Technology Impact

The library's "Technology Impact" cluster spans from Humphrey Jennings documenting 17th-century observers watching machines arrive to Kai-Fu Lee watching general purpose technologies eat job categories whole—and the through-line isn't progress or disruption. It's a specific cognitive failure that repeats across four centuries. Schmidt and Cohen note that "our propensity for selective memory allows us to adopt new habits quickly and forget the ways we did things before." Brynjolfsson and McAfee show that exponential growth on a logarithmic chart looks perfectly predictable, but on a linear chart—the one humans actually experience—it looks like an explosion from nowhere. Kurzweil plots the same data and calls it a law. Kaczynski plots the same data and calls it a trap. What the cluster collectively argues, without any single author quite saying it, is that technology's deepest impact is on our capacity to perceive technology's impact. The GPT doesn't just reorganize the economy; it reorganizes the baseline against which we measure normal. Jennings's 1660 observers and Anderson's informatized societies are performing the same act: standing inside a transformation they can describe but cannot feel the edges of, because the edges have already become the floor.