PEG – Page 2 – Trying to understand the intersection between business and technology

The July 30 article in Quanta, What Can a Cell Remember?, reports on a striking experimental finding: kidney cells grown in a dish appear to “anticipate” regularly spaced pulses of chemical signals. When the pulses are paused and then resumed, the cells respond differently—suggesting, at first glance, that they “remember” what came before.

It’s a compelling observation. But the interpretation it invites—framed in terms of “memory”—raises some interesting questions about how we make sense of biological systems, especially in an era where cognitive metaphors are everywhere.

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.

Rewired

by peg2025-06-302025-06-27 No Comments

Much of today’s business writing is reductionist, focused on clean cause-and-effect narratives. This isn’t a flaw; most of the time, what organisations need is tactical advice: if you have X, do Y. Rewired is a strong example of this genre, offering a practical guide to how contemporary organisations structure, run, and deliver technology.

But we’re not in a steady state. We’re at the end of an era shaped by firm-centric efficiency, and entering one defined by networked coordination, contested data, and shifting boundaries of control.

We’re living through a transition, away from the familiar paradigms of the last 30 years, and toward something still taking shape. In that context, advice grounded in what worked before may be increasingly ill-suited to what comes next. The book excels at guiding firms through internal change, but falters when the real challenge is how firms relate to everything outside them. Rewired is useful for what it is. But how useful that is, right now, is an open question.

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.

Fluency Without Thought: New Evidence for the LLM Productivity Trap

by peg2025-06-172025-06-22 No Comments

A recent academic paper—Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing—offers compelling empirical evidence for a claim I’ve been exploring: that LLMs are reshaping knowledge work in ways that increase surface fluency while weakening deeper forms of cognitive engagement.

Why We Keep Misreading Disruption

by peg2025-06-042025-05-27 No Comments

We’re wired to spot disruption in the wrong places—chasing the latest AI feature or platform, expecting it to upend everything overnight. Google’s new ‘Shop with AI’ mode is already stirring such claims, but as my latest Substack essay Why We Keep Misreading Disruption explores the real question isn’t what these technologies do, but what deeper systemic shifts they reveal. This piece unpacks why our visions of the future often miss the mark, how globalisation’s story helps explain structural change, and what it means to see disruption as a ‘punctuation’ rather than just incremental progress.

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.

The Power Loom Principle

by peg2025-05-282025-05-27 No Comments

We’ve mistaken where progress really comes from. It’s not the invention—it’s the reinvention of work.

We’re pouring billions into AI, automation, and other “hero” technologies, hoping for a productivity miracle. But the real source of past leaps wasn’t the tech itself. It was how we reorganised work around it. In my latest Substack post, The Power Loom Principle, I explore how this blind spot is stalling growth—and what we must do to reignite it.

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.