Gamechangers: Thinking inside the box

09/13/21 • 37 min

The notion of shipping things in standardised boxes seems obvious in retrospect, so why did shipping containers take so long to emerge? Host Tom Standage finds out how difficult it was for this simple idea to take off. He talks to shipping experts and economists about the container’s far-reaching impact on the global economy—creating both winners and losers.

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For full access to The Economist’s print, digital and audio editions subscribe at economist.com/podcastoffer

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Previous Episode

Gamechangers: More than just a game

Deep learning, a form of artificial intelligence, powers voice assistants, facial recognition, music recommendations and underpins pioneering scientific research on how proteins fold. But all this was made possible by a breakthrough in a completely different field: video games. Powerful graphics chips (GPUs), developed to make video games more realistic, turned out to be ideal for speeding up the mathematical calculations used in deep learning. Host Tom Standage finds out how gaming transformed AI and meets the researchers who persevered when the chips were down.

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Next Episode

Gamechangers: Mobile money

Paying for things using your phone has become far more widespread during the pandemic. But Western consumers are playing catch-up. Mobile payments have been widespread for more than a decade in Africa, and in particular in Kenya, where the world’s first successful mobile-money system, called M-PESA, was launched in 2007. Why did it take off in Kenya first, how did users shape the development of the product—and what does this story reveal about innovation? Tom Standage hosts

For full access to The Economist’s print, digital and audio editions subscribe at economist.com/podcastoffer

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.