Category: Society and the economy

How has technology development changed the nature of society and the economy?

The Crooked Path

by peg2025-09-042025-09-02 No Comments

Why Breakthroughs Disappoint and Work Delivers

You know that feeling when you read about the latest “breakthrough” technology that’s going to change everything—fusion finally working, quantum computers achieving some new milestone, brain-computer interfaces getting closer to reality—and part of you feels excited but part of you thinks, haven’t I heard this before?

I’ve been carrying around a low-level disappointment about technology promises for years now. Remember when VR was going to transform everything? You bought into the hype, got a headset, used it enthusiastically for maybe two weeks, and now it’s gathering dust in a closet. Or self-driving cars: we’ve been perpetually “just a few years away” from full autonomy for over a decade now (and the current rollout still relies on an operations centre with remote drivers). Blockchain was going to revolutionise everything from voting to supply chains, but mostly it revolutionised speculation and energy consumption.

This got me wondering: why does this keep happening?

The AI Productivity Paradox

by peg2025-08-282025-08-27 No Comments

The recent decline in entry-level employment is not a consequence of AI’s revolutionary power. Instead, it is a symptom of a maturing industry entering a low-growth phase. AI is serving as a tool for cost optimisation rather than a driver of new value creation.

If generative AI were truly a general-purpose technology on par with electricity or the micro-processor, the macro data should already be unmistakable. Instead, the silence is deafening.

The Tyranny of the Ideal

by peg2025-08-272025-08-26 No Comments

There’s a persistent belief that policy failures happen because politicians ignore expert advice. Healthcare reform gets watered down by special interests. Climate action stalls because fossil fuel lobbies block rational carbon pricing. Immigration reform collapses because extremists prevent sensible comprehensive solutions.

The real story is more unsettling: these policies are failing precisely because politicians are following expert advice. The most sophisticated policy frameworks, implemented exactly as designed, produce the most predictable disasters. Our smartest people aren’t being ignored—they’re being followed faithfully toward systemic failure.

The Intelligent Hand

by peg2025-08-212025-08-21 No Comments

Why Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman Explains Our Current Expertise Crisis

Why do expert predictions keep failing while practical adaptations keep succeeding?

I’ve been tracking this pattern across domains—AI researchers confident about artificial general intelligence while consultants quietly discover ChatGPT helps structure client presentations; fusion physicists announcing breakthroughs while the technology remains perpetually “almost ready”; policy experts debating digital transformation frameworks while small businesses just start using whatever tools solve Tuesday’s problems.

The disconnect isn’t accidental. It reveals something fundamental about how knowledge actually develops versus how we think it should. And Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman, published in 2008, provides the clearest framework I’ve found for understanding why this split keeps widening—and why it matters more than we realize.

The Collapse of Narrative Attractors

by peg2025-08-192025-08-19 3 comments

Watching the cathedral of certainty crumble while the rest of us quietly bolt the next floor on

You’ve felt this. The same people who promised social media would democratise information now warn it’s destroying democracy. The same voices who said smartphones would liberate us from our desks now fret about screen addiction. The experts who assured us globalisation would lift all boats are now explaining why supply chains are fragile and manufacturing should come home.

It’s not just that they were wrong—it’s the whiplash. The confident certainty followed by equally confident reversals, as if the previous position never existed. As if the complexity was always obvious to anyone paying attention.

But here’s what’s actually happening: you’re watching narrative attractors collapse in real time.

Crabgrass Frontier

by peg2025-07-072025-08-25 No Comments

There’s a scene in Who Framed Roger Rabbit where Judge Doom lays out his plan to dismantle the trolley system and replace it with freeways. It’s intended to be cartoonishly evil, but the idea feels all to familiar. The demise of the streetcar and the rise of the car-centric suburb have long been framed as a conspiracy: businessmen colluding to kill transit, sell tires, and pave the future. Like many myths, there’s a sliver of truth. But the full story is both more mundane and more revealing.

Kenneth T. Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier quietly dismantles these comforting narratives. Published in 1985, it remains one of the clearest accounts of how American suburbia was not the outcome of technological inevitability or malicious forces in society, but a product of consumer preference (a desire to find privacy through space) and policy design, shaped by incentives, subsidies, zoning, and a particular vision of the good life. In Jackson’s telling, suburbia wasn’t chosen. It was made.

Society and the economy

How Systems Evolve After Legitimacy Fails

by peg2025-06-262025-07-01 No Comments

Media still publishes. Science still tests hypotheses. Consultants still give advice. Universities still confer degrees. Doctors still diagnose.

But none of these institutions command authority like they used to.

Their outputs still circulate, but the performances that once legitimated those outputs—peer review, op-eds, credentials, protocols—no longer land with the same force. We use the infrastructure, but we’ve stopped believing in the ritual.

This is not a collapse of function. It’s a collapse of legitimacy. And it is reconfiguring our systems in profound ways.

The singularity is an unlikely possible world

by peg2025-06-192025-06-22 No Comments

Discussions of the technological singularity often assume an inevitable leap to a future where machines surpass human intelligence in a runaway process. Yet, this focus reflects more than empirical forecasting—it reveals a preference for a particular possible world that aligns with cultural hopes or anxieties about transformation.

Prediction Without Disruption

by peg2025-05-292025-05-29 No Comments

The recent Stanford paper on Outcome-based Reinforcement Learning to Predict the Future¹ (RLVR) could be seen as both a product of and a contributor to the cycle of misinterpreting disruption, as I discussed in Why We Keep Misreading Disruption.² It’s advancing tools that improve prediction without necessarily addressing or understanding the foundational shifts that disruption entails.

Society and the economy

The Mirage of Frictionless Commerce

by peg2025-05-27 No Comments

Apparently “the checkout page is dead.” VISA, it seems, wants to make commerce ambient. Shopping, in this vision, becomes so seamless that it vanishes into the background. You see something. You want it. You get it. No friction. No steps. No checkout.

This kind of story is seductive. It flatters our bias toward convenience, efficiency, and the steady technological flattening of human effort. But it also misreads the system it claims to transform.