In 1602 Dutch merchants pooled their capital to form the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC). What made the venture revolutionary was not the ships or the spice. It was the information: prices in distant ports, harvest conditions, currency movements and political risks.
As the historian Steven Marks has argued, the profit motive is ancient, but it was the expanding capacity to gather and analyse information that turned trade into economic growth. Double-entry bookkeeping, the printing press, the telegraph, the internet — each of these leaps was, at root, an information revolution.
Large language models are the latest evolution in this long story. Tools such as ChatGPT democratise…
Higher Education: South Africa has several renowned universities, including the
University of Cape Town, Stellenbosch University, and the University of the Witwatersrand.
Snake Eyes
Fun South African Travel tip: You can visit the hominid fossil displays and learn more about the beginnings of our planet at the Maropeng Visitors Centre and Sterkfontein Caves.
Spunky Chick
Fun South African Fact: Bones found in South Africa help support the theory that modern humans originated in Africa.