WTF? audiobook

Reading the book, I found these parts particularly useful:Tips for developing technology- Page 9: People, who use sites such as Amazon, Google or Facebook, participate in the development of software. In other words, users help out testing technology and giving feedback.- Page 36: Quote by Reid Hoffman: In Washington, you assume that every year things cost more and do less. In Silicon Valley, everyone expects products to cost less every year and do more.- Page 42: The Twitter symbols "@", "retweet" and "hashtags" were created by users and later adopted by Twitter.- Page 116: A modern organization seeks to have high alignment and high autonomy. Everyone knows what the goal is, and people are empowered to find their own ways of reaching the goal.- Page 124: Often, when technology is first deployed, it amplifies the worst features of the old way of doing business. Only gradually do individuals and organizations realize, through a cascading network of innovations, how to put new technology to work.- Page 145: When building digital government services, start with needs - user needs, not government needs. Make it simple and open.- Page 156, 161 and 163: The fitness function of Google's search quality team has always been relevance. Is this what the searcher wants to find? Choose the fitness function of your algorithm, and they will shape your company.- Page 297: The open source pioneers of Linux and the Internet has shown us that sharing knowledge beats hoarding knowledge.- Pages 352 and 355: Work on stuff that matters and focus on creating more value than you capture.- Page 352: The time you spend thinking about your values will help you do better work.Tips on public funding as well as regulation of innovation and education- Page 132: Larry Page and Sergey Brin's research project at Stanford, which led to Google, was funded by the National Science Foundation's digital library program. The market value of Google is greater than the total amount of taxpayer dollars spent on the National Science Foundation since it was founded in 1952.- Page 179: Regulators should consider the possible harms to the people whose data is being collected, and work to eliminate those harms, rather than limiting the collection of data itself.- Page 189: Companies like Uber, Lyft and Airbnb should open up more data to academics as well as to regulators trying to understand the impact of on-demand transportation on cities.- Page 216: By requiring social media sites to add truth signals to the news feed algorithm, the algorithm will find reasonable doubt and thereby help people get to facts quicker.- Page 246 and 250: In the USA, the share of GDP going to wages has fallen from 54% in 1970 to 44% in 2013, while the share going to corporate profits went from 4% to 11%. According to billionaire capitalist and technology investor Nick Hanauer, workers have been screwed so long that they can no longer afford to be customers.- Page 252: The single biggest unexplored reason for long-term slower growth is that the financial system has stopped serving the real economy and now serves mainly itself. The financial industry employs 4% of Americans but takes in more than 25% of all corporate profits - down from a 2007 peak of nearly 40%.- Page 252: People, who are born in 1980, are far less likely to be better off financially than people born in 1940.- Page 266: In 2014, Walmart raised its minimum wage to USD 10 per hour and invested in employee training and career paths. This improved customer satisfaction, employee retention and sales.- Page 268: We could give tax credits for unpaid work.- Page 271: Only 15% of the money flowing from financial institutions makes its way into business investment, i.e. into the real economy. The remaining 85% move around a closed financial loop via the buying and selling of real estate, stocks and bonds. This great money river is accessible only to a small part of the population.- Page 282: Ordinary people can no longer afford to live in San Francisco. To change that, government needs to put a limit on the tax deductability of mortgage interest and increase the number of houses being built per year.- Page 298: For the first time in generations, young people in modern developed economies are worse off than their parents.- Page 305: Universal basic income appeals to Conservatives as a way of simplifying the rules of the welfare state - thereby saving money as well as reducing bureaucracy and inefficiency.- Page 340: There is no joy in the current education system. It is full of canned solutions to be memorized. Instead, it needs to be a vast collection of problems to be solved.- Page 341: The combination of learning by doing, social sharing, and on demand expertise is central to how people - especially young people - learn today. For example, people learn through YouTube about how to cook various dishes. Just in time learning.Other interesting research findings:- Page 28: In 1992, there were about 200 websites worldwide.- Page 200: 66% of Americans get their news content through social media, 44% of them from Facebook alone.- Page 211: A fake story typically provides no sources.- Page 334: Increasingly, technologies empower workers, help find their strengths and match them with opportunity.- Page 338: In the 1970s, a computer wasn't very useful, unless you learned how to program. Today, few people, who own a smartphone, know how to program.- Page 346: Love of learning may be more important than specific skills that will soon be out of date.

Tim O’Reilly, who I admit to having no awareness of prior to buying this book, has obviously had a front row seat at the birth and development of the digital economy. And he’s either a prolific note taker or has a large research staff.However it came into being, this is a thorough, if not exhaustive, review of the history of digital. At 448 pages, it is quite literally a tome of a book. And while the author is clearly a competent documentarian, I wouldn’t call it a quick read. I would have accepted his references with less supporting documentation but engineers, admittedly, may be more demanding on that front.For me, the book is really two books. The first book is all about the history of Silicon Valley and its creations. When he noted “…the genius of TCP/IP” I considered putting the book down, as I don’t have a clue what that is and don’t really have any interest in learning as long as my Mac and Kindle work.The Internet has also trained me in the value of “chapter learning.” There is a lot I don’t need to know because if and when I do I can turn to Google and YouTube. But I slogged through and it was undoubtedly good to get more informed. (We’re all a little lazy on that front today.)The second book—the one about the metaphorical Silicon Valley’s place in the word—was pure gold. In this book the author takes an inquisitive scalpel to the frustrating world we now live in and, explains it, isolates some of the root causes, and offers some prescriptions.While I am not a techie, I am a mathematician and philosopher of sorts and was fully engaged by “Part III: A World Ruled by Algorithms.” Algorithms drive the digital world but are little understood by the people who use its services. An algorithm is a recursive computation that provides, particularly when used in groups, informed answers to problems like how to rank data or answer a search. A computation, however, is not a calculation in the way that 2+2=4 is; least of all when context is factored in. Algorithms will give you an answer but not necessarily “truth.” That, more often than not, is a matter of perspective and your personal standard of precognitive conclusion.Which is precisely why “fake news” will be impossible to ultimately prevent. Even Facebook’s vision of communities won’t help. It is community that is the problem to begin with. In the end, the news coming from the “other community” is all fake because, by definition, it is not substantiated if we are unwilling to accept that it is.Algorithmic bias, I believe, is the biggest challenge our society and our economy faces at the moment. I dare say it is more immediate than climate change for the simple reason that the Internet has become integrated with our economy, our politics, and our culture to such a degree that if it fails our world will come tumbling down.And it will fail, I believe, because of algorithmic bias, which will undermine trust in the Internet, or, more precisely, the Internet gatekeepers. Trust is pivotal to the Internet ecosystem and the gatekeepers, to date, have protected it with skill and determination.The author actually lays out the argument quite well when he notes that traffic tickets handed out by intersection cameras are quite “fairly” distributed. Who can argue with the time-stamped image? And he’s right, of course. But what if the cameras are only installed in certain neighborhoods and not installed in certain other neighborhoods? The problem is not the algorithm per se, it is its application. The author correctly notes, “The characteristics of the training data are much more important to the result than the algorithm.” Bingo. And that will be an impossible problem to fix to everyone’s satisfaction. (Compromise is not exactly the ideal of the day.)And the courts, I predict, won’t help. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 exempted ISP’s from all copyright laws because they are, theoretically “neutral.” This protection, O’Reilly argues, is both warranted and critical. The warranted argument is moot, however, because ISPs will eventually lose that protection in the courts. Semantics are a double-edged sword in our legal system. Our legal system turns on semantics and the distinction between a “neutral platform” and a content provider will ultimate be erased once the mobs outside of SV turn on it.The author’s solution to algorithmic bias is to double down—install more and more robust algorithms that are measured by the right results. (Google’s quest for “relevance” won’t do it.) And that will help. It will not, however, erase a problem that people are only now even becoming aware of. And the very psychological attributes that allow people to be hoodwinked also work in reverse. Once the tipping point is reached, convincing them that you now tell the truth is next to impossible.In the end I couldn’t agree more with O’Reilly that the real problem we face today is the master algorithm of serving the shareholder. “It’s essential to get beyond the idea that the only goal of business is to make money for its shareholders.” As a former CEO myself, he is absolutely right; we have hollowed out our economy and our souls and given it all to management and their investors, who now enjoy a very outsized portion of our miraculous economic output. And we are destroying our economic future in the process.“People have a deep hunger for idealism,” O’Reilly notes. And I agree. We can survive, or, if we don’t survive in the short term, dig our way out. Our resilience is legendary.I further agree with O’Reilly that the concerns about the robots putting us out of work are overstated. There will always be plenty to do.Fixing algorithmic bias, however, will be painful. Some wealth will be lost. Some power will have to be redistributed. It won’t happen without a battle. Bravo to Tim O’Reilly, however, for putting this very important topic on the table for discussion.This will, I believe, prove to be a seminal book on a topic of truly epic importance.

