"Fourth, the presentist bias in this chart is extreme in two ways. First, we forget things that we don't count as "technology" anymore (e.g., toilets, coal furnaces, sewing machines), and so they are left off. Second, we don't know what innovations are at low levels of adoption right now--imagine someone in 1960 trying to predict the adoption arc for personal computers!--and so our current rates of adoption are vastly overestimated compared to what the same chart will look like in 50 years."

"So here’s a riddle: which form of technology should we prefer, labor saving or labor complementary? Labor saving technology is consistent with high wages and tight labor markets. But it also, of course, leads to less jobs overall in the sectors where it is deployed. Which brings us back to the homeless people with hotspots. Let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that this is a legitimately profit-making business venture rather than a weird kind of charity. (And note that even as charity, the project depends on its consumers viewing it as a kind of legitimate business, a way for the homeless to engage in “productive” labor.) Putting hotspots on homeless people has to count as a labor complementary technology. From the standpoint of the wireless company, the marginal product of a homeless person’s labor is much higher (i.e., it’s non-zero) once you’ve figured out that you can attach hotspots to them. So if you think that it’s bad when machines replace human labor (which is not what I think), then this is just the kind of technical change you should prefer.
"But labor complementary technology doesn’t necessarily look so great once you’re face-to-face with the kind of labor it complements. In this case, it relies upon the existence of a cheap and exploitable labor force—something that’s obvious when you’re looking at a homeless person in a creepy t-shirt, less so when you order from an online retailer. And here’s where I think a lot of the outrage over homeless-people-as-infrastructure goes wrong.
"I don’t recall seeing a lot of complaints about the problem of homelessness in Austin prior to this story. Which I don’t mean as some kind of “gotcha”—the world is full of horrible things, and it’s neither possible nor particularly helpful to try to talk about all of them all of the time. But to get up in arms about an ad agency exploiting the homeless as wifi routers strikes me as a peculiarly half-assed form of outrage. If they weren’t walking around as billboards for wireless service, Austin’s homeless and poor would still be homeless and perhaps a bit more poor. The fundamental problem here is not exploitation, but the condition of possibility for that exploitation, which is the fact that there are so many poor and homeless Americans in the first place.
"“The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all”, goes the old adage from Joan Robinson. Then again, says Marx, “to be a productive laborer is not a piece of luck, but a misfortune. In the short run, labor complementary technology may employ more people, which is better than them not being exploited at all. But in the long run, the jobs thus created tend to be terrible, and our real goal ought to be to channel technical change toward labor saving innovation.
"This leaves us with the question of what the homeless of Austin can demand, if not the right to be walking 4G hotspots. Fortunately there is a simple solution to that. There’s nothing (economically) stopping us from just giving people cash; and as the housing activist Max Rameau likes to say, the cause of homelessness is that people don’t have homes, and we have plenty of those. So imagine what would happen if this pool of cheap, easily exploitable labor wasn’t available. A company that wanted to sell 4G wireless services might have to invest in more transmitters to fulfill demand. Or perhaps they would deploy robots to roll around the streets selling wireless access! This would not employ as many people, since it’s more a labor saving than a labor complementary technology. But it also wouldn’t create the grotesque spectacle of fellow human beings serving as pieces of infrastructure."

The 747 and the B-52 are over half a century old, but show no sign of going away, and might well be good for another half century.  What else?

"Try to imagine a utopian version of earth in which everyone on the planet can obtain the material living standards of the average contemporary Dutch person without doing any paid labor. Well some people are going to be enjoying the life of leisure from a nice villa in the Tuscan countryside or from the stunning beaches of the Caribbean while others will be less-fortunately situated in Arkhangelsk or the suburbs of Houston."

Is the marginal cost to NBER of providing an additional _electronic_ copy of this paper $5?  If so, they are being ripped off by their web hosting provider.  If not, why charge $5?

In the long run, of course, the end-point of this scenario is Sterling's "The Beautiful and the Sublime". --- Come to think of it, when was Sterling's story written?  Could either have influenced the other?

"xisting indicators of technical change are plagued by shortcomings. I present here new measures based on books published in the field of technology that resolve many of these problems and use them to identify the impact of technology shocks on economic activity. They are positively linked to changes in R&D and scientific knowledge and capture the new technologies' commercialization dates. Changes in information technology are found to be important sources of economic fluctuations in the post-WWII period and total factor productivity, investment and, to a lesser extent, labor are all shown to increase following a positive technology shock."

Conversely, the demand for Pan Am flights to the moon is much smaller than _very reasonable_ people have expected. This suggests an interesting question for retrospective studies of futurology: what's the variance? Quite conceivably, futurology is right _on average_, but with such a huge spread as to be unusable...

More scenes from the technological singularity that was the 19th century.

Adina Levin review's _The Box_, on the rise of container shipping, and convinces me I definitely need to read it