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technology



  • O'Mara: Politics and Commercial Pressure, not ChatGPT, are the Threats

    Historian of technology and Silicon Valley Margaret O'Mara says that the peril of artificial intelligence chatbots and artificial intellience will lie in how it is marketed; the rush to be first to the market creates conditions for sloppy tech and abusive applications. 



  • Don't Like Where Society's Heading? Blame Palo Alto

    by Scott W. Stern

    Journalist Malcolm Harris attempts to excavate the history of how a worldview shaped by the tech industry—most notably its rampant individualism and subordination of the self to surveillance, metrics and monitoring—conquered the world, while also keeping the flames of unregulated capitalism and eugenics burning. 



  • Why I'm Not Afraid of ChatGPT

    by Christopher Grobe

    The limits of AI writing technology present writing teachers the opportunity to show students how to demand more of their writing than the bots can possibly provide. 



  • 50 Years Later, Remembering Pong's Success

    Pong's develper and Atari cofounder Allan Alcorn: "I didn't think the company would last long because most startup companies didn't. And so I thought it would fail after a while, but it'd be a lot of fun."



  • Can Silicon Valley Be Redeemed? (Review Essay)

    by Margaret O'Mara

    Three books collectively demand a reckoning with Silicon Valley's immense social power; tech executives would do well to listen, says a technology historian. 


  • Pessimistic Economic Forecasts Ignore a History of Dynamism

    by John Landry and Howard Wolk

    Many economic histories portray the American prosperity of the century between the Civil War and the 1970s as the picking of low-hanging fruit. But the story of entrepreneurial innovation during that time is more complicated, and more relevant to the present, than we think. 



  • The Automation Myth (Review Essay)

    by Clinton Williamson

    Neither utopian nor cataclysmic predictions about the effects of automation made in the 20th century have come exactly to pass; technology has changed, but not replaced, work. Several new books try to connect the past and future of work.