Technology, AI & Future Literacy

What technology does to work, markets, attention, and power, and how to read a technology claim: diffusion lags, S-curves, Jevons, tasks versus jobs, network effects, scaling laws and their limits, the jagged frontier, the Collingridge dilemma, and staying literate without chasing the feed.

45 cards · space to flip · 1–4 to grade · d to go deeper

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Reading list

The works this deck draws on, in the order worth reading them. Cards point to a specific chapter or paper where one fits.

BookCo-Intelligence · Ethan Mollick, 2024The best single starting point: what current models do well and badly in work and learning, from someone who runs the experiments. Light on history; the rest of the list fills that in.
BookThe Technology Trap · Carl Benedikt Frey, 2019Who gained and who lost from mechanisation across three centuries, and why the losers' resistance mattered. The account that complicates the comforting aggregate story about jobs.
BookThe Second Machine Age · Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, 2014The clearest statement of the optimistic economic case for digital technology, with the diffusion and productivity arguments laid out plainly. Written before current models, which helps you see what was predictable.
BookThe Shock of the Old · David Edgerton, 2007The corrective: a history of technology in use rather than invention, showing how much of any era runs on old tools. Read it to inoculate against novelty bias.
BookPower and Progress · Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, 2023A thousand years of who captured the gains from technology, arguing that the direction of progress is chosen. A committed argument rather than a survey; read it as the case for one side.
BookThe Alignment Problem · Brian Christian, 2020The calm, reported history of how machine learning systems come to pursue the wrong target and of the people trying to fix it. The best book behind the risk cards.
BookThe Master Switch · Tim Wu, 2010The rise and fall of information empires from the telephone to the internet, and the cycle from open to closed that platform power tends to follow.
BookHow the World Really Works · Vaclav Smil, 2022The material substrate: energy, materials, and why the physical world moves slower than software. Dry and numerical, which is the point.