a16z Frontier (@a16zfrontier) “When the telephone was first invented, people didn’t really know what to use it” — TopicDigg

When the telephone was first invented, people didn’t really know what to use it for. Some guesses: audio for telegraphs (finally!), or a primitive radio for listening to live music. Then its users started finding their own answers. @JamesGleick, bestselling author of Chaos and The Information, joins @smc90 and @rhackett to talk about The Telephone: A New History — and how users help decide what a new technology becomes. In this episode: 00:00 – Introducing James Gleick 02:07 – The messy invention of an inevitable technology 08:15 – How network effects changed the telephone 14:29 – How farmers built a decentralized phone network from barbed wire 17:20 – What Mark Twain missed while eavesdropping on his wife’s calls 20:12 – To play monopoly or not? 31:22 – Open vs. closed systems 37:17 – What made Bell Labs (and Xerox PARC) more than one-hit wonders? 41:20 – Scientists, tinkerers, and the conditions for invention 47:22 – Debating whether AI is a fourth industrial revolution 52:11 – How technology changes the way we think 59:55 – From “ahoy” to “hello, world”