Category: Society and the economy

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

Eye of the Master

by peg2025-04-302025-07-01 No Comments

There’s no shortage of books about artificial intelligence right now. Most fall into one of two camps: breathless optimism or existential dread. The Eye of the Master is something else entirely—a rare and rigorous exploration of how we got here.

This is one of the most illuminating books I’ve read on the current wave of AI. Pasquinelli doesn’t waste time on hype or speculation. Instead, he takes us back to the intellectual roots of machine learning—tracing how ideas from neuroscience, cybernetics, psychometrics, and even art history quietly shaped the architecture of neural networks and the metaphors we use to describe them.

Abundance

by peg2025-04-242025-04-18 No Comments

Klein, Ezra. Abundance. 1st ed. New York Amsterdam Antwerpen: Avid Reader Press, 2025. We’re in the middle of a crisis of constraint—affordable housing, aging infrastructure, fragmented […]

The Geography of Desire

by peg2025-04-18 No Comments

Privacy, Commute, and the Making of the Housing Crisis We talk a lot about zoning, construction costs, NIMBYism—but these are symptoms, not causes. The Geography of […]

Book Updates Moving to Substack

by peg2025-02-252025-03-10 No Comments

For those following my book-related posts, I’m making a slight change to how I share this work. To better organise this expanding body of work, I’ve recently launched a Substack newsletter where I’ll be sharing book excerpts, work-in-progress concepts, and applications of the analytical framework I’m developing.

The Longevity Imperative

by peg2025-01-142025-07-01 No Comments

Scott, Andrew J. The Longevity Imperative: How to Build a Healthier and More Productive Society to Support Our Longer Lives. First U.S. edition. New York: Basic Books, 2024.

I’ve been following Prof. Scott’s work for some time and was glad when The Longevity Imperative was published as it provides an overview of the demographic change we’re in the midst of. While discussions about aging populations often frame demographic shifts as a crisis to be managed, particularly in policy and business forums, what’s refreshing about Prof. Scott’s work, and this book in particular, is that we can also frame this demographic shift as an opportunity.

The Way We Eat Now

by peg2024-12-272025-01-24 No Comments

Wilson, Bee, and Annabel Lee. The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change. London: 4th Estate, 2019.

I discovered Bee Wilson through Consider the Fork, an excellent ‘history of how we cook and eat’⁠ that draws heavily on Kranzberg’s Laws.⁠ Recently, I came across The Way We Eat Now, first published in 2019. While Consider the Fork examines the evolution of kitchen technology, this book explores how our relationship with food—and related cultural practices—has changed over time.

Society and the economy

School Life in 2024 A.D.

by peg2024-01-192024-04-16 No Comments

An interesting bit of paleofuture has been appearing in several social media feeds (on reddit, for example). I’ve converted it to text (below) for ease of reading.

Forever ten years away

by peg2023-08-24 No Comments

Why do some the technologies always seem to be ten years away? We’re not talking about the science fiction dreaming of faster than light travel or general AI and the singularity. Those ten years apply to technologies that forever seem to be just out of reach, just beyond our current technical capabilities, like nuclear fusion (as opposed to fission) or quantum computing. Researchers make incremental progress and we’re told that (once the technology works) its going to change everything, but despite this incremental progress estimates of when the technology will be commercialised and so available to the public always seem to be in the ballpark of ‘ten years’.

A new narrative for digital data

by peg2023-03-282024-05-28 No Comments

The article suggests rethinking digital data privacy by adopting Indigenous Australian metaphors focused on relationships and responsibilities rather than Western concepts of property and rights. It argues that treating data as property fails due to its intangible nature and advocates for a framework where data is viewed through relational responsibilities. This approach, inspired by Indigenous cultures, emphasises communal care and accountability, providing a more sustainable and ethical model for managing digital privacy and data use.

How industries evolve

by peg2022-08-092022-12-08 No Comments

We have a new essay published in Deloitte Insights, How industries evolve: Interactions, not institutions, drive disruptive change, a collaboration with Damien Crough from prefabAUS. This essay builds on the observation in The real landscape of technology-enabled opportunity. that disruption is typically the result of the accumulation of many minor innovations, rather than being driven by some significant disruptive innovation, by showing how industries evolve when the verbs change (how organisations in the industry interact) rather than the nouns (disruption of the organisations themselves).