Continuations

In my draft book World After Capital, I write about how digital technology has given us the possibility to leave the Industrial Age behind and enter the Knowledge Age. In an early chapter on Optimism, I argue against economic, historical and technological determinism. These are all theories in which an external force determines the shape of society, instead of the decisions made by us humans under the guidance of a set of values. The memo written by a Google employee, is a good reason to add ...

Peter Thiel was interviewed by Francis Fukuyama (he of the “End of History”). The interview is well worth reading as it contains a lot of provocative thoughts. I agree with Thiel that the US government has lost its ability to achieve the kind of progress represented by the great public works projects or the Apollo program. I disagree though on the causes for this believing that it is primarily due to the pervasive influence of special interests and money in politics. I also don’t agree that w...

I learned how to program on this Apple II over 30 years ago. Over that time period – as a first approximation – programming has stayed the same. Yes, I have learned new tools and new programming languages, but programming still amounts to typing a bunch of text into an editor in a syntax that’s generally easier to read for a machine than a human. That is about to change dramatically. When I teach programming to novices I introduce it by saying: programming is just telling a machine what to do...

When I first started talking to Dina who is helping me with research, I explained that I consider myself a technology optimist. By which I mean that I am optimistic that over time we the human species will figure out how to use technology to make things better. Dina rightly challenged me to define what I mean by “better” and by the related word “progress.” And that turns out to be a lot harder than I thought. Let’s start with what it is not. Economic growth as measured by GDP is an increasing...

At USV we have been using Carlota Perez’s framework that distinguishes between the installation and deployment phases of a technology. In short, the installation phase is when a technology first comes into a market and investments are capacity building. The deployment phase is when this capacity is used to actually affect broad changes in the economy and society. The installation phase is (almost) always marked by a speculative bubble. Perez documents this across many prior technologies such ...

Having recently started to read “Willpower” by Roy Baumeister, I am fascinated with the controversy over the reproducibility of his experiments on ego depletion. This is just the latest example in a longstanding historic problem with reproducibility that impacts the progress of science in many fields including medicine. This is an area where blockchain technology may be able to help. How so? We need to switch the academic standard for publishing to include raw data from experiments. Often thi...

In my draft book World After Capital, I have a section on Human Needs. I am currently in the middle of rewriting that section (so don’t go read it now) because it suffers in parts from a confusion between needs and solutions. What do I mean by that confusion? Our bodies need nutrition for survival. That is the need. Eating meat is, however, only one of many possible solutions for that need. Vegetarians or vegans provide nutrition to their bodies without consuming meat. And some people are att...