Technology does not drive change

October 26, 2019

«It’s my belief that technology does not drive change.
Technology merely enables changes.
It creates options and opportunities
that as individuals and as communities and as entire cultures
we choose to exploit.
And it’s our response to the technologies that drive change.
In other words, first we invent our technologies
and then we use our technologies to reinvent ourselves».
– Paul Saffo, technology forecaster

books and literature

Lolly Willowes

Sylvia Townsend Warner is one of the most interesting literary figures of the 21st century, and Lolly Willowes is one of her finest works, even more stunning if you think it was her debut novel. Self-supporting, intellectually independent, and consistently sceptical of social and religious

April 26, 2026 9:00 am

books and literature

Fugitive Telemetry

This is book #6 in the Murderbot series (yes, I accidentally skipped #5, I’m circling back to that), and I’m afraid I didn’t like this as much as the others. The whole investigation felt a bit rushed and, though the final twist is interesting in

April 24, 2026 8:00 am

architecture, engineering and construction

The Discipline of Inspiration: Valéry and the Algorithmic Mind

Paul Valéry rejected inspiration as miracle, seeing creativity as the discipline of thought in motion. This week, we parallel his notion of mental “operations” with computational procedures in design: iteration, optimisation, constraint, and recombination, and challenge the dichotomy between intuition and automation. Drawing on contemporary

April 22, 2026 9:00 am