It is puzzling why a particular technology does not spread everywhere throughout the world once invented. Why didn’t the plow, for instance, or backstrap looms, or the buttress arch, or any number of thousands of ancient inventions spread to all parts of the world once they had been refined? If they were truly advantageous, why would not their benefits ripple through a culture at the speed of news? After a century or two, any worthwhile invention should be able to cross a mountain or valley. We know from archeological remains that trade moved steadily, while innovations did not. Instead the spread of technology has always been uneven, even among places with similar resources, geography, climate and culture. It is very common for an innovation to be held up in one place and not cross into another region even as other innovations overtake it on the same route. It is almost as if technology had an ethnic dimension.

Anthropologist Pierre Petrequin once noted that the Meervlakte Dubele and Iau tribes in Papau New Guinea had been using steel axes and beads for many decades but their use had not been adopted by the Wanos tribe a “mere day’s walk away.”

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The Amish have the undeserved reputation of being Luddites, of people who refuse to employ new technology. It’s well known the strictest of them don’t use electricity, or automobiles, but rather farm with manual tools and ride in a horse and buggy. In any debate about the merits of embracing new technology, the Amish stand out as offering an honorable alternative of refusal. Yet Amish lives are anything but anti-technological. In fact on my several visits with them, I have found them to be ingenious hackers and tinkers, the ultimate makers and do-it-yourselfers and surprisingly pro technology.

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The fastest growing entity today is information. Information is expanding 10 times faster than the growth of any other manufactured or natural product on this planet. According to a calculation Hal Varian, an economist at Google, and I made, worldwide information has been increasing at the rate of 66 percent per year for many decades. Compare that explosion to the rate of increase in even the most prolific manufactured stuff–like concrete, or paper–which averages only 7 percent annually over decades.

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Here is why you don’t have to worry about the Singularity in your lifetime: thinkism doesn’t work. First, some definitions. According to Wikipedia, the Singularity is “a theoretical future point of unprecedented technological progress, caused in part by the ability of machines to improve themselves using artificial intelligence.”  According to Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil, a smarter than human artificial intelligence will bring about yet smarter intelligence, which in turn will rapidly solve related scientific problems (including how to make yet smarter intelligence), expanding intelligence until all technical problems are quickly solved, so that society’s overall progress makes it impossible for us to imagine what lies beyond the Singularity’s birth. Oh, and it is due to happen no later than 2045.

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In the universe of the free (”free” as in beer), getting ripped off is the norm. Yes, many products and services are deliberately priced at zero these days, but a significant portion of consumers will gravitate to illegitimate free versions of not-free stuff. Free versions of pricey digital products are not hard to find on underground file trading sites, or in bits and pieces on above ground aggregators like YouTube. Most high-priced wares like expensive commercial software can be had for literally nothing. But very cheap things are widely pirated for free as well. 

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There’s a dawning sense that extremely large databases of information, starting in the petabyte level, could change how we learn things. The traditional way of doing science entails constructing a hypothesis to match observed data or to solicit new data. Here’s a bunch of observations; what theory explains the data sufficiently so that we can predict the next observation?

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Shortly after Will Wright released yet another version of his SimCity in the mid 1990s, I was visiting Maxis’ studios and chatting with Will about evolutionary system and self-generating software. SimCity was a city that built itself according to a few rules–which the player tweaked and tried to maximize. It was the ultimate nerd god-game, the nerd playing god. Will offered to give me a peek preview of his next project. SimCity was so cool, I was expecting something even more generative, more ambitious, more god-like–something like Spore.

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The Internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it. In order to send a message from one corner of the Internet to another, the protocols of communication demand that the whole message be copied along the way several times. IT companies make a lot of money selling equipment that facilitates this ceaseless copying. Every bit of data ever produced on any computer is copied somewhere. The digital economy is thus run on a river of copies. Unlike the mass-produced reproductions of the machine age, these copies are not just cheap, they are free.

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