#technologicalchange

"Mirrors We Don't Have"

Stung by Russian manipulation of power markets, the EU plans to triple renewables by 2030 In the wake of a year when consumer energy prices across Europe skyrocketed, making it difficult for some people to heat their homes or cook, the European Commission today announced a new power market plan with ambitious targets: phase out gas, the fossil fuel that underpins much of the bloc’s power production, and…Read more... https://qz.com/stung-by-russian-manipulation-of-power-markets-the-eu-1850224228

A detail from my static film, Typewriter #3. Typing on an old typewriter--and by "old" I mean around one hundred years old, is a different experience in unexpected ways. Just think. This was the first time you could write directly in a type. It was socially disruptive in its own way. Was it high class or low class to type? Would beautiful handwriting long be a socially meaningful skill? Poor spelling and grammar would now be more obvious, too. Not to mention all those waves if technological and social change that created the need for the typewriter in the first place. #typewriter #typewriterrevolution #socialchange #technology #technologicalchange #video #videoart #art #artmusem #artistsoninstagram #artphotography #artoftheday #artcollector #artnerd #jrrtolkien #lotr

"Population reached approximately 4 million by 10000 BC, 50 million by 1000 BC, and 170 million by the year 1. Population then reached 265 million by the year 1000, 425 million by 1500, and 720 million by 1750 before the subsequent explosion of the British Industrial Revolution and the subsequent spread of Modern Economic Growth. [..] In Kremer's model, population will grow and eventually population will be high enough that research and development will proceed fast enough to push income per capita high enough to trigger the demographic transition and thus break the Malthusian proportional link between resources and technology on the one hand and population on the other. After that link is broken, economic growth will predominantly take the form not of Malthusian increases in population but rather Industrial Revolution and Modern Economic Growth increases in living standards and labor productivity. The breakthrough to an Industrial Revolution, Modern Economic Growth, and our present prosperous global post-industrial economy is therefore baked into the cake: an all-but-inevitable event in human history produced by the simple fact that when it comes to generating useful ideas two heads are better than one: "the fundamental nonrivalry of technology as described by Paul Romer (1986)..." The alternative view to the inevitability of the breakthrough is that the breakthrough to the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent knock-on transition to Modern Economic Growth was a lucky throw of the historical dice--that while Kremer's model has something like our economic world today as our inevitable destiny, the world might well be substantially otherwise and remain substantially otherwise for millennia if not longer. [..] It was not Newtonian science that inclined British inventors and entrepreneurs to seek machines that raised labour productivity but the rising cost of labour... due to... Britain’s success in the global economy... in part the result of state policy... [and] Britain['s] vast and readily worked coal deposits.... The necessary R&D was profitable in Britain (under British conditions) but unprofitable elsewhere.... The theory advanced here explains the technological breakthroughs of the industrial revolution in terms of the economic base of society–natural resources, international trade, profit opportunities. Through their impact on wages and prices, these prime movers affected both the demand for technology and its supply... [..] The nineteenth century engineering industry was a spin-off of the coal industry.... The British inventions of the eighteenth century–cheap iron and the steam engine, in particular–were so transformative... because of the possibilities they created for the further development of technology. Technologies invented in France–in paper production, glass, knitting–did not lead to general mechanization or globalization.... There is no reason to believe that French technology would have led to the engineering industry, the general mechanization of industrial processes, the railway, the steam ship, or the global economy. In other words, there was only one route to the twentieth century–and it went through northern Britain..."

For one emacs using coworker, anytime we watch each other use emacs, we inevitably ask each other "wait, how did you do that," notably for flyspell-auto-correct-previous-word and dired-maybe-insert-subdir, which are both amazing but even after years of collective emacs use we each were only familiar with one. ↩︎