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 ]
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The timing was perfect and the symbolism entirely appropriate: a Brinks truck pulling into the parking lot of the Dodgers’ spring training facility soon after team executives returned from a meeting in Las Vegas with free agent Bryce Harper. The question the Dodgers have to answer isn’t whether... Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2019-02-26 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Despite employing a small army of contractors to monitor posts, it’s clear the company is no longer fit for purposeWay back in the 1950s, a pioneering British cybernetician, W Ross Ashby, proposed a fundamental law of dynamic systems. In his book An Introduction to Cybernetics, he formulated his... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2019-01-06 00:00:00 UTC ]
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A study of how Facebook, Google and Microsoft have applied the EU’s new GDPR rules shows users are being manipulatedOne of the most influential books published in the last decade was Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. In it, the... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2018-07-08 00:00:00 UTC ]
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It’s Mark Zuckerberg’s business model that allows Facebook to be manipulated by political activists – no wonder he’s in denial about itOne of my favourite books is The Education of Henry Adams (published in 1918). It’s an extended meditation, written in old age by a scion of one of Boston’s... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2017-10-08 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Multimillion fines are just the start for Facebook and Google, as the world comes to realise how political big tech has becomeIn his wonderful book The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began, the literary historian Stephen Greenblatt traces the origins of the Renaissance back to the rediscovery of a... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2017-09-24 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Hinton worked for media mogul for more than 50 years before he resigned from News Corp at height of hacking scandalRupert Murdoch’s righthand man for more than 50 years is to have his memoirs published, providing one of the most informed portraits of the media mogul to date.Les Hinton, who... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2017-09-06 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The Facebook founder puts all his faith in an empowering ‘global community’ to cure all our ills. Dream onOn Thursday 16 February, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and supreme leader of Facebook, the world’s most populous virtual country (population 2bn) published an epistle to his 89m... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2017-05-07 00:00:00 UTC ]
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It’s getting easier to get to a billion views on Facebook. But publishers that are only chasing scale, and not thinking about video as a long-term business, are in trouble. Take, for instance, TV, which can monetize the same piece of content through advertising, licensing, syndication,... Continue reading at Digiday
[ Digiday | 2016-11-21 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Two weeks have passed since the government in Bangladesh blocked access to Facebook, WhatsApp, Viber, and other social media sites. In Dhaka, some people have crowded into hotel lobbies to access private networks, while others are gaining access thro ... Continue reading at Editor & Publisher
[ Editor & Publisher | 2015-12-03 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Ebury m.d. Rebecca Smart said that traditional publishers need to “shout from the rooftops” more about the value and investment they provide for authors. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2015-12-01 00:00:00 UTC ]
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With her prizewinning debut, Claire Fuller could be following in the footsteps of Ian Rankin and Hilary Mantel who found success with their later work – but only with the support of her publisherAs one of the judges for the Desmond Elliott prize for best debut novelist this year, I couldn’t help... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2015-07-03 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Numerous top authors are enlisting fellow writers to formulate a "long-term" strategy to combat Amazon's dominance of the market, writes The Bookseller. Continue reading at Publishing Perspectives
[ Publishing Perspectives | 2014-07-23 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Authors United, the group of writers who signed a letter calling on Amazon to resolve its dispute... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2014-07-21 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Public libraries have an economic impact on their communities that far exceeds their "... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2014-06-04 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Concerns are mounting among publishers, booksellers and authors about the long-term impact of the... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2013-01-25 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Written By: Lisa Campbell Publication Date: Fri, 21/10/2011 - 08:29 W H Smith has trained 6,000 staff, installed working units into stores and readied television and press advertising following its new "long-term" partnership with Kobo. read more Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-10-21 00:00:00 UTC ]
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As part of our year-end story package, we tasked ChatGPT with writing a guest post about the future of generative AI. The prompt asked for a 1,200 word article (a number it undercut by quite a margin) that explored both the potential negative and positive outcomes of the technology. We then... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2023-12-28 16:00:10 UTC ]
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Amazon has taken some steps to stem the tide of books written with artificial intelligence, but another solution may already exist. Continue reading at Wired
[ Wired | 2023-09-28 11:00:00 UTC ]
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Great speakers and a strong slate of educational programming await the library community at of the 2023 ALA Annual Conference, set for June 22–27 in Chicago. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2023-06-09 04:00:00 UTC ]
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What the hell are we doing? All the best things are shutting down and people are out here using computers to make children’s books? Not to get too Jeff Goldblum on you, but just because you build a tool to do something doesn’t make it interesting or worthy. To wit, a product designer named... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2022-12-13 15:19:23 UTC ]
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