If you hang out with technologists, you have heard Amara’s law. Humans tend to overestimate the short-run effect of technology and underestimate its long-run effect. Decades of experience inform this bit of wisdom. Roy Amara worked as a policy analyst at two think tanks, the Stanford Research Institute and the Institute for the Future. His …
Frontier Pick and Shovel Markets
A firm in a “pick and shovel” market produces a good or service that serves as an input to other businesses. A “frontier” pick-and-shovel supplier has made a significant technical breakthrough in applied science or engineering that has enabled capabilities in its product previously considered impractical, uneconomical, or impossible. Pick-and-shovel markets have been around for …
Private Returns on Technology Adoption
From a firm’s perspective, the emergence of a new technology wave is a new opportunity to generate a financial return. The question is precisely how. That topic remains as salient today, in the era of artificial intelligence, as it was when firms first encountered smartphones, the commercial internet, and personal computers. Before we fully embrace …
Artificial Intelligence and the Jevons Paradox
What can a nineteenth-century economist teach a twenty-first-century Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at one of the largest technology firms? More to the point, why is Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, quoting William Stanley Jevons? Jevons was a dominant figure in economic thought in Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century, but not today. His …
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Commercial and Scientific Prototypes
A prototype is a product or service's early sample, model, or release. It is built to test a concept or process and serves as a tangible representation of an idea. Some prototypes are primarily commercial, while others are scientific. The advent of digitization has significantly revolutionized the prototyping process over several decades in both commercial …
Digitopoly 