Latest Articles Related Media
We Know His House, But Not His Life
By: John F GroomA White Paper on the Strange Shape of Human DataConsider someone I will call “Old Friend.” I have known Old Friend for most of my life. We grew up together. I knew his family and his...
Read More →
The Tools We Had
By: John F GroomHow much of an accomplishment belongs to the person, and how much belongs to the tools available to them? This article is itself an example of what it is about. Not very long ago, if...
Read More →
The Technology of Life vs. The Technology of Death
By: John F GroomWhen we think about the technology of the 20th century, some of the first images that come to mind are technologies of death. The machine gun, the tank, the bomber, poison gas, the V-...
Read More →
What Changes, What Doesn’t
By: John F GroomI was born in 1961, at the beginning of a long period of radical change. Fashion, technology, civil rights, gender relations, and many other parts of society seemed to be changing as...
Read More →
From Building Land to Building the Digital Future
By: John F GroomThe Origins of My Entrepreneurial PathLooking backward from the age of artificial intelligence, it is easy to make a basic historical mistake: to assume that the choices available tod...
Read More →
Why?
By: John F GroomWe live in an age obsessed with optimization. We optimize our investment portfolios. We optimize our diets. We compare sleep scores and heart rates. We optimize driving routes to save...
Read More →
The Digital Reconstruction of Daily Life
By: John F GroomThe Innovations Were Only the BeginningIn 15 Mini-Revolutions That Changed Daily Life, I looked at the technological developments that have most changed ordinary life during my lifeti...
Read More →
15 Mini-Revolutions That Changed Daily Life
By: John F GroomI was born in 1961. That makes my lifetime an interesting window through which to look at technological change. I was born into a world that was already recognizably modern. Cars, air...
Read More →
Yes, AI Is Amazing. But Not as Amazing as a Hummingbird
By: John F GroomArtificial intelligence is amazing. It can write software, translate languages, analyze medical images, generate pictures, search enormous bodies of information, recognize patterns hu...
Read More →
The Future That Didn’t Happen
By: John F GroomWhy 1970 Sometimes Seemed More Future-Oriented Than 2026When Alvin Toffler published Future Shock in 1970, the future seemed to be arriving everywhere at once. Humans had just walked...
Read More →