On the one hand, the leap forward that AI took last year is real and opens the biggest opportunity in technology since the development of the web or social media. On the other, unlike previous waves, everyone is aware of it, not just the experts, techies, or early adopters. The…

A law of economic entropy: capital flows across a perceived value difference towards higher perceived value and eventual price equilibrium. — The laws of physics have often provided frameworks for understanding systems far removed from particles and energy. One such principle that has been discussed across disciplines is the law of entropy in thermodynamics. In essence, entropy is a measure of disorder or randomness in a system, and systems naturally evolve…

The earth has to produce more waste than the energy it consumes from the sun. Life must consume more energy and waste even more and intelligent life must consume and waste more still. Consumption and waste aren’t things to reduce, but to manage. The key tenets of much of environmental…

The structural implications of AI Before networks, computers were standalone machines and before the internet, computer networks were limited to individual organizations. The internet connected all computers, smartphones put them in the hands of everyone. This rewired global communication & interaction and as a result, restructured society itself to become…

A Computational Understanding of the Second Law of Thermodynamics This is an expansion of notes from Wolfram’s 3 part series which attempts to show a new theory of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, founded on a computational understanding vs an energy one based on heat exchange (Clausius) or the statistical…

The Return of Inflation It’s widely believed that the return of inflation, after more than a decade of deflationary pressure, isn’t transitory. The causes are variously claimed to be: easy monetary policy, the COVID pandemic, and the war in Ukraine. These are all symptoms of counter-reactions to deeper underlying structural…

A profile on me as an early Internet pioneer in the Financial Times, in March 1999, while I was working on my third startup, Moreover.com. The piece is early enough that it isn’t online, to link to. Moreover was the first online news search engine, prior to Google news. What…

CeFi vs DeFi. Why crypto will ditch decentralization medium term but will change the world later, when it returns. The Crypto universe exists in the virtual one in terms of regulation, law enforcement or protection. …

Eighteen years ago I did a presentation at South by Southwest, in Texas, where I proposed a trivial new standard for online bios. The problem at the time was that blogrolls (sidebar links to favorite blogs) had no descriptions. The concept was that people should describe themselves or their blog…