The theory in question is Jevon's paradox. If you've never heard this term, go read this article.

It's fascinating to me how some of the machines that modern technology relies on are so few in number. And how they can be in operation for more than half a century and still be critically important after all that time.

Critical history of Powerpoint and "the rise of presentation culture".

An insane story of evil corporate gaslighting – of one scientist in particular at the same time as society in general. Just like with climate change, they knew perfectly well what they were doing but did everything they could to keep it secret.

If we cannot come up with ways for A.I. to reduce the concentration of wealth, then I’d say it’s hard to argue that A.I. is a neutral technology, let alone a beneficial one.

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We should all strive to be Luddites, because we should all be more concerned with economic justice than with increasing the private accumulation of capital.

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Imagine an idealized future, a hundred years from now, in which no one is forced to work at any job they dislike, and everyone can spend their time on whatever they find most personally fulfilling. Obviously it’s hard to see how we’d get there from here. But now consider two possible scenarios for the next few decades. In one, management and the forces of capital are even more powerful than they are now. In the other, labor is more powerful than it is now. Which one of these seems more likely to get us closer to that idealized future? And, as it’s currently deployed, which one is A.I. pushing us toward?

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The tendency to think of A.I. as a magical problem solver is indicative of a desire to avoid the hard work that building a better world requires. That hard work will involve things like addressing wealth inequality and taming capitalism. For technologists, the hardest work of all—the task that they most want to avoid—will be questioning the assumption that more technology is always better, and the belief that they can continue with business as usual and everything will simply work itself out. No one enjoys thinking about their complicity in the injustices of the world, but it is imperative that the people who are building world-shaking technologies engage in this kind of critical self-examination.

Great story. Tales of of dozens-of-projectors productions and a whole 35mm-slide-based media industry that just kind of went away.

The history of Oral Rehydration Solution (ORS). Sometimes the big advances are stupid simple.

Coldicutt describes how strange it is that engineers and technologists (without much knowledge about history, politics, or philosophy) are taken so very seriously when they predict the societal impact of their work, but that vice versa, people without much knowledge of the nuts and bolts of the technology that do have such knowledge are treated as having no authority at all.