London Stripe Press Book Club #1 - Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation
Welcome to the first ever London Stripe Press Book Club, hosted at incident.io’s office in Shoreditch.
We’ll be tackling the question:
“What can past tech cycles and bubbles teach us about the current wave of AI innovation?”
To frame the discussion, we’ll be using Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber- a book that examines how periods of intense investment and optimism have historically coincided with major technological breakthroughs.
Yes, the dotcom bubble famously wiped out hundreds of billions in market value. But it also gave us Amazon, Google, and massive investment in fibre infrastructure that powers today’s high-speed internet.
Readers and non-readers are welcome to discuss the ideas contained in the book.
From Stripe Press’s website:
“From the Moon landing to the dawning of the atomic age, the decades prior to the 1970s were characterized by the routine invention of transformative technologies at breakneck speed. By comparison, ours is an age of stagnation; of slowing median wage growth, rising inequality, and decelerated scientific discovery. In Boom, Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber take an inductive approach to this problem. They track some of the most significant breakthroughs of the past 100 years—from the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program to Moore’s law and Bitcoin—and reverse-engineer how transformative progress arises from the same dynamics that govern financial bubbles, bringing together small groups with a unified vision, vast funding, and surprisingly poor accountability. Bubbles, they conclude, aren’t all bad—in fact, they create the ideal conditions for transformative innovation. Integrating insights from economics, philosophy, and history, Boom provides a blueprint for accelerating innovation and a path to unleash a new era of global prosperity.”
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