From Telegraph to AI: Why Learning the Language of Innovation Still Matters

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Introduction: Finding Echoes in History

As a trained economic historian specializing in 19th century's large technical systems like railways and telegraphs, I am always tempted to find historical parallels with today's emerging technologies—particularly what has come to be called artificial intelligence.

This impulse is not mere academic nostalgia. Understanding how past technological revolutions unfolded, who benefited from them, and why some innovations endured while others faded can offer crucial guidance for leaders, educators, and innovators navigating the current AI landscape. The question I keep returning to is simple but profound: Is AI genuinely transformative, or is it another overhyped technology destined to disappoint? How will we know?

Europe's Private R&D Innovation Divide: Which Companies Lead in R&D Investment?

The 2025 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard | IRI

Recently the European Commission published its Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard for 2024. It is remarkable the so many countries are (far) below the EU average in this sense. In fact, all sub-scandinavian countries, except Germany, spend below the EU average per employee on Research and Development.

Here is the top-20 ranking for individual companies:

These numbers are hard to interpret without looking at the same indicators in the world's other industrial power houses for which reliable data are availalbe, which leaves out China.

Key Observations from the EU Data:

• Germany dominates the list with the highest number of companies (227), the highest total sales (€1.88 trillion), and the highest total R&D spending (€118.6 billion).
• Denmark has the highest R&D spending per employee (~€44,792), driven largely by high-intensity pharmaceutical companies like Novo Nordisk.
• Romania shows a very high R&D per employee figure, but this is based on a single data point (Bitdefender Holding B.V.), which is a software security company with high R&D intensity relative to its size.
• France ranks second in total sales and R&D spending, maintaining a strong R&D per employee ratio of €18,740.
• Sweden and Finland also show strong innovation metrics, with R&D per employee figures exceeding €23,000 and €25,000 respectively.

Note: The "Grand Total" row represents the sum/average of the EU member states listed in the file. Companies with missing employee data were excluded from the denominator of the "per employee" calculation to ensure accuracy.

The Educational Shield: Navigating Truth in a Post-Fact World

Introduction

In the modern era, we are often told we live in a "post-fact" world—a landscape where emotion, repetition, and tribalism frequently override empirical evidence. What to do? The words of the philosopher Bertrand Russel come to mind in his message to future generations (1959): "When you are studying any matter, or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only: "What are the facts, and what is the  truth that the facts bear out?" Never let yourself be diverted, either by what you wish to believe, or by what you think could have beneficial social effects, if it were believed." 

He insisted in his message to future generations to make a second point: "The moral thing I should wish to say to them is very simple. I should say: Love is wise, hatred  is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other. We have to learn to put up with the fact, that some people say things that we don't like. We can only live together in that way. And if we are to live together and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance, which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet. More about this second point in another article.

Such is the reputation for hate speech, lying and misrepresenting facts of the current (and maybe last) President of the USA, Donald Trump, that you wonder why he would bother with facts at all. 

The Economist cover 23 Jan: deserved ridicule

Due to my training as economic historian, what I found most upsetting in his speech at Davos the 21st of January, were these grains of truth in some of the economic statistics he presented, not his preposterous misrepresentation of history on Greenland, nor his mental decline. 

The Nazi Minister of Propoganda, Josef Goebbels called this the "principle of plausibility" or selective truth-telling, involved constructing arguments from credible snippets or verifiable facts drawn from diverse sources, then embedding them within broader narratives of deception. By anchoring lies to isolated truths—like accurate economic data or historical events—propagandists created an "illusion of veracity," exploiting people's tendency to generalize trust from partial accuracy. Even only 10% or 20% of true statement is enough to create the illusion of veracity. In combination with the effect of repeating lies long enough so that they become accepted as facts (e.g. the 2020 election being stolen). The true statements, however, should never be more than 50% in order to raise suspicion and invite further scrutiny (Tella et al., 2011).

Here we used Gemini 3.0 Deep research feature on a transcript of his speech to identify the facts in his speech, which on the whole was a bombastic misrepresentation of his own achievements.