How ‘Automation’ Made America Work Harder

Computers Were Supposed to Reduce Office Labor. They Accomplished the Opposite

The world confronts “an epochal transition.” Or so the consulting firm McKinsey and Company crowed in 2018, in an article accompanying a glossy 141-page report on the automation revolution. Over the past decade, business leaders, tech giants, and the journalists who cover them have been predicting this new era in history with increasing urgency. Just like the megamachines of the Industrial Revolution of the 19th and early 20th centuries—which shifted employment away from agriculture and toward manufacturing—they say that robots and artificial intelligence will make many, if not most, modern …

Did Moore’s Law Really Inspire the Computer Age? | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

Did Moore’s Law Really Inspire the Computer Age?

A Half Century Ago, Chemist Gordon Moore Made a Prediction—Or Was It a Challenge?—That Became a Narrative for Our Time

In the last half-century, and especially in the last decade, computers have given us the ability to act and interact in progressively faster and more frictionless ways. Consider the now-ubiquitous …

Yes, Classroom Tech Can Tackle Inequality—but Change Takes Politics and Patience

Digital Education Is Lifting Students While Challenging Academics and Silicon Valley

Even as digital technology has grown exponentially more sophisticated, accessible, and integral to our lives, social inequality has cast a deeper shadow across the United States in recent decades. Simultaneously, …

Why Artificial Intelligence Won’t Replace CEOs

An MBA’s Instinct Is Increasingly Vital in the Age of Information Overload

Peter Drucker was prescient about most things, but the computer wasn’t one of them. “The computer … is a moron,” the management guru asserted in a McKinsey Quarterly article in …

Computers and Robots Can Copy Your Work, and Get Away With It

So Long as Computers Don’t Understand the Copied Content, Copyright Law Will Stay Focused on People

Copyright has a weird relationship with computers. Sometimes it completely freaks out about them; sometimes it pretends it can’t see them at all. The contrast tells us a lot about …

My Grandma’s Los Altos Garage Launched a Tech Revolution

Tourists Flock to the Birthplace of Apple Computers. But to Me, the Ranch-Style House Was a Place to Eat Peanut Butter and Watch Cartoons.

My grandma’s house is your typical white, one-story house in the suburbs of the Silicon Valley—it has rustic red brick accents, baby blue trim, and a perfectly manicured front lawn. …