Archive for category: Tech & Society

If you were born in the 1990s you might never have questioned the pervasiveness of companies like Google in the Internet domain. For you, such companies, products, services, and technologies have been ever present and seemingly unassailable.

Yet in the past few months we have seen the emergence of a set of technologies, especially ChatGPT, which have opened the real possibility of a technical and business threat to Google’s near monopoly on Internet search.

Most of us have a shared understanding of what is meant when we hear the word land. Normally, people think of the ground underfoot or the plains stretching to the mountains or the contrast of the Earth and the sea. However, some technical abstractions can also be considered as land in the view of Henry George. In this blog entry we will discuss the societal implications of how we manage certain ethereal properties affecting satellites, cell phones, and even your Wifi connection. These naturally occurring elements are what I call “Unland Land.” As we will see they are universal, impactful, and highly valuable.

For all those kids out there from 1 to 92 who need to use technology, how do you make it work for yourself? Are you really connected to the society or is society passing you by? This post explores the “red shift” inherent in our technological environment and how the pace of change and complexity it generates leaves a Digital Divide and an economic gap in its wake.

Since the earliest times, technologies have been a two-edged sword – literally. They cut both ways. We all remember in our Jungian collective unconscious the scene where the exceedingly useful wheel – now on the nasty armed chariot – scares the fleeing peasant. Boy, the inventor of that technology sure never intended for that to unfold.

We arrived in Japan recently to attend to some family matters. One household issue we also wanted to deal with was our legacy washing machine. Little did I know that this would start an adventure in both technology and Economics.