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 ]
In the late 1990s the venerable book trade chronicler Ian Norrie wrote to The Bookseller’s then-editor Louis Baum to complain about the inclusion of an author in the magazine’s series of The Great and the Good. “Authors are not part of the book trade per se,” Norrie wrote. This week The... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2015-12-04 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Eight-page section containing the Book of Esther was part of 15th-century edition cut up and sold in pieces by New York book dealer in 1920sAn eight-page fragment from the Gutenberg Bible, the first major book to be printed using Johann Gutenberg’s printing press in 15th-century Germany, will go... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2015-06-11 00:00:00 UTC ]
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There’s something about ink, paper and the printing press that has always bothered tyrants and those afraid of ideas.Was there a single old hand in the world of magazines who didn’t read the stories about the demand for copies of the post-massacre edition of Charlie Hebdo, raise their eyebrows... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2015-01-25 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Some of Pixar's most illustrious alums, steeped for decades in Pixar's potent creative culture, reveal how they apply the company's philosophies of success to their own ventures--and you can, too.While working as an animator in London in the late 1990s, Suzanne Slatcher spent her lunch breaks at... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2014-03-26 00:00:00 UTC ]
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If these are the end times for literature, then we must be traveling in circles, for the death of storytelling looks an awful lot like its birth. The novel itself isn’t all that old. Sure, we can find a handful of examples going back thousands of years, but you have to stretch your definition of... Continue reading at Slate
[ Slate | 2014-01-14 00:00:00 UTC ]
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For most of us the digital revolution started some time ago. Working in journalism for nearly 15 years means that I have seen things change enormously, but even back in the late 1990s it was clear that the web was where it was at -- or where it was going to be. Newspapers and magazines have had... Continue reading at Betanews
[ Betanews | 2013-07-31 00:00:00 UTC ]
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From Clay Foster, chairman and CEO of Journal Inc. and publisher of the Daily Journal: Today’s paper is the culmination of months of planning and hard work to go live on a new printing press. In challenging economic times this was not an e ... Continue reading at Editor & Publisher
[ Editor & Publisher | 2013-01-14 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Carly Simon, the singer and songwriter who has had a rocky life and a storied career, has sold her autobiography to Random House for a sum in the seven figures, according to a person familiar with the deal. Ms. Simon, the author of several children's books, is writing the memoir herself. It's... Continue reading at Crains New York
[ Crains New York | 2012-06-02 00:00:00 UTC ]
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The tagline “It’s not TV. It’s HBO” is something many will remember from the late 1990s, back when the cable network was in the vanguard for airing critically acclaimed series like The Sopranos and Sex and the City. Today there’s hardly a cable network in the game that isn’t trying to capture... Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2012-02-10 00:00:00 UTC ]
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