Kevin Kelly

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pages: 611 words: 188,732

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

Fabrice Florin: Stewart Brand recognized very early on the importance of computers for information sharing, and so very early on he wanted to be able to serve his community with the right tools that would allow people to communicate and share ideas effectively. Kevin Kelly: Whether it was ever articulated or not, what Whole Earth was doing was trying to make it work in terms of governance, best practices, cultural nudges, pricing… Howard Rheingold: Part of it was not trying to shape it, enabling the shape to emerge. Letting the people there make whatever it was. Kevin Kelly: One of the design principles for The Well was to try to get as close to free as we could get. The idea was to see how cheap can we possibly make this, cheap for the user. Stewart Brand: I priced it to be very inviting. Kevin Kelly: We would bring the power to the people by having really cheap telecommunications.

We changed the name in the middle of its life. Jane Metcalfe: We sent a copy to Kevin Kelly. Louis Rossetto: We had a piece on Anthony Burgess about how word processing affects writing. And a piece on Nicholson Baker, who was a word worker, a novelist. This is like the seed for everything that came out ultimately in Wired. Kevin Kelly: And I thought, Wow, this is interesting! So I reviewed it for Whole Earth. I called it “the least boring computer magazine there was.” Louis Rossetto: He had written this gracious thing. And so we said, “We want to go meet Kevin Kelly.” And so we went to visit him in his chaotic office. He had billions of books all over the place.

But it turned out there was a ten-year hiatus between when I did that article and when Hackers came out, so the lifetimes that I experienced around computers made it seem always very slow and kind of boring and frustrating. Kevin Kelly: For me there was this new interest in this culture that was emerging around the programmers. I was talking to Stewart about the fact that there were three generations of hackers and they hadn’t met—they themselves didn’t know about each other. Stewart Brand: And Kevin said, “What if we can get those three generations together?” Kevin Kelly: And the one genius of Stewart’s is that he will often take an idea and, unlike me, he’ll actually try and do something about it.


pages: 339 words: 57,031

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, book value, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Californian Ideology, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War

Rather, a close look at Wired’s first and most influential five years suggests that the magazine’s vision of the digital horizon emerged in large part from its intellectual and interpersonal affiliations with Kevin Kelly and the Whole Wired [ 209 ] Earth network and, through them, from the New Communalist embrace of the politics of consciousness.4 Although Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe founded Wired, and although Rossetto’s libertarian politics exerted a substantial influence on the magazine, Rossetto and Metcalfe also drew heavily for funds and, later, for subjects and writers, on the Whole Earth world. In 1992, while Kevin Kelly was finishing up Out of Control, Rossetto hired him to serve as executive editor of the magazine.

In the 1990s both computer networks such as the Internet and the social networks of the Whole Earth community became emblems of what many claimed at the time was a new economic and political world. Thanks in large part to the example of the Global Business Network and to the writings of Kevin Kelly and Peter Schwartz, as well as to the work of Wired magazine as a whole, many began to imagine that the New Communalist dream of a nonhierarchical, interpersonally intimate society was on the threshold of coming true. Despite their libertarian orientation, the writings of Esther Dyson, John Perry Barlow, and Kevin Kelly in this period fairly ache with a longing to return to an egalitarian world. For these writers and, due to their influence, for many others, the early public Internet seemed poised to model and help bring into being a world in which each individual could act in his or her own interest and at the same time produce a unified social sphere, a world in which we were “all one.”

As he coordinated those collaborations, Brand quickly learned to speak the contact languages developing around him. In this way, he and others like him, including most prominently Kevin Kelly and the writers of Wired, gave voice to an ongoing integration of ideas and practices that had first appeared in the New Communalist and hightechnology research worlds. Having helped that synthesis to emerge in interpersonal collaboration among multiple communities, and having helped link it to new computing technologies, Brand, and later Kevin Kelly, Peter Schwartz, and others, found themselves in a unique position to “report” the synthesis as “news” to the rest of the world.


pages: 194 words: 49,310

Clock of the Long Now by Stewart Brand

Albert Einstein, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Eratosthenes, Extropian, fault tolerance, George Santayana, Herman Kahn, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, low earth orbit, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, nuclear winter, pensions crisis, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

Manifestations of the overall project could range from fortune cookies to theme parks. For now, we will build an astonishing Clock and a unique Library and see what develops from there. Who is “we”? The Long Now Foundation was established in 1996 to foster long-term responsibility. The founding board is Daniel Hillis (co-chair), Stewart Brand (co-chair), Kevin Kelly, Douglas Carlston, Peter Schwartz, Brian Eno, Paul Saffo, Mitchell Kapor, and Esther Dyson. Hillis created Thinking Machines Inc. and its supercomputer, the Connection Machine, and is now a Fellow at Disney. Brand began the Whole Earth Catalog and co-founded Global Business Network. Kelly is executive editor of Wired magazine and author of Out of Control.

To caricature each of their stances: Judaism says, “The Messiah is going to come, and that’s the end of history”; Christianity says, “The Messiah is going to come back, and that’s the end of history”; Islam says, “The Messiah came; history is irrelevant.” One Sunday morning at a Long Now Foundation board retreat on Clock/Library design, Kevin Kelly, a devout Christian, spoke up: “I go to church, but why am I here and not in church? It’s because I feel that the Christian church denies the future. From year one, they have been waiting for the second coming. I think we need a story that includes the future.” CLOCK/LIBRARY “8. Provide a description of what a visitor to the clock, library, etc. would see and experience.”

It would show, in briskly intuitive fashion only: the year date (Gregorian calendar, easily convertible to anything else), the position of the Sun (hence the approximate time of day), the Moon’s position and phase, the local rising and setting times of the Sun and Moon, and the locally visible star field, which rotates daily, shifts with the yearly seasonal cycle, and adjusts very gradually to the 25,784-year cycle of the precession of the equinoxes. Kevin Kelly observed that such a display would be a return to origins: “From the very beginning clocks were simulacra. The first clocks were models of the heavens—Sun and Moon rotating overhead. Later clockmakers modeled a universe of seasons and time and birth and death, displayed as marching jacks and crowing cocks.


pages: 509 words: 132,327

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, connected car, domain-specific language, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Extropian, full employment, game design, global village, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kubernetes, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snow Crash, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, The Hackers Conference, Timothy McVeigh, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, Zimmermann PGP

Public domain. Jaron Lanier. Photo: Kevin Kelly. VPL suits and gloves. Photo: Kevin Kelly. Full-body VPL suit. Photo: Kevin Kelly. VPL diagram. Photo: Kevin Kelly. Photo of VR machine at Whole Earth Institute’s Cyberthon, Mondo 2000. Courtesy Ken Goffman. Cyberspace illustration, Mondo 2000. Courtesy Ken Goffman. Cybersex illustration, Mondo 2000. Courtesy Ken Goffman. R.U. a Cyberpunk? Mondo 2000, 1993, Nr 10, p. 30. Courtesy Ken Goffman. Photo of John Perry Barlow. Mondo 2000. Courtesy Ken Goffman. John Gilmore. Photo: Kevin Kelly. Timothy C. May. Photo: Kevin Kelly. May, Gilmore, and Hughes.

Entire communities functioned like whole systems, many in the countercultural avant-garde came to understand: there was a different way of seeing things, a circular way, where everything was connected, connected by feedback, kept in balance, in touch with the environment, even with animals and plants and rocks, in unity, as one single whole, one planet, shrunk into a village by communication technology. A veritable cult emerged. Seeing communities as self-regulating feedback systems was liberating, driven by a theory of machines that was quite literally “out of control,” in the memorable phrase of the founding editor of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly.1 The cybernetic myth had a major cultural impact. Wiener’s work, in its countercultural and highly symbolic reading, forms one of the oldest and deepest roots of that firm belief in technical solutions that would later come to characterize the culture of Silicon Valley. One of the earliest and most eminent writers roused by cybernetics was L.

On the one hand, cybernetic ideas and terms were spectacularly successful and shaped other fields: control engineering, artificial intelligence, even game theory. On the other hand, cybernetics as a science entered a creeping demise, with therapists and sociologists increasingly filling the rolls at the American Society for Cybernetics. Kevin Kelly, the Wired magazine editor, later observed that “by the late 1970s, cybernetics had died of dry rot.”25 Yet, to the surprise of the remaining founders, cybernetics lived on—not in Boston’s scientific research labs, but in California’s counterculture communes. The rising New Age movement found the new discipline’s mystic side appealing.


pages: 573 words: 142,376

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

Then he said he needed to speak to his financial adviser. At midnight he called Brockman back and said he hadn’t been able to find him, adding that he was going to think about it overnight and throw the I Ching. Brockman couldn’t tell whether he was joking or not. In the morning Brand called back and said he would accept. * * * Kevin Kelly was a high schooler in a suburban town in New Jersey when his mother alerted him to the Whole Earth Catalog, having read a story about it in Time and figured it might be something he would be interested in. It would take Kelly another year to actually find a copy in a bookstore in Woodstock. Like many others of his generation who had found the Whole Earth Catalog, it changed his life.

(Sales of the UK edition were almost nonexistent.) It was left to Paul Hawken, the Point Foundation’s financial officer, to break the news to the Review editors that their publication would be folded into the CoEvolution Quarterly to create the newly combined publication that Art Kleiner had named the Whole Earth Review. Kevin Kelly, who was editing the Quarterly, was put in charge of editing the two publications together into a strange mixture that pleased neither audience. The coup de grâce, however, was delivered by Richard Dalton, who had served as editor of the first two issues of the Review and then handed the job off to Kleiner.

Although the first issue of the combined Whole Earth Review was titled “Computers as Poison,” Brand was outwardly sanguine: “Computers suppress our animal presence,” he told an SF Focus interviewer. “When you communicate through a computer, you communicate like an angel.”[23] Just a few years later he would realize how naive he had been. * * * Shortly after he arrived in Sausalito, Kevin Kelly read Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, a book that portrayed three generations of “white hat” computer hackers (the good guys) ranging from the young programmers at MIT’s AI Lab decades earlier, through the Homebrew Computer Club, to the then new world of video game design.


pages: 361 words: 81,068

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

., p. 68. 17 Cassidy, Dot.Con, p. 63. 18 Kaplan, The Silicon Boys and Their Valley of Dreams, p. 243. 19 Clark, Netscape Time, p. 261. 20 Ibid., p. 251. 21 Ibid., p. 249. 22 Ibid., p. 119. 23 Ibid., p. 67. 24 Thomson Venture Economics, special tabulations, June 2003. 25 Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Random House, 1996). 26 Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy (New York: Penguin, 1997). 27 Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Viking, 2010). 28 Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy, p. 156. 29 Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook, The Winner-Take-All Society: How More and More Americans Compete for Ever Fewer and Bigger Prizes, Encouraging Economic Waste, Income Inequality, and an Impoverished Cultural Life (New York: Free Press, 1995). 30 Ibid., p. 47. 31 Ibid., p. 48. 32 “The Greatest Defunct Web Sites and Dotcom Disasters,” CNET, June 5, 2008. 33 Cassidy, Dot.con, pp. 242–45. 34 Stone, The Everything Store, p. 48. 35 Ibid. 36 Fred Wilson, “Platform Monopolities,” AVC.com, July 22, 2014. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Matthew Yglesias, “The Prophet of No Profit,” Slate, January 30, 2014. 40 Stone, The Everything Store, pp. 181–82. 41 Ibid., p. 173. 42 Jeff Bercovici, “Amazon Vs.

“It has four very powerful qualities that will guarantee its ultimate triumph,” Negroponte promised about this revolution. It would be “decentralizing, globalizing, harmonizing and empowering.”25 One of the most frequently quoted books about the Internet economy published in the wake of the August 1995 IPO was Kevin Kelly’s New Rules for the New Economy.26 Kelly’s economic manifesto, which came out as a series of articles he wrote as the founding executive editor for Wired magazine, became an appropriately magical handbook for startup entrepreneurs in the surreal dot-com era. The personally very gracious and well-meaning Kelly, one of the founders of the countercultural WELL BBS and a born-again Christian techno-mystic who would later write a book about how technology has a mind of its own,27 stoked the already irrational exuberance of the late nineties with a new economy manifesto that today reads like a parody of digital utopianism.

In 1995, two American economists published a less hyped but much more prescient book about the depressingly old rules of our new economy. In The Winner-Take-All Society,29 Robert Frank and Philip Cook argue that the defining feature of late-twentieth-century global capitalism was a growing financial chasm between a narrow elite and the rest of society. Rather than Kevin Kelly’s “thousand points of wealth,” Frank and Cook found that wealth in the winner-take-all society actually had very few points. They agreed with Tom Perkins about the enormous power and influence of this new elite. But in contrast with Perkins, Frank, and Cook—whose observations about this emerging plutocracy are supported by the later research of many distinguished economists, including Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Reich, and Thomas Piketty—didn’t celebrate this one percent, trickle-down economy.


pages: 606 words: 157,120

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

,” ScienceDaily, February 28, 2007, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/070218140157.htm. 265 “the more we look for patterns”: ibid. 265 “exhaustive data, the Google way of doing science”: quoted in Ethan Zuckmerman, “Kevin Kelly on Context for the Quantified Self,” My Heart’s in Accra, May 29, 2011, http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2011/05/29/kevin-kelly-on-context-for-the-quantified-self. 266 “a serious shift in our image”: David Weinberger, Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now that the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 35.

To assume that we can distill life-changing lessons from it and then apply them in completely different fields seems arrogant to say the least. Worst of all, Wikipedia is itself subject to many myths, which might result in Wikipedia-inspired solutions that misrepresent its spirit. “The bureaucracy of Wikipedia is relatively so small as to be invisible,” proclaims technology pundit Kevin Kelly, confessing that “much of what I believed about human nature, and the nature of knowledge, has been upended by the Wikipedia.” But what did Kelly believe before Wikipedia? Kelly writes that “everything I knew about the structure of information convinced me that knowledge would not spontaneously emerge from data, without a lot of energy and intelligence deliberately directed to transforming it.”

This view of technology as an autonomous force has its own rather long intellectual pedigree; in 1978 Langdon Winner offered perhaps the best summary in his Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of- Control as a Theme in Political Thought. This view has been debunked hundreds of times as a lazy, unempirical approach to studying technological change, and yet it has never really left the popular discourse about technology. It has recently made a forceful appearance in Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants, and Kelly’s thought is not a bad place to observe technological defeatism up close, if only because he is a Silicon Valley maven and the first executive editor of Wired. Besides, very diverse thinkers about “the Internet”—from Tim Wu to Steven Johnson—cite Kelly’s What Technology Wants as an influence.


pages: 281 words: 71,242

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer

artificial general intelligence, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, Colonization of Mars, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, income inequality, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, PageRank, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, yellow journalism

But maybe the media is going to be a part time job”: “Chris Anderson on the Economics of ‘Free,’” Der Spiegel, July 28, 2009. “Greater technology will selfishly unleash our talents, but it will also unselfishly unleash others”: Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (Viking, 2010), 237. “The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book”: Kevin Kelly, “Scan This Book!,” New York Times Magazine, May 14, 2006. “In a curious way, the universal library becomes one very, very, very large single text”: Kelly, “Scan This Book!” “By enabling people from diverse backgrounds to easily connect and share their ideas”: Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here (PublicAffairs, 2013), 292.

Before the arrival of the new technologies, information, like the isolated scholar, was atomized. But now, information can be sorted and processed by a much larger community—that could correct mistakes, add insights, and revise conclusions. Technology enabled what H. G. Wells once called the World Brain, or what Wired editor Kevin Kelly called the hive mind. The assumption that undergirds this strain of technological thinking is that humans aren’t simply self-interested economic creatures. Linus Torvalds, the engineer who created Linux, argued, “Money is not the greatest of motivators. It’s been well established that folks do their best work when they are driven by a passion.”

It was a superhighway to a world of readers that would never dump a quarter into a newspaper box, let alone pay the hefty charge for home delivery. No direct mail campaign, no television advertising, could equal the marketing potential of the Internet. “Value is derived from plentitude [sic],” Wired editor Kevin Kelly counseled, advice that was adopted on the widest scale. This was a conscious change, but newspapers hadn’t entirely understood how they were abandoning an old tenet of their business. Media had long followed a venerable strategy that suggested that profit could be found in the bundling of products—the way Microsoft Office jammed consumers into buying Excel with Word, though they may not have had any need for a spreadsheet.


pages: 134 words: 22,616

Cool Tools in the Kitchen by Kevin Kelly, Steven Leckart

Community Supported Agriculture, crowdsourcing, Hacker Conference 1984, Kevin Kelly, new economy, Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review

Cool Tools in the Kitchen Kevin Kelly and Steven Leckart Editor Brian Jepson Copyright © 2011 Kevin Kelly and Steven Leckart 2011-10-05 First release O’Reilly books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. Online editions are also available for most titles (http://my.safaribooksonline.com). For more information, contact our corporate/institutional sales department: (800) 998-9938 or corporate@oreilly.com. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and author assume no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

A correspondent at Wired Magazine, Steven has also written for the New York Times, Men’s Health, and Men’s Journal, among other publications. CAMILLE CLOUTIER, Managing Editor Camille runs the Cool Tools website, posting items daily, maintaining software, measuring analytics, managing ads, and in general keeping the site alive. As Kevin Kelly’s personal librarian, she also oversees research, web production and ebook conversions for many of his publishing projects. KEVIN KELLY, Publisher Kevin founded Cool Tools and edited all reviews through 2006. He writes the occasional review, oversees the design and editorial direction of the website, and is working on a print book version of Cool Tools. A Senior Maverick at Wired Magazine, Kevin co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor from its inception until 1999.

Not just kitchen stuff, but all kinds of useful things. One day you’ll hear about a solar-powered flashlight. The next, a book on how to build an igloo, or the best heart rate monitor. We pride ourselves on the mix. The Cool Tools website began in 2003. However Cool Tools started even earlier, in 2000, as an email list run by Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of Wired Magazine and, prior to that, publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and its quarterly journal. The Whole Earth Catalog was a reader-written publication, with no ads, long before the web. Much of Cool Tools’ DNA stems from the passionate amateur’s spirit of the Catalog.


pages: 224 words: 64,156

You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, different worldview, digital Maoism, Douglas Hofstadter, Extropian, follow your passion, General Magic , hive mind, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Conway, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Long Term Capital Management, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, Project Xanadu, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, social graph, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

Some of the questions were silly, and others were prescient. How Politics Influences Information Technology I was part of a merry band of idealists back then. If you had dropped in on, say, me and John Perry Barlow, who would become a cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or Kevin Kelly, who would become the founding editor of Wired magazine, for lunch in the 1980s, these are the sorts of ideas we were bouncing around and arguing about. Ideals are important in the world of technology, but the mechanism by which ideals influence events is different than in other spheres of life.

You Need Culture to Even Perceive Information Technology Ever more extreme claims are routinely promoted in the new digital climate. Bits are presented as if they were alive, while humans are transient fragments. Real people must have left all those anonymous comments on blogs and video clips, but who knows where they are now, or if they are dead? The digital hive is growing at the expense of individuality. Kevin Kelly says that we don’t need authors anymore, that all the ideas of the world, all the fragments that used to be assembled into coherent books by identifiable authors, can be combined into one single, global book. Wired editor Chris Anderson proposes that science should no longer seek theories that scientists can understand, because the digital cloud will understand them better anyway.* Antihuman rhetoric is fascinating in the same way that self-destruction is fascinating: it offends us, but we cannot look away.

The printing that takes place in North Korea today, for instance, is nothing more than propaganda for a personality cult. What is important about printing presses is not the mechanism, but the authors. An impenetrable tone deafness rules Silicon Valley when it comes to the idea of authorship. This was as clear as ever when John Updike and Kevin Kelly exchanged words on the question of authorship in 2006. Kevin suggested that it was not just a good thing, but a “moral imperative” that all the world’s books would soon become effectively “one book” once they were scanned, searchable, and remixable in the universal computational cloud. Updike used the metaphor of the edges of the physical paper in a physical book to communicate the importance of enshrining the edges between individual authors.


pages: 477 words: 75,408

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism by Calum Chace

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, bread and circuses, call centre, Chris Urmson, congestion charging, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flynn Effect, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gender pay gap, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, lifelogging, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Milgram experiment, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

[cccxlii] https://edge.org/conversation/john_markoff-the-next-wave [cccxliii] http://uk.pcmag.com/robotics-automation-products/34778/news/will-a-robot-revolution-lead-to-mass-unemployment [cccxliv] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment [cccxlv] http://www.prisonexp.org/ [cccxlvi] http://fourhourworkweek.com/2014/08/29/kevin-kelly/ [cccxlvii] https://www.edge.org/conversation/kevin_kelly-the-technium [cccxlviii] http://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/165acton.html [cccxlix] http://mercatus.org/sites/default/files/Brito_BitcoinPrimer.pdf [cccl] http://www.dugcampbell.com/byzantine-generals-problem/ [cccli] http://www.economistinsights.com/technology-innovation/analysis/money-no-middleman/tab/1 [ccclii] : The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) in Northern California, The Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) and the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) in England’s Oxford and Cambridge respectively, and the Future of Life Institute (FLI) in Massachussetts.

[xcv] These are games which previous AI systems found hard to play because they involve hand-to-eye co-ordination. The system was not given instructions for how to play the games well, or even told the rules and purpose of the games: it was simply rewarded when it played well and not rewarded when it played less well. As the writer Kevin Kelly noted, “they didn't teach it how to play video games, but how to learn to play the games. This is a profound difference.”[xcvi] The system's first attempt at each game was feeble, but by playing continuously for 24 hours or so it worked out – through trial and error – the subtleties in the gameplay and scoring system, and played the games better than the best human player.

Some people believe this phenomenon of humans teaming up with computers to form centaurs is a metaphor for how we can avoid most jobs being automated by machine intelligence. The computer will take care of those aspects of the job (or task) which are routine, logical and dull, and the human will be freed up to deploy her intuition and creativity. Engineers didn’t become redundant just because computers replaced slide rules. Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine, puts it more lyrically: machines are for answers; humans are for questions.[cclxvi] The trouble is that the intuition and creativity which we humans bring to tasks and jobs is largely a matter of pattern recognition, and machines are getting better at this at an exponential rate.


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What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, c2.com, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, charter city, classic study, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer vision, cotton gin, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, George Gilder, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, life extension, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, Picturephone, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, rewilding, Richard Florida, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, silicon-based life, skeuomorphism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Vernor Vinge, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, yottabyte

Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England First published in 2010 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright © Kevin Kelly, 2010 All rights reserved LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA Kelly, Kevin, 1952- What technology wants / Kevin Kelly. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. eISBN : 978-1-101-44446-7 1. Technology’—Social aspects. 2. Technology and civilization. I. Title. T14.5.K45 2010 303.48’3—dc22 2010013915 Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 12, 28. 14 one mega-scale computing platform: Kevin Kelly. (2008) “Infoporn: Tap into the 12-Million-Teraflop Handheld Megacomputer.” Wired, 16 (7). http://www.wired.com/special_multimedia/2008/st_infoporn_1607. 14 eyes (phone and webcams) plugged in: Ibid. 14 searches at the humming rate of 14 kilohertz: comScore. (2007) “61 Billion Searches Conducted Worldwide in August.” http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2007/10/Worldwide_Searches_Reach_61_Billion. Calculation based on comScore’s figure for the number of searches performed in a month. 14 5 percent of the world’s electricity: Kevin Kelly. (2007) “How Much Power Does the Internet Consume?”

Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Chapter 1 - My Question PART ONE - ORIGINS Chapter 2 - Inventing Ourselves Chapter 3 - History of the Seventh Kingdom Chapter 4 - The Rise of Exotropy PART TWO - IMPERATIVES Chapter 5 - Deep Progress Chapter 6 - Ordained Becoming Chapter 7 - Convergence Chapter 8 - Listen to the Technology Chapter 9 - Choosing the Inevitable PART THREE - CHOICES Chapter 10 - The Unabomber Was Right Chapter 11 - Lessons of Amish Hackers Chapter 12 - Seeking Conviviality PART FOUR - DIRECTIONS Chapter 13 - Technology’s Trajectories Chapter 14 - Playing the Infinite Game Acknowledgements Annotated Reading List Source Notes Index ALSO BY KEVIN KELLY Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World Asia Grace VIKING Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.


pages: 411 words: 80,925

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live by Rachel Botsman, Roo Rogers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, Community Supported Agriculture, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global village, hedonic treadmill, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, information retrieval, intentional community, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Simon Kuznets, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, South of Market, San Francisco, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, web of trust, women in the workforce, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Carol Kaesuk Yoon, “Bacteria Seen to Evolve in Spurts,” New York Times (June 1996), www.nytimes.com/1996/06/25/science/bacteria-seen-to-evolve-in-spurts.html. 2. Arnold Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England: Popular Addresses, Notes and Other Fragments (London, 1884). 3. Kevin Kelly, “Kevin Kelly on the Next 5,000 Days of the Web,” video on Ted.com (July 2008), www.ted.com/index.php/talks/kevin_kelly_on_the_next_5_000_days_of_the_web.html. 4. Clifford Stroll, “Why the Web Won’t be Nirvana,” Newsweek (February 1995), www.newsweek.com/id/106554/page/1. 5. Tim Cooper and Sian Evans, “Products to Services,” a report for Friends of the Earth, Centre for Sustainable Consumption, Sheffield Hallam University, www.foe.co.uk/resource/reports/products_services.pdf. 6.

In other words, we want not the stuff but the needs or experiences it fulfills. As our possessions “dematerialize” into the intangible, our preconceptions of ownership are changing, creating a dotted line between “what’s mine,” “what’s yours,” and “what’s ours.” This shift is fueling a world where usage trumps possessions, and as Kevin Kelly, a passionate conservationist and founder of Wired magazine, puts it, where “access is better than ownership.”1 We have constructed a large part of our freedom around our “right to own” and our self-identity around what we do. But for the Millennials, the first generation that writer John Palfrey describes as “born digital,” this powerful relationship with ownership is fracturing.

From Rachel Botsman For me, this is a book about the possibilities and powerful reconnections that can help reshape our future for the better. I am indebted to the brilliant thought leaders whose ideas have inspired me to think in this way. These include Yochai Benkler, Robin Chase, Jeff Howe, Kevin Kelly, Lawrence Lessig, Bill McKibben, Elinor Ostrom, Robert Putnam, Jeremy Rifkin, Clay Shirky, and James Surowiecki. Personal thanks to Gillian Blake for transforming the way I write, and to Ben Loehnen for masterfully shepherding this project. This book would not have been remotely possible without my fantastic coauthor and wonderful friend, Roo Rogers.


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Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier

4chan, air gap, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, cosmological constant, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, game design, general-purpose programming language, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, hype cycle, impulse control, information asymmetry, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lifelogging, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, peak TV, Plato's cave, profit motive, Project Xanadu, quantum cryptography, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

© REX / Shutterstock. Drawings by Ann Lasko Harvill, photographed by Kevin Kelly, used with permission. © George MacKerron, used with permission. Reproduced with permission. Copyright © 1984 Scientific American, a division of Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. © MixPix / Alamy Stock Photo. Photograph by Ann Lasko Harvill, used with permission. Photograph by Kevin Kelly, used with permission. © NASA. Photograph by Young Harvill, used with permission. © AP Photo / Eric Risberg. © AP Photo / Oinuma. Photograph by Kevin Kelly, used with permission. Top photographs: © Rick English Pictures.

Poïesis Fascination Versus Suicide Rue Goo Appendix Two: PHENOTROPIC FEVERS (ABOUT VR SOFTWARE) Mandatory Metamorphosis Grace Picture This Sleight Editor and Mapping Variation Phenotropic Trial Run Scale Motivation Role Reversal Expression The Wisdom of Imperfection Resilience Adapt Swing Rubble Fills Plato’s Cave Many Caves, Many Shadows, but Only Your Eyes Appendix Three: DUELING DEMIGODS Not Artificial, but Imaginary The Banality of Weightlessness The Invisible Hand on a Multitouch Screen The Absurdity of Demanding That AI Fix Itself The Humane Use of Human Systems NOTES INDEX ALSO BY JARON LANIER ABOUT THE AUTHOR ILLUSTRATION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS COPYRIGHT Illustration Acknowledgments All images in this book are courtesy of the author with the exception of the following: Photographs by Kevin Kelly, used with permission. © AP Photo / Jeff Reinking. Top: © Mark Richards. Courtesy of the Computer History Museum. Bottom: Courtesy of the Inamori Foundation. Courtesy of Steve Bryson. Photographs by Ann Lasko Harvill, used with permission. Left: Photograph by Ann Lasko Harvill, used with permission. Right: Photograph by Kevin Kelly, used with permission. © Linda Jacobson. Photograph by Walter Greenleaf, used with permission. TK Reproduced with permission.

A tech company based on consensus decision making? Would that be a crazy idea? (2017 Jaron intervenes to scream, Yes, that would have been crazy!) But at the time everything seemed possible and everyone was idealistic and young enough to go for nights without sleep to get the latest demo running. Kevin Kelly visited VPL in the late 1980s and took these pictures of Ann’s early concept drawings that were still pinned on the wall. Upper left: Very early concept drawing for the VPL EyePhone. Like every other team making VR headsets since, we underestimated the ultimate thickness that would be needed. Upper right: An EyePhone in use.


pages: 222 words: 53,317

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension by Samuel Arbesman

algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Apple II, Benoit Mandelbrot, Boeing 747, Chekhov's gun, citation needed, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, data science, David Brooks, digital map, discovery of the americas, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Flash crash, friendly AI, game design, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Hans Moravec, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, Inbox Zero, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mandelbrot fractal, Minecraft, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, SimCity, software studies, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, the long tail, Therac-25, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

The evolved circuit had taken advantage of weird physical and electromagnetic phenomena, which no engineer would ever have thought of using, to make the circuit complete its task. In another instance, an equation was evolved to solve another problem, and the result was also recognized as impenetrable. Kevin Kelly, in Out of Control, describes it thus: “Not only is it ugly, it’s incomprehensible. Even for a mathematician or computer programmer, this evolved formula is a tar baby in the briar patch.” The evolved code was eventually understood, but its way of solving the problem appeared to be “decidedly inhuman.”

These include such things as technological change and how that affects education, more on Big Data, our increasing partnership with our machines, automation and the future of jobs, and the many, many different types of systems that we see around us, including those in manufacturing, food, government, energy, and so much more. Some of the works below address these topics. • • • The Systems Bible by John Gall is a bizarre romp into how to think about large systems and how they work, or don’t. It is fascinating and much of my thinking parallels Gall’s. Out of Control by Kevin Kelly includes some of the same points about biological thinking and how technology is becoming increasingly biological and unable to be understood, though from the perspective of emergence and biological complexity and the use of biological principles to build technologies. I also recommend What Technology Wants by the same author.

Quoted in Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1977), 13. “complicated” and “complex” systems: This is but one of likely very many distinctions between these two terms. Imagine water buoys: Thanks to Aaron Clauset for providing the example of tied-together buoys during a discussion. the infrastructure of our cities: In Kevin Kelly’s view, “Cities are technological artifacts, the largest technology we make.” What Technology Wants (New York: Viking, 2010), 81. could fill encyclopedias: David McCandless, “Codebases: Millions of Lines of Code,” infographic, v. 0.9, Information Is Beautiful, September 24, 2015, http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/million-lines-of-code/.


pages: 422 words: 113,525

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, back-to-the-land, biofilm, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dark matter, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, digital divide, Easter island, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, megaproject, microbiome, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, rewilding, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, We are as Gods, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, William Langewiesche, working-age population, Y2K

—Jon Turney, The Guardian (London) “This is a short course on how to change your mind intelligently. Stewart Brand is the master guru of following the early warning signals of first adopters and the rough edges of science wherever it might lead. In this book he reveals how this discipline has landed him at the very front of cultural change once again.” —Kevin Kelly, author of What Technology Wants “In the face of climate change, a founding father of the greens argues the movement must embrace whatever works—even if that happens to be nuclear power, mass urbanization, or genetic modification. . . . The environmental left needs to view the world afresh.

This is the fastest global diffusion of any technology in human history. . . . Cellphones are the first telecommunications technology in history to have more users in the developing world than in the West.” American travelers are often shocked to find that cellphone connectivity is better in developing countries than in the United States. Technology historian Kevin Kelly draws an interesting conclusion from this:A decade ago many folks who like to worry about the advance of technology were worried about the “digital divide.” This phrase signified the unfair gap between those who had computers and the internet and those who did not. The question was usually framed in these words: “What are you going to do about the digital divide?”

A lot of different organisms use similar or nearly identical genes to do the same job.” Where a gene comes from is irrelevant; the point is what it does. Genetic engineering is so much more precise, transparent, and accountable than breeding, it invites the thought experiment proposed by technology historian Kevin Kelly: “Suppose the sequence was reversed. Suppose genetic engineering is what we had been doing all along. Then some group says, ‘No, we’re going to use this new process called breeding . We’ll create all kinds of interesting recombinations, we’ll blast seeds with radiation and chemicals to get lots of mutations, and we’ll grow whatever comes up, pick the ones we like, and hope for the best.’


pages: 669 words: 210,153

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Measure the cost of inaction, realize the unlikelihood and repairability of most missteps, and develop the most important habit of those who excel and enjoy doing so: action. “Productivity is for robots. What humans are going to be really good at is asking questions, being creative, and experiences.” * * * Kevin Kelly Kevin Kelly (TW: @kevin2kelly, kk.org) is “senior maverick” at Wired magazine, which he co-founded in 1993. He also co-founded the All Species Foundation, a nonprofit aimed at cataloging and identifying every living species on earth. In his spare time, he writes best-selling books, co-founded the Rosetta Project, which is building an archive of all documented human languages, and serves on the board of the Long Now Foundation.

Dubner (p. 574) Dan Engle (p. 109) James Fadiman (p. 100) Jon Favreau (p. 592) Jamie Foxx (p. 604) Chris Fussell (p. 435) Cal Fussman (p. 495) Adam Gazzaley (p. 135) Malcolm Gladwell (p. 572) Seth Godin (p. 237) Evan Goldberg (p. 531) Marc Goodman (p. 424) Laird Hamilton (p. 92) Sam Harris (p. 454) Wim Hof (p. 41) Reid Hoffman (p. 228) Ryan Holiday (p. 334) Chase Jarvis (p. 280) Daymond John (p. 323) Bryan Johnson (p. 609) Sebastian Junger (p. 420) Noah Kagan (p. 325) Samy Kamkar (p. 427) Kaskade (p. 329) Sam Kass (p. 558) Kevin Kelly (p. 470) Brian Koppelman (p. 613) Tim Kreider (p. 489) Paul Levesque (p. 128) Phil Libin (p. 315) Will MacAskill (p. 446) Brian MacKenzie (p. 92) Justin Mager (p. 72) Nicholas McCarthy (p. 208) Gen. Stan McChrystal (p. 435) Jane McGonigal (p. 132) BJ Miller (p. 400) Matt Mullenweg (p. 202) Casey Neistat (p. 217) Jason Nemer (p. 46) Edward Norton (p. 561) B.J.

Novak How to Say “No” When It Matters Most * * * Part 3: Wise BJ Miller Maria Popova Jocko Willink Sebastian Junger Marc Goodman Samy Kamkar Tools of a Hacker General Stanley McChrystal & Chris Fussell Shay Carl Will MacAskill The Dickens Process—What Are Your Beliefs Costing You? Kevin Costner Sam Harris Caroline Paul My Favorite Thought Exercise: Fear-Setting Kevin Kelly Is This What I So Feared? Whitney Cummings Bryan Callen Alain de Botton Lazy: A Manifesto Cal Fussman Joshua Skenes Rick Rubin The Soundtrack of Excellence Jack Dorsey Paulo Coelho Writing Prompts from Cheryl Strayed Ed Cooke Amanda Palmer Eric Weinstein Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg 8 Tactics for Dealing with Haters Margaret Cho Andrew Zimmern Rainn Wilson Naval Ravikant Glenn Beck Tara Brach Sam Kass Edward Norton Richard Betts Mike Birbiglia The Jar of Awesome Malcolm Gladwell Stephen J.


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Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World by Timothy Ferriss

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, fear of failure, Gary Taubes, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, global macro, Google Hangouts, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, helicopter parent, high net worth, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, index fund, information security, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Mr. Money Mustache, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, sunk-cost fallacy, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

If it’s not the death of yourself or those you are responsible for, there’s probably some reasonable set of options you should consider calmly and thoughtfully. “I started my first business with $200. . . . I learned far more about business from that $200 than from a debt-inducing MBA.” Kevin Kelly TW: @kevin2kelly kk.org KEVIN KELLY is “senior maverick” at Wired magazine, which he co-founded in 1993. He also co-founded the All Species Foundation, a nonprofit aimed at cataloging and identifying every living species on Earth, and the Rosetta Project, which is building an archive of all documented human languages.

Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: Nov. 6–Dec. 4, 2015) Soman Chainani Dita Von Teese Jesse Williams Dustin Moskovitz Richa Chadha Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: Dec. 11, 2015–Jan. 1, 2016) Max Levchin Neil Strauss Veronica Belmont Patton Oswalt Lewis Cantley Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: Jan. 8–Jan. 29, 2016) Jerzy Gregorek Aniela Gregorek Amelia Boone Sir Joel Edward McHale, Lord of Winterfell Ben Stiller Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: March 11–March 25, 2016) Anna Holmes Andrew Ross Sorkin Joseph Gordon-Levitt How to Say No: Wendy MacNaughton Vitalik Buterin Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: Feb. 12–March 4, 2016) Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks Julia Galef Turia Pitt Annie Duke Jimmy Fallon Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: April 1–April 15, 2016) Esther Perel Maria Sharapova Adam Robinson Josh Waitzkin Ann Miura-Ko Jason Fried Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: April 22–May 13, 2016) Arianna Huffington Gary Vaynerchuk Tim O’Reilly Tom Peters Bear Grylls Brené Brown Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: May 27–June 16, 2016) Leo Babauta Mike D Esther Dyson Kevin Kelly Ashton Kutcher Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: June 24–July 15, 2016) Brandon Stanton Jérôme Jarre Fedor Holz Eric Ripert Sharon Salzberg Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: July 22–Aug. 12, 2016) Franklin Leonard Peter Guber Greg Norman Daniel Ek Strauss Zelnick Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: Aug. 12–Sept. 9, 2016) Steve Jurvetson Tony Hawk Liv Boeree Anníe Mist þórisdóttir Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: Sept. 16–Oct. 14, 2016) Mark Bell Ed Coan Ray Dalio Jacqueline Novogratz Brian Koppelman Stewart Brand Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: Oct. 21–Nov. 18, 2016) Sarah Elizabeth Lewis Gabor Maté Steve Case Linda Rottenberg Tommy Vietor Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: Nov. 25–Dec. 30, 2016) Larry King Muna AbuSulayman Sam Harris Maurice Ashley How to Say No: Danny Meyer John Arnold Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: Jan. 6–Jan. 27, 2017) Mr.

A gift to all of my Apple ][ programming buddies from high school and Dungeons & Dragons comrades. So many of the geek references from the early days of personal computing brought back a Rush 2112 of Proustian 16K memories, from the Trash-80 to cassette-loading games. Most influential books on me: Out of Control by Kevin Kelly. Introduction to the power of evolutionary algorithms and information networks inspired by biology. Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil. What Moore observed in the belly of the early integrated-circuit (IC) industry was a derivative metric, a refracted signal, from a longer-term trend, a trend that begs various philosophical questions and predicts mind-bending futures.


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Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal

Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Big Tech, bitcoin, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, commons-based peer production, context collapse, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, death of newspapers, Debian, disruptive innovation, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Ethereum, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, Induced demand, informal economy, information security, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kubernetes, leftpad, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, node package manager, Norbert Wiener, pirate software, pull request, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Ruby on Rails, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, urban planning, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler, Zimmermann PGP

. ** A study of the Mozilla Firefox web browser project found that among the 150,000 issue reporters over eleven years, there was “a comparably small group of about 8,000 experienced, frequent reporters” (roughly 5% of reporters) who had higher-quality insights and contributions.175 CODE AS ARTIFACT, CODE AS ORGANISM “One of my hypothesis [sic] is that species of technology, unlike species in biology, do not go extinct. When I really look at supposed extinct species of technology, I find they still survive in some fashion. A close examination of by-gone technologies shows that somewhere on the planet someone is still producing it.” —KEVIN KELLY, “Immortal Technologies”183 To the untrained eye, writing software appears to be all about the new and shiny, free from the earthly troubles of working with atoms rather than imaginary bits. In practice, software ages quietly, in the shadows, and stubbornly refuses to die. There are two observations to make about software here, which will help illuminate the problem.

This is especially true in today’s world, where creators can attract millions of fans without being nationally or internationally famous. Whereas everyone once congregated around the same set of memes, now countless online celebrities are knighted every day. In “1,000 True Fans,” a blog post first published back in 2008 and now part of internet canon, the writer Kevin Kelly points to the value of a small, avid audience. In an updated version of this post, he writes, To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans.

Pricing is typically based on CPM, or cost per thousand impressions, and CPC, or cost per click, both of which require a lot of views to make these numbers meaningful. These days, as consumers are faced with near-infinite options, making money as a creator is about making meaning of the small again: Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 true fans,” finally come to pass. We’re seeing renewed interest in subscription models, sponsorships, and merchandise, all of which operate as a function of parasocial, or one-sided, intimacy. It’s hard to write about the economics of content without discussing advertising further, but because it’s such a big topic on its own, I’m not explicitly covering it in this book.


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Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age by Steven Johnson

Airbus A320, airport security, algorithmic trading, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Donald Davies, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, Jane Jacobs, John Gruber, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mega-rich, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, techno-determinism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche, working poor, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, your tax dollars at work

The return on the Kickstarter investment can’t be measured by the conventional yardstick of utilitarian economic theory. People contribute for more subtle, but just as powerful, reasons: the psychological reward of knowing that their money is helping cultivate another human’s talents; the social reward of being seen in public doing just that. Drawing on the work of Lewis Hyde, the writer Kevin Kelly calls this kind of activity the Web’s “gift economy.” Kelly described this phenomenon in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published shortly after the dot-com bubble burst in 2000: As the Internet continues to expand in volume and diversity without interruption, only a relatively small percent of its total mass will be money-making.

My thinking on these issues has been greatly expanded—if not downright borrowed—from conversations with Beth Noveck, Yochai Benkler, Fred Wilson, Brad Burnham, Larry Lessig, Denise Caruso, John Mackey, John Geraci, Paul Miller, Roo Rogers, Rachel Botsman, Reid Hoffman, Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler, Clay Shirky, Stewart Brand, Howard Rheingold, Kevin Kelly, Jon Schnur, Raj Sisodia, Gordon Wheeler, Nick Grossman, Jay Haynes, Eric Liftin, John Battelle, and my mother, Bev Johnson. Special thanks to the group who were generous enough to comment on the manuscript in draft: Bill Wasik, David Sloan Wilson, Dan Hill, Henry Farrell, and my father and longtime political sparring partner, Stan Johnson.

The key books and essays that have shaped my thinking on the power of peer networks and the framework of peer-progressive values include Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks; Beth Noveck’s WikiGovernment; Carne Ross’s The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People Will Take Power and Change Politics in the 21st Century; Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs; Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations; Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom’s The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations; Tim O’Reilly’s “The Architecture of Participation”; Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi’s “Cognitive Democracy”; and just about everything written by Manuel Castells, starting with The Rise of the Network Society. Many of these themes are explored in my books Emergence and Where Good Ideas Come From. For more on the gift economy, see Kevin Kelly’s essay “The Web Runs on Love, Not Greed,” in the January 4, 2002, edition of The Wall Street Journal. The figure of some $1.5 billion passing through crowdfunding sites in 2011 is from Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/sites/suwcharmananderson/2012/05/11/crowdfunding-raised-1-5bn-in-2011-set-to-double-in-2012/.


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The Glass Cage: Automation and Us by Nicholas Carr

Airbnb, Airbus A320, Andy Kessler, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Bernard Ziegler, business process, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive load, computerized trading, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gamification, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, High speed trading, human-factors engineering, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet of things, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, turn-by-turn navigation, Tyler Cowen, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche

., Princeton Readings in Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 110–111. 28.Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013), 323. 29.Kevin Kelly, “Better than Human: Why Robots Will—and Must—Take Our Jobs,” Wired, January 2013. 30.Kevin Drum, “Welcome, Robot Overloads. Please Don’t Fire Us?,” Mother Jones, May/June 2013. 31.Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Verso, 1998), 43. 32.Anonymous, “Slaves to the Smartphone,” Economist, March 10, 2012. 33.Kevin Kelly, “What Technology Wants,” Cool Tools, October 18, 2010, kk.org/cooltools/archives/4749. 34.George Packer, “No Death, No Taxes,” New Yorker, November 28, 2011. 35.Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 4–5. 36.Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper, 1991), 80. 37.Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), 57.

If computers are advancing so rapidly, and if people by comparison seem slow, clumsy, and error prone, why not build immaculately self-contained systems that perform flawlessly without any human oversight or intervention? Why not take the human factor out of the equation altogether? “We need to let robots take over,” declared the technology theorist Kevin Kelly in a 2013 Wired cover story. He pointed to aviation as an example: “A computerized brain known as the autopilot can fly a 787 jet unaided, but irrationally we place human pilots in the cockpit to babysit the autopilot ‘just in case.’ ”1 The news that a person was driving the Google car that crashed in 2011 prompted a writer at a prominent technology blog to exclaim, “More robo-drivers!”

It informs society’s recurring dream of emancipation from toil, the one that was voiced by Marx and Wilde and Keynes and that continues to find expression in the works of technophiles and technophobes alike. “Wilde was right,” Evgeny Morozov, the technology critic, wrote in his 2013 book To Save Everything, Click Here: “mechanical slavery is the enabler of human liberation.”28 We’ll all soon have “personal workbots” at our “beck and call,” Kevin Kelly, the technology enthusiast, proclaimed in a Wired essay that same year. “They will do jobs we have been doing, and do them much better than we can.” More than that, they will free us to discover “new tasks that expand who we are. They will let us focus on becoming more human than we were.”29 Mother Jones’s Kevin Drum, also writing in 2013, declared that “a robotic paradise of leisure and contemplation eventually awaits us.”


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The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

In 2001 an IBM machine called Watson beat the best human players at the TV quiz game Jeopardy! In 2013 a DeepMind AI system taught itself to play Atari video games like Breakout and Pong, which involve hand–eye coordination. This was much more significant that it might have seemed. The AI system wasn’t taught how to play video games, but rather how to learn to play the games. Kevin Kelly thinks that AI has now made a decided leap forward, but its significance is still not fully appreciated. He writes: Once a computer manages to perform a task better than humans, the task is widely dismissed as simple. People then say that the next task is really hard – until that task is accomplished by the computer and so on.

Admittedly, the Baxter robot works for about $4 an hour. But Baxters are, in fact, not very capable and are not in much demand. They may be cheap to run but they cost $22,000 and upward to buy. Sales of Baxters have not picked up, and in December 2013 Baxter’s manufacturer, a firm called Rethink, laid off a quarter of its staff.39 According to Kevin Kelly, it costs $100,000 or more to buy an industrial robot but you may need to spend four times that amount over a lifespan to program, train, and maintain it, making a total bill over the robot’s “lifetime” of half a million dollars or more.40 So, employing a robot will involve a fixed investment.

Accordingly, it is better for us to think about the labor market in an AI- and robot-dominated world in relation to supply and demand and to see changes in these two fundamentals as being expressed in changes in both quantities and prices. In the case of employment, the price in question is wages and salaries. And, of course, what happens here feeds into the income distribution. So who will the winners and losers be? Kevin Kelly, the editor of Wired magazine, has made a key contribution to discussion of this issue. He has said: “You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots.”18 Google chief economist Hal Varian frequently says that people should seek to be an “indispensable complement” to something that’s getting plentiful and cheap.


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The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State by James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, compound rate of return, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, debt deflation, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Macrae, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, phenotype, price mechanism, profit maximization, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, spice trade, statistical model, telepresence, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto

This leap in computation has allowed us for the first time to fathom some of the universal characteristics of complexity. What the computers show is that complex systems can be built and understood only from the bottom up. Multiplying prime numbers is simple. But disaggregating complexity by trying to decompose the product of large prime numbers is all but impossible. Kevin Kelly, editor of Wired, puts it this way: "To multiply several prime numbers into a larger product is easy; any elementary school kid can do it. But the world's supercomputers choke while trying to unravel a product into its simple primes." The Logic of Complex Systems The cybereconomy will inevitably be shaped by this profound mathematical truth.

The closer computers bring us to understanding the mathematics of artificial life, the better we understand the mathematics of real life, which are those of biological complexity. These secrets of complexity, harnessed through information technology, are allowing economies to be reconfigured into more complex forms. The Internet and the World Wide Web have already taken on characteristics of an organic system, as Kevin Kelly suggests in Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems. and the Economic World.' In his words, nature is "an idea factory. Vital, postindustrial paradigms are hidden in every jungle ant hill. . . . The wholesale transfer of biologic into machines should fill us with awe. When the union of the born and the made is complete, our fabrications will learn, adapt, heal themselves, and evolve.

This is why cries of "exploitation" by workers are now heard mainly among janitors. Information technology is making it plain that the problem faced by persons of low skill is not that their productive capacities are being unfairly taken advantage of; but rather the fear that they may lack the ability to make a real economic contribution. As Kevin Kelly suggests in Out Of Control, the "Upstart" car company of the Information Age may be the brainchild of "a dozen people," who will outsource most of their parts, and still produce cars more carefully customized and tailored to their buyer's wishes than 126 anything yet seen from Detroit or Tokyo: "Cars, each one customer-tailored, are ordered by a network of customers and shipped the minute they are done.


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The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, Joel Hyatt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, centre right, classic study, clean water, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, Danny Hillis, dark matter, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, double helix, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, George Gilder, glass ceiling, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herman Kahn, hydrogen economy, industrial cluster, informal economy, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Productivity paradox, QR code, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

Sufficiently complex systems can't be controlled. We have reached that level of complexity, and we are going to far surpass it in the coming years. Once again, we can turn to our wise old teacher, nature. Nature has perfected out of control systems. Biological systems are great models for what human-designed systems could come to be. Kevin Kelly, the former executive editor of Wired, laid this out beautifully in Ms groundbreaking book Out of Control: How Human Systems Are Emulating the Biological. At the microlevel, individual organisms are extremely complex but not strictly controlled by their brains. For example, many organs of the body do not need the brain to function.

Against that gloomy backdrop, a project began at Wired magazine in San Francisco to create a positive scenario of the future. It would need to be able to convince a tough-minded audience that this vision of the world could be realized in the near future. Peter Schwartz, a contributing writer for the magazine, and Peter Leyden, a senior editor, teamed up to work through the ideas and write the story. Kevin Kelly, Wired's executive editor, Louis Rossetto, Wired's founder and publisher, and John Battelle, the executive managing editor, challenged our thinking and contributed their ideas throughout the yearlong gestation of the article, which was published in July 1997. By the winter of 1998, we had started realizing that politics would be increasingly important in sustaining and extending this Long Boom.

Richard L Berke, "Voters All Over Take the Wheel from Conservatives," New York Times (January 31, 1999), WK1. DeAnne Julius, "21st Century Economic Dynamics: Anatomy of a Long Boom," OECD Forum for the future, Expo 2000 conference on the policy drivers for the Long Boom. (OECD; Frankfurt, 1998) Kevin Kelly, the executive editor of Wired, expands at length on the networking metaphor in his book The New Rules of the New Economy (New York: Viking, 1998). "Education and the Wealth of Nations," The Economist (March 29, 1997), 15, 21-23. The Third Wave; AMn Toffler, The Third Wave, The Classic Study of Tomorrow (New York: Bantam Books, 1980). 306 83 83 84 87 NOTES . like the best schools: This concept is based on a conversation Leyden had with Roberto Unger, a Harvard professor, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in the summer of 1998.


pages: 360 words: 100,991

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence by Richard Yonck

3D printing, AI winter, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, backpropagation, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, ghettoisation, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of writing, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Loebner Prize, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Skype, social intelligence, SoftBank, software as a service, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing test, twin studies, Two Sigma, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Review, working-age population, zero day

In addition to immediate survival, mirroring and mimicry could have promoted learning, language development, and empathy that improved bonding among families and clan members.30 Again, such behavior would have likely enhanced survivability for both the individual and the clan and thus could have been selected for. Much later, such mirroring might have come to serve yet another purpose: the transmission of culture and technology. (What author, editor, and technologist Kevin Kelly refers to as the technium.)31 In which case, the transmission of the first true technology carried over to the transmission and continuation of subsequent technologies. Most notable of these, in light of its obvious long-term success, was knapping. Much later, over the course of thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of generations, would come other technologies, such as fire and the first proto-languages.

This in spite of many people’s newscast-instilled perceptions that death and destruction lurk around every corner. Pinker argues that this improