CONCEPT
The Innovation Illusion
Edgerton's diagnosis of the structural error at the heart of contemporary technology discourse — the conviction that novelty is the point, that the newest technology is the most important, and that the drama of invention is the drama of history.
The innovation illusion is the systematic mis-weighting of novelty in popular and policy discourse about technology. Across innovation-centered narratives, the moment of invention receives disproportionate attention, the persistence of older technologies is ignored or dismissed, and the actual labor of deployment — maintenance, repair, adaptation, integration into existing practice — becomes invisible. Edgerton has documented the same illusion across every major technological era of the past century, and his analysis of the AI moment treats it as the latest instance of a pattern with no exceptions in the historical record. The illusion is not a failure of intelligence on the part of any individual observer; it is a structural feature of how dramatic narratives compete for attention against empirical ones.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The illusion is most visible in the rhetoric that accompanies the arrival of any major new technology. Edgerton has assembled side-by-side comparisons of language