracing knowledge. Maybe I am being overly reductionist here but there are three values that seem to me to be intimately connected with the knowledge loop of learning, creating and sharing. Put differently I don’t see how a society based on knowledge would work well or be sustained if any one of these is removed. Now other than the first one you may not recognize these as values and it is not even that easy to define what “values” are in ...

I have been telling lots of people that I am writing a book about our transition past the industrial economy. If you have been reading Continuations for a while you know that this has been the subject of much of my writing here. So why write a book? For starters I greatly enjoy reading books so the idea of writing one is appealing. But what is the goal, what am I trying to accomplish with the book? The key reason is that I am trying to influence where we are headed. Earlier this week I tweete...

Between the climate crisis and the US government crisis it’s difficult to remain upbeat. So today instead of writing about either of those I want to celebrate an example of what I call the Knowledge Loop in my book World After Capital. About a year ago or so I stumbled on a wonderful Youtube channel called Numberphile that has over 3 million subscribers. On Numberphile, Brady Haran gets mathematicians to explain interesting and sometimes simply just quirky bits of math. The videos tend to be ...

I have been trying to put my finger on what exactly bothers me quite so much about Trump’s approach to politics. Yes, there are lots of individual elements that people have rightly criticized. But now I have figured out what unifies it all for me: Trump is pushing us collectively into thinking fast and abandoning knowledge. What do I mean by this? One of the books I highly recommend is “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman. In it Kahneman catalogs years of research into behavioral econ...

There’s been a lot of handwringing recently about how we don’t really understand deep neural networks. The MIT Technology Review even published an article with the sensationalist headline “The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI.” It head the subheading “No one really knows how the most advanced algorithms do what they do. That could be a problem.” Well sure it could be a problem, but let’s get one important point out of the way: no one really knows how people do what they do, yet we have them do ...