The past decade has been terrible in terms of job growth and median wage growth, and sadly that was true even before it culminated in the worst recession since the 1930s. But not all the news is bad. Although it’s not much discussed, this has actually been the best decade since the 1960s for productivity …
Smaller and smaller books
Erik Brynjolfsson hasn't been blogging too often because over the last couple of months he has been book writing. He and Andrew McAfee have released their new book, Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy. If you think that is a wordy …
10 Years into the iPod Revolution
It is almost completely impossible to believe that 10 years ago today, one of the great revolutions in IT was launched. On October 23, 2001, Apple announced the iPod. To say it was rudimentary is an understatement. It had only 5GB of hard disk storage, as the size of a deck of cards and weighed …
Three Events on Technology, Employment and the Economy
If you’re interested in technology, employment and the economy, you might be interested in three events happening in the next few weeks. The first is the Compass Summit in Palos Verdes, California, on October 23-26. There will be an impressive array of technologists, business leaders, visionaries and policymakers coming together to discussion how innovation can …
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Siriously
Whenever I call some provider and I get some voice operated system, I cringe. It never quite works and you end up shouting at it as if it were hard of hearing. So why would I want that on my phone? Indeed, my iPhone has had voice control for some time and I've never used …
Data-driven Decision-making
Information technology has created a data explosion. We now record virtually every click of every visitor to every website, every search on Google or Bing, every transaction at every cash register, every call or text on cellphones, every inventory change in our supply chains and petabytes of other data on what we buy, sell, or …
Science with & without the Internet: Part I
Michael Nielsen has a mission: to open up science. A pioneer in the field of quantum computing (a quick Google scholar search shows his top publication to have over 13,000 citations), Nielsen pretty much dropped out of academia to pursue his quest to change science. Like myself he is an Australian living in Toronto. But …
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Passwords from the dead
We have lots of passwords. In my case, some of them are of little consequence. But others are critically important. For instance, I'd hate for my family to be struggling with bank account information if I were to pass away. And with password updates, it is hard to incorporate them in wills. This is not …
Online science and the speed of review
Steve Landsburg alerted me to an amazing set of interactions in Mathematics this week. A very distinguished Princeton professor, Ed Nelson, announced what may have been the most profound mathematical result of the century (right up there with Godel's Theorem last century): that the Peano axioms in mathematics were inconsistent. Nelson announced his finding on …
Lunch Break: Robot ball controlled from your iPhone
Here's an interesting way for the digital and physical worlds to interact: Sphero is a robot ball controlled from your smart phone. I could make a connection to the unexpected power of combinatorial innovation in the digital economy, but the truth is, it's just kind of fun to watch on my lunch break. Enjoy!
Digitopoly 