Technology & Society
Using technological history to understand how general-purpose technologies migrate scarcity, reshape power, and offer testable analogies for the AI era.
21 essaysCore questions in this topic
- How do general-purpose technologies change what is truly scarce?
- Why do incumbent organizations miss an emerging paradigm?
- What decision checklists can technological history offer the AI era?
At the Threshold of the Compute Era, Looking Back at the Dawn of Electricity
What the adoption of electricity, telephony, television, computing, and the internet can teach us about the recurring tests of the AI era.
Gutenberg's Bankruptcy and Luther's Viral Rise
The inventor of printing captured little of its value; the real winners rebuilt content, distribution, and networks of belief.
Insull's Pyramid
Samuel Insull's electricity empire reveals the fragility created when infrastructure, financial leverage, and growth narratives reinforce one another.
A Map of the Next Migration of Scarcity
As compute becomes abundant, value will migrate toward data, workflows, trust, responsibility, and experiences grounded in human finitude.
Monarchs of the Radio
Every new medium changes how attention is distributed and crowns a new class of organizations and individuals adapted to its structure.
The People Swept Away by Electricity
A history of the failures, deaths, and wrong turns behind electrification—and what they reveal about the true costs of a general-purpose technology revolution.
Railway Mania: The First Infrastructure Bubble
Railway mania shows how infrastructure bubbles create fortunes, destroy capital, and still leave behind foundations for the next wave of growth.
Recombination: The Value of General-Purpose Technology Lies in the Ruins of Old Forms
The value of a general-purpose technology lies not in the technology itself, but in the new combinations of products, processes, and organizations it enables.
Predictable Repetition: Seven Public Bets on the AI Era
Seven public predictions about infrastructure, platforms, organizations, trust, and value migration in the AI era, grounded in historical patterns.
Epilogue: The Ethics of the Betrayer
Surviving a technological revolution requires betraying inherited assets, identities, and formulas for success—but that betrayal must remain accountable.
The Funeral of the Battleship
What the end of the battleship era teaches us about organizations trapped by assets, identity, and sunk costs.
The Migration of Scarcity
Technological revolutions do not eliminate scarcity; they move value from old bottlenecks to new complements and capabilities.
The Morning the Cable Was Cut
From telegraph cables to digital platforms, how control of the channel becomes commercial power—and why that power is eventually rebuilt.
The Red Flag Act: How an Empire Gave Away the Future
Britain’s early automobile regulation shows how institutions protecting old interests can make a leading nation surrender the next industrial revolution.
The Shipping Container That Swallowed the World
The container changed far more than shipping: it reorganized ports, railways, warehouses, trade, and the global division of labor.
The Steam-Engine Layout Checklist
The real test of AI adoption is not tool procurement, but whether workflows are still designed around yesterday’s scarcity.
The Timetable War
Systems created to serve people can eventually constrain the room for action of organizations, industries, and societies.
The Patent War: The Wright Brothers Won the Lawsuit and Lost the Sky
The Wright brothers’ patent war reveals the thin line between protecting innovation and obstructing an ecosystem.
Translate the User, Not Just the Words
Users describe symptoms; entrepreneurs must diagnose the real need and build a solution users cannot yet articulate.
The Fourth Test: When Everything Can Be Synthesized, Who Prices Reality?
When generative technology makes fabrication cheaper than reality, accountable trust, verification, and provenance become the new scarcity.
From Entropy to Consciousness: An Inevitable Causal Chain
Starting from entropy increase, dissipative structures, self-organization, life, and prediction, this piece asks how consciousness emerges — and whether AI could enter the same causal chain.