As always, technology can help with production. What’s scarce is orientation.
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...
What Humanity Needs To Flourish In The Next Decade
We are headed toward a world of productivity without prosperity, execution without verification and capacity without constraint. But this outcome is not inevitable.
What Humanity Needs To Flourish In The Next Decade
We are headed toward a world of productivity without prosperity, execution without verification and capacity without constraint. But this outcome is not inevitable.
The Consumer AI Revolution Won’t Be Technical. It’ll Be Emotional.
In technology, the obvious revolutions often come last.
Wrap to 2025, Proem to 2026
Technological Paradigm Shifts are fundamental changes in technology that reshape industries and society.
Big Tech’s attention economy can be reformed. Here’s how.
The business model is doing irreparable harm to society. But there is an alternative, and we don’t need to destroy the tech giants to get there.
Your tech stack is not the product
Early stage technology decisions must be, uncomfortably, a means to an end.
Taking on the Technosphere: A Kitchen Debate
In his original writings on the technosphere from the early 2010s, Peter Haff identified its existence as a grand metabolizing system. Back in early 2016, spurred on by the preparation for HKW’s Anthropocene Campus: The Technosphere Issue, a vehement debate sprang up in the home of science and technology scholars Gabrielle Hecht and Paul N. Edwards: How valid is Haff’s approach? What is its overall reality? And what is its heuristic purpose? In this republication of their dispute, you, the reader, can engage alongside Hecht and Edwards in the ongoing question of whether the concept of the technosphere is indeed “a useful tool,” “silverware,” or “a barren gadget” in understanding the current and future condition of planet Earth.
A Real Political Economy of Technology - The Ideas Letter
Two technological futures are competing for political and material priority: generative AI and the green transition. Benanav argues that while AI is marketed as a world-reordering breakthrough, its productivity gains…
tech isn’t the future it’s just capitalism faster
responding with slowness in relations
What’s the best technology that doesn’t exist yet?
We analyzed 100+ conversations and essays on positive futures to find out
If AI is normal technology, history is not reassuring. — LessWrong
There’s a truism that technology is good - even if it creates winners and losers, it improves the world. Toby Ord argues that the conclusions about t…
It’s Time to Embrace Slow Productivity
We need fewer things to work on. Starting now.
The idea of a "tech industry" has always relied on "computer" being a special kind of medium, akin to alchemy. And if tech demands to be king, AI hype has now elevated LLMs to a king of kings. But the solipsism has hit a dead end. The only way forward is to recognize that computers are not special.
LLMs are just normal technology. But tech is just a normal medium.
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