Tim O'Reilly is an innovator that I have followed off and on since I bought my first computer (an Osborne). One might call him the father of the DIY revolution. Early in computers O'Reilly began publishing a series of books on computing especially how to build and program them. For the active hobbyist they were an invaluable resource.This book is a bit more ambitious than his early work. It is a substantive discussion of the risks and rewards of our advancing technology. He starts the book by describing the uses of maps. He goes on to argue that maps both give us a way to go and help us to see, in perspective of where we are.Where I have a disagreement with O'Reilly is in his sections on Economics. Like many people who quote Adam Smith he seems not to have considered some important points. He seems to have misread an important body of work generally called the Theory of the Firm. The writers in that area start with Ronald Coase. But over a period of a couple of decades the theory developed to make a distinction between shareholders, managers and workers. One of the most important papers in this area (By Anthony Downs) postulated that when a firm moves from sole ownership to a corporate structure incentives begin to change - managers tend to appropriate a good part of surplus which sole owners might not. He has a pretty good history of how compensation in corporate structures began to change as more and more compensation came in stock options. And he, using the map metaphor, offers some interesting ideas about how compensation structures could change in the future.He also has, in my opinion, an overly broad trust in government's role in forming society and in solving problems. Oddly he quotes a British source who commented that government should do only what it could do. He cites a series of projects called Code for America which created as one example a college search site - which duplicated in a totally inadequate manner projects that were underway in the private sector.Finally he grapples with the work of Robert Gordon the economist who wrote a provocative paper a couple of years ago arguing that the new normal for economic growth was well below what most would expect. He quotes Thomas Piketty - had I been consulted I would have urged him to think a bit more widely. Even with the nonsensical discussion of economics this is still one of the most provocative books I have read in the last couple of years. Perhaps the most interesting issues he presents are a theories of thought experiments to get us to begin to think about what all these amazing technologies could lead to. He makes the bold expression that technology does not diminish jobs but it does destroy professions.One of the most interesting speculations I came away with was the difference between knowledge and habits of the mind. The needs of society over time is to think creatively about how we educate our young people and people who are displaced as technology continues to advance.O'Reilly is an optimist. At one point after WWI and the General Theory - Keynes wrote a speculative piece on leisure - how the advancing technologies (then) would create a condition where people no longer needed to work. At the end of the book he looks at a series of projects that people have undertaken to respond to these new challenges. The intent of this book is to get us who are living through these changes to think differently about types of differing maps we could use to get us through. While I think O'Reilly is a bit off on his thinking about economics and his trust in government, the rest of the book is a genuine contribution to considering the future.

I really didn't know what to expect with this book. Got it because I've used O'Reilly books since the very beginning of my career, and thought the title "What's the future.." might be interesting.In many ways it covered more topics than almost any other book I've read, talking about specific technologies, government, people, skills you should learn, economics, etc. It jumped around a lot, referencing an idea mentioned before to combine it with the new topic. However, I can't imagine another way you could cover such a broad topic of "the future".I wouldn't necessarily say I agree with everything O'Reilly says, but I loved his approach to describing things. I thought sometimes he was decently precise about something we should do/think about, and other times it felt a bit more.. aspirational. Things like "We should think about other people more" or such jazz.All around, and acknowledging that it wasn't "perfect", I enjoyed that book more than almost any other non-fiction book I've read in the past, and I absolutely felt disappointed to realize it was over. I went & followed O'Reilly on all social media I could find, and wanted to rate this book immediately. All together well worth my time.

"As maravilhas da primeira revolução industrial foram criadas por trabalhadores em parceria com novos tipos de máquinas. Será que poderíamos construir arranha-céus, voar pelos ares ou alimentar sete mil milhões de pessoas sem máquinas que nos tornam mais fortes, mais rápidos e mais poderosos? O mesmo acontece com a tecnologia actual. Se for utilizada de forma adequada, deverá permitir-nos fazer coisas que eram anteriormente impossíveis.Para tornar a economia do futuro melhor do que a do presente, é necessário encontrar novas formas de potenciar os trabalhadores, dando-lhes novas competências e acesso a novas oportunidades. À medida que automatizamos algo que os seres humanos costumavam fazer como poderemos potenciá-los para que possam fazer algo que tenha um novo valor?"Páginas 116 e 117

