Increasing the supply of people becoming inventors is possibly one of the most significant, world-changing things that anyone can do. Some thoughts on how to do it through film.
Age of Invention: The Industry of All Nations
The spirit of the nineteenth-century exhibitions of industry, and how we might organise a Great Exhibition for the modern day.
After Forty Years, Still No Silver Bullet
As always, technology can help with production. What’s scarce is orientation.
War and the lost generation of inventors
Large wars destroy not only lives and infrastructure but also the human capital that fuels long-term economic progress. This column presents new evidence from Britain that shows that communities that lost many young men in World War I experienced persistent declines in subsequent innovation. The losses were particularly detrimental for frontier technologies and breakthrough inventions, highlighting how war can leave long-lasting scars on a country’s capacity to generate new ideas.
We used to get excited about technology. What happened?
Innovation that truly serves us all is in scarce supply. That’s a problem.
100 years of whatever this will be
What if all these weird tech trends actually add up to something? Last time, we explored why various bits of trendy technology are, in my o...
Why I (Still) Love Tech: In Defense of a Difficult Industry
Technology is just another human creation—like religion or government or sports or money. It's not perfect, and it never will be. But it's still a miracle.
The Golden Age Is Behind Us: How the Status Quo Impacts the Evaluation of Technology
New technology invariably provokes concerns over potential societal impacts. Even as risks often fail to materialize, the fear continues. The current research explored the psychological underpinnings of this pattern. Across four studies ( N = 2,454 adults recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk), we found evidence for the role of status quo thinking in evaluating technology. In Study 1, we experimentally manipulated the reported age of unfamiliar technology and found that people evaluate it more favorably when it is described as originating before (vs. after) their birth. In Studies 2 through 4, participants’ age at the time of invention strongly predicts attitudes toward a wide range of real-world technologies. Finally, we found that individual differences in status-quo-based decision-making moderated evaluations of technology. These studies provide insight into how people respond to the rapidly changing technological landscape.
Gazing through a lens, I invent as much as I reveal | Psyche Turning Points
For years I watched people through cameras and screens, filling in the blanks and calling it truth
Three Things I Know
When living in times of radical technological change, look to things that have stood the test of time.
When will average people feel AI’s impact?
We’re <5 years into a compounding revolution which could take a century, and how the AI industry should manage this.
The End of Software
To understand how software will change, we can benefit from studying how technology has changed other industries. History tends to rhyme, if you listen. Before the internet, media behaved very differently—it was expensive to create. You had to pay people to make content, edit it, and distribute ...
The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves
Leading scientific theorist W. Brian Arthur puts forth …
A People’s History of Tech
A collective storytelling project to build a more representative history that reflects the human impacts of technology.
There is starting to be some genuinely interesting AI-created film stuff (among a flood of slop), and I suspect this will only accelerate. The “is it art?” debate will grow Benjamin’s 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” already argued it’s likely the wrong question.
