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Joel Mokyr

Friday 8th of May 2026

Free lunch Technological progress … has provided society with what economists call a “free lunch,” that is, an increase in output that is not commensurate with the increase in effort and cost necessay to bring it about. Joel Mokyr, Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress © 2016 Kwiple.com
 
Technology When we don't quite know what we are doing (even if we are doing it well), can we write a program that does it for us? Joel Mokyr, November 20, 2015, four months before AlphaGo, a program from Google DeepMind, won 4 out of 5 games playing against one the world's top three players of Go, a board game with simpler rules than chess but many more squares and possible moves, making winning much more dependent on recognizing inexplicable spatial patterns © 2016 Kwiple.com