Continuations

So far I have been writing about the climate crisis primarily as a threat, an extinction level threat for the human species. But the climate crisis is also humanity’s biggest opportunity. It is our opportunity to leave the Industrial Age behind and enter the Knowledge Age (that’s the term I use in my book World After Capital). Expect a series of blog posts expanding on this idea, but to start things off I want to paint a picture of what that might look like: I imagine clean air and quiet citi...

Yesterday was an impressive day in tech news. Here are three announcements that caught my attention:Wolfram Alpha releases an APIApple makes in-app purchases available for free appsGoogle announces it will distribute ebooksI believe that each of these is important in their own right (and they may make it into their own blog posts). But what is mostly on my mind is how much is changing and how quickly that change is occurring. When people ask me whether investing in web services is a long-term...

My first word processor experience was on an Apple II - I have forgotten which program I liked best, but they were all fairly capable. This was over 25 years ago. When I look at how I use Microsoft Word today, not much has changed. Sure I will occasionally make use of some nice features like revision tracking, but there is nothing fundamentally different about the experience. In particular there seems to be no leveraging of the enormous compute power of modern machines and the fact that we ar...