The Ocean Doesn’t Care About Your Swimming Lessons

'Remarkably, great innovation seems to begin with the bankruptcy of the innovators.'

The above is perhaps one of the key insights that David Steinberg brings to light in his book.

This swaggering account speeds through the history of railroad mania, the electrification of America, and the fiber optic boom: three manias that ultimately bankrupted their builders and remade the world.

In the 1840s, British families mortgaged their futures for railway shares. The trains were undoubtedly real. The fortunes, however, were not. Samuel Insull, who, 80 years after the railroads, electrified America and built an empire of holding companies, only to go bankrupt. To quote the author, 'The heroes of one part of a cycle often become the villains on the other.' In the 1990s, the smartest money on Wall Street buried the ocean floor in fiber optic cables that sat unused for a decade.

A clear-eyed field guide to what we are living through now, the work is a byproduct of the investment research conducted by the author over the last several years. Synthetic Brains & Steam Trains moves through each mania, much as an investor would. Who paid for the infrastructure? Who got wiped out? What was the capacity actually worth? How long did it take for the world to grow into it?

The author finishes with a brief eye to lessons that can be observed in the present. Here begins a skeptical tour of the fundamental concepts of artificial intelligence, including a discussion of why machines that reconstruct rather than remember can answer our questions so confidently, and yet also, so incorrectly.

The book, intentionally written as a casual article, examines the gap between what these systems can do and what they have so far changed. 'History doesn't rhyme, history repeats.' Different names, different machines, the same plot. The investors who knew the plot did better than the ones who knew the technology. Volume III of The Ocean Doesn't Care About Your Swimming Lessons includes detailed notes provided by the author, further reading, and other observations that are the byproduct of an investment analyst who, like everyone else, is making sense of the changing paradigm.

Publisher - Marlowe Keynes

Language - English

Case Bound - PPC

Contributors

By author

Logan Atkeson

Published Date - 2026-06-13

ISBN - 9638148000036

Dimensions - 20.3 x 12.7 x 1.4 cm

Page Count - 144