O’Reilly impressed me with his solid analysis of where technology is leading us and assured us that we have a choice in shaping our future. He first coined the phrase’ Open source hardware’. His firm first coined ‘big data’. WTF technology is the kind of amazing technology that we would say ‘Gosh’ the first time we see it, but then seamlessly incorporate into our lifestyle, such as GPS, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Uber. I learnt many things from him:1. Software trumps hardware; open source trumps proprietary; network trumps single computers, decentralised trumps centralised. The best apps get better by harnessing user data to improve, like Google never-ending battle with SEO optimisation to give useful search results. The next wave will be apps that harness ubiquitous sensors to improve themselves. Data is king. 2. To look at the future, see what the rich are doing (as they will become widespread in future, like air travel), and look at the fringe of innovation. Rate of growth acceleration is much more important than growth itself. 3. From Christensen: when something becomes commoditised, an adjacent thing usually becomes valuable.4. Airbnb and Uber gets so big because they generate useful services from idle real estate and cars. Surge pricing helps to increase supply of cars in rush hour. They lose money at first (ok Uber is still losing money) but gradually make money once they become main stream. Paradoxically should Uber owns its own self driving car, it may have the same problem as conventional taxis by losing the flexibility of car supply. 5. Truly disruptive services create new markets and do not take over old markets. 6. Platforms are the way of the future, and trump apps. Successful companies create a thick marketplace with lots of users. Platforms must be careful not to extract too much value from the market otherwise the market will slowly disappear as users dwindle. 7. Governments can become platforms and let the public improve on its services (e.g. Code for America). Policy implementation must have the end user in mind. 8. Algorithms are useful but human inputs are necessary to direct and feed proper big data to them. Companies are now using apps to have low wage workers on demand. This dehumanize workers and make them unable to plan their lives. Uber however let drivers choose when to work, and is empowering. 9. Fake news are almost impossible to detect in the age of instant media. Algorithms can help a bit. Does it have any sources? Those sources authoritative? Multiple independent accounts? Articles mathematically sound? To avoid overwork, AIs can focus on only news that gain momentum. 10. Systems generate results that they are designed to give. Financialization of the market is going to cause more inequality, societal upheaval, destruction of the middle class, climate change and return to the dark ages. Unless, that is, we do something about it. Raising the minimum wage, removing income tax, increasing capital tax and giving a universal basic income will help. 11. We will never run out of jobs. AI will augment human beings. Work on stuff that matters, not just to do something to IPO and then cash out. Boy this book is so good!

This book surprised me. I was expecting the typical "futurist" book with semi-interesting guesses as to what was coming in the near future. This book wasn't like that at all. Instead, it provided an excellent overview of the past 40 years in technology, how that has led to where we are today, and mindset shifts we need for looking into the future. It was more about reshaping your thinking to prepare for what might come than to predict specific technologies or potential outcomes.This book was similar to other Books of Titans books - The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly and Thank You For Being Late by Thomas Friedman - but of the three, I'd recommend this one for depth and insight.Excellent book. I love the ones that catch me by surprise.

A true thinker and innovator. Highly recommended for everyone; from policy makers, regulators to entrepreneurs and simple men on the streets. It started off really dry, something developers would find interesting to read but it gets better and better. There are suggestions on how the government can

WTF? by Tim O'Reilly takes in the sweeping changes wrought by the advent of computing and the internet and puts the future in perspective. O'Reilly's ideas have major implications for everything from deciding on your career path and what skills to develop, to making sense of the headlines and choosing who to vote for. The mental models outlined in this book are maps that will help you search the present for clues to the future.

** spoiler alert ** Review + personal highlights:Review:- Interesting insights and metaphores. E.g. how the financial market has become an end in itself, and more than 50% of all trades are done by systems. It's an example of a hybrid global brain system: partly AI's, partly humans. - Sometimes the book has a strong autobiography vibe (And then in 1990 I predicted this and that to happen. And ofcourse it turned out to be true.) - Very U.S. centered book. Too much imo, especially in an age of globalization. - Highly idealogical, but also down to earth. Good examples, inspiring quotes. Overall I'm very glad to have read WTF?. ----------Personal highlights:• Fakenews is the 'disgusting' face of the economical model which is driving the internet.• AI, Self-driving cars, increasing inequality, on-demand services: they tell us that there are massive changes coming in work, economie, and business.• Technology, demography, globalization, urbanization will be the four biggest changers.• How to create more value than to capture?• Edwin Schlossberg: “The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think” • The Global Brain (incl. IoT, AI), is getting a body and starts to move (robotics, self driving cars, etc.)• In the long run Uber and Lyft are competing with car ownership (together wit Tesla). Replacing material with information (digital twins bring new possibilities).• Lyft has more moral consciousness• When making sense of the future, think in terms of gravitational cores, not hard boundaries.• Networked marketplace platforms, On Demand, Managed by Algorithm, Augmented Workers, • When the best leader leads, the people will say 'We did it ourselves' - Lao-tzu• Networks often turn out to be two-sided marketplaces in which one party pays for access to info or attention of the other party.• Due to the network effect and the 'winner-takes-all' principle", open markets dissapear and one privately run market has monopoly (amazon, facebook, google search).• Every firm builds two intertwined systems: one that serves the user, and one that helps understanding how the user uses the system.• Programmers become managers of intelligent programs (the narrow AI's/microservices become the workers)• David Brin argues we should have two way transparancy in a surveillance society.• The notion of the creep-factor should be central in the future of privacy-regulation. p. 177• John Rawl's 'Veil of Ignorance': The best rules for a political or economic order are those that would be chosen by people who had no prior knowledge of their place in that order. p. 181• The algorithm is the new shift boss. What is the fitness function driving the algorithm? p. 197• WSJ: Blue Feed / Red Feed: what do Hillary sup see in Facebook and what do Trump sup see in Facebook?• Processes of intellectual discovery are all about arguments between different (and sometimes stylized) positions. p. 223• Regarding stock prices: We should add 'fake growth' to 'fake news' in our vocabulary. p. 243• The market has become an end instead of a means to an end and it leads amazon, google, etc.• Inequality feeds on itself since the market becomes more optimized for those who can spend. p. 264• Enjoying a meal with a loved one is not something machines can make more efficient. p. 308• Even in a world where every need is met, there will still be a world of wants. p. 313• Food is blended with ideas to make it more valuable. p. 314• We know what the good life looks like. We have the resources to provide it to everyone. Why have we constructed an economy that makes it so difficult to achieve? p. 318• Ignorance, not knowledge drives science. p. 339• On-demand education? p. 343• Money is like gas in a car: important to get around, but not the goal or even the journey. p. 351• Scenario planning, two key vectors. • Customer obsession is the key to the WTF of Delight Future.• 'We have a job to do' is radically different than 'we need jobs'

O'Reilly intentionally exploits "WTF?" as a euphemism. When we're confronted with something new and unknown, we're tempted to throw up our hands in frustration, "WTF?!"The author encourages us, rather, to throw up our hands in excitement and consider whether what we're experiencing the future invading the present. He likes to quote William Gibson: "The future is already here -- it's just not evenly distributed." And then he makes the case throughout.O'Reilly is optimistic about the future. He's an observer of current trends, identifying where the future has already invaded the present, and extrapolating to determine what the future may look like after it's evenly distributed. He uses Google, Uber, Lyft, and Amazon as case studies throughout, and looks in the rear-view mirror enough to gain insights for the future.This book is really good and very much worth the read. I would have given it five stars, except that it could have been shorter. The first few chapters were slow, and O'Reilly perhaps spends a little too much time on history. Perhaps like Mark Twain, he didn't have time to write a short book, so he wrote a long one instead. Still highly recommended.

It's a really well written overview from the last 40 years of tech development, in a fun mix of personal stories and behind the scenes peeks. While reviewing the last you end up getting a better understanding of how should the current technologies evolve, while getting a few cool mental models to think about the future. This was the main hook for me, mental models and stories instead of tech fortune telling.

This book should be on every community, business and political leader's read list. There are a lot of challenges coming at US society - and it's ability to deal with them successfully and inclusively is dependent on the decisions we make over the next few years. Making good decisions about _how_ we use technology and _how_ the US educates and prepares it's population (with education, safety net frameworks to make job transitions easier for those without reserves) is going to be crucial. Tim O'Reilly has been a tech thought leader for thirty years. Read this book to get the roadmap of the challenges that he sees coming.

This is an interesting read. This is the first book I've read by Tim O'Reilly though I have benefited from some of the texts his company sells. If you're interested in a positive view of the developments today in big data, artificial intelligence and robotics and how they could shape our future then this is a must read for you.