As with the printing press and the dotcom boom, initial frenzy and speculation obscures the lasting legacy of new technologies“Innovation,” wrote the economist William Janeway in his seminal book Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy, “begins with discovery and culminates in speculation.” That just about sums up 2023. The discovery was AI (as represented by ChatGPT), and the speculative bubble is what we have now, in which huge public corporations launch products that are known to “hallucinate” (yes, that’s now a technical term relating to large language models), and spend money like it’s going out of fashion on the kit needed to make even bigger ones. As I write, I see a report that next year Microsoft plans to buy 150,000 Nvidia chips – at $30,000 (£24,000) a pop. It’s a kind of madness. But when looked at it through the Janeway lens, ’twas ever thus.“The innovations that have repeatedly transformed the architecture of the market economy,” he writes, “from canals to the internet, have required massive investments to construct networks whose value in use could not be imagined at the outset of deployment.” Or, to put it more crudely, what we retrospectively regard as examples of technological progress have mostly come about through outbreaks of irrational exuberance that involved colossal waste, bankrupted investors and caused social turmoil. Bubbles, in other words. In recent times, think of the dotcom boom of the late 1990s. Or in earlier times, of the US railway... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2023-12-30 16:00:37 UTC ]
Hunting for office space before the pandemic, executives at ad agency Wellcom Worldwide were dismayed to encounter asking rents of $90 per square foot a year in Manhattan, which wound up being a deal-breaker. The company landed in far-cheaper Dumbo instead.But now, with Manhattan prices still... Continue reading at Crains New York
[ Crains New York | 2024-11-25 10:48:24 UTC ]
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Print media do face challenges but the influence they offer – especially on the right – is considerable‘Expect the unexpected” is the bland but pointed advice given by the evasive editor of the Daily Beast to the bemused William Boot, accidental protagonist in Evelyn Waugh’s deathless Fleet... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2024-09-15 08:00:52 UTC ]
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Suzanne Scanlon’s book, Committed: A Memoir of Finding Meaning in Madness, is a memoir unlike any I’ve read. Scanlon returns to the landscape of the past, reflecting on her experience of being committed in the New York State Psychiatric Hospital while a student at Barnard in the late 1990s.... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2024-07-23 11:00:00 UTC ]
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Photo by Laurel Chor and NPR NPR reports that this May, the printing press Factor Druk in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv was devastated by a Russian missile attack, taking the lives of seven employees and wounding more than 20 others. The attack also destroyed thousands of books and much of the... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2024-07-18 17:02:49 UTC ]
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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Science fiction has reinvented the Robinsonade – a narrative based on the scenario described in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe – on numerous occasions and in a variety of ways. We’ve had individuals stranded on a whole planet rather than a mere... Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2024-07-10 14:00:26 UTC ]
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OpenAI and News Corp, the owner of The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, The Sun, and more than a dozen other publishing brands, have struck a multi-year deal to display news from these publications in ChatGPT, News Corp announced on Wednesday. OpenAI will be able to access both current and well... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2024-05-22 21:46:16 UTC ]
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Seven says decision purely commercial but Financial Review editor accuses rival company of ‘abuse of market power’ Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updatesGet our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcastThe print edition of Nine’s Australian Financial... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2024-05-09 07:55:56 UTC ]
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Every Tuesday, a wave of new books is published, fresh off the printing press onto the shelves of bookstores around the world. Even for a book editor like me, it gets overwhelming to keep track of all the forthcoming titles. So we’ve turned to our most trusted source for recommendations: indie... Continue reading at Electric Literature
[ Electric Literature | 2024-02-29 12:00:00 UTC ]
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As with the printing press and the dotcom boom, initial frenzy and speculation obscures the lasting legacy of new technologies“Innovation,” wrote the economist William Janeway in his seminal book Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy, “begins with discovery and culminates in speculation.”... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2023-12-30 16:00:37 UTC ]
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Colleen Hoover’s novels took the top six places on last year’s New York Times bestseller list, while in the UK she rivals Richard Osman as the biggest author in recent times. How has she done it?The first Colleen Hoover book I read was It Ends With Us, and when I opened it on the tube, I saw... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2023-08-19 10:00:17 UTC ]
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The framing of these stories of murder and mayhem have remained remarkably consistent since the invention of the printing press – and may reveal our own hidden fears and desires. Continue reading at The Conversation
[ The Conversation | 2023-08-07 13:03:29 UTC ]
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From the Gutenberg press to the word processor, a detailed trawl through the history of print offers lessons for the digital ageThe Gutenberg Parenthesis is a term coined by Danish scholar Lars Ole Sauerberg, who proposed that the history of literary culture as we had hitherto known it – the... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2023-08-02 11:00:02 UTC ]
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Long, long ago, a 1937 first edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit was forged by a printing press and sold. For a time, it was lost to man, buried in the piles of donated inventory at the Cancer Research UK superstore in Dundee, Scotland, until manager Adam Carsley spotted the worn copy on the... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2023-07-12 15:27:21 UTC ]
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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The printing press is one of the great inventions of the last millennium. It revolutionised how many people could read and own books, led to an explosion in the sheer number of books in the world, and helped to spread the word (quite literally) […] Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2023-05-31 14:00:13 UTC ]
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Microsoft has called for the US federal government to create a new agency specifically focused on regulating AI, Bloombergreports. At a speech in Washington, DC attended by some members of Congress and non-governmental organizations, Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith remarked that... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2023-05-26 09:55:10 UTC ]
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The history of Project Gutenberg is connected to both the beginnings of the printing press as well as that of ebooks. Continue reading at Book Riot
[ Book Riot | 2023-03-15 10:35:00 UTC ]
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The internet did not cause the insurrection. But it enabled it. The technology of any age in human history shapes the culture of that time. With the advent of agriculture and farming tools, humans developed stationary civilizations and abandoned thousands of years of itinerancy. The printing... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2022-10-07 08:59:43 UTC ]
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With the newspaper’s founder and senior editors jailed, other pro-democracy media outlets shut and 1,000 journalists out of work, can press freedom survive in the territory?Read more: ‘My career is finished, my friends are in prison and I’m an alien in my city’: life after Hong Kong’s Apple... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2022-06-24 05:01:07 UTC ]
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Penguin Random House worldwide chief executive Markus Dohle says he is "optimistic" about the future of the publishing industry, claiming "it's the best time in this business since Gutenberg invented the printing press". Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-11-20 11:07:03 UTC ]
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The Pointless presenter’s second crime novel, The Man Who Died Twice, has sold 114,202 copies in its first week on saleRichard Osman’s follow-up to The Thursday Murder Club, The Man Who Died Twice, has become one of the fastest-selling novels since records began.Published on 16 September, The... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2021-09-21 14:37:39 UTC ]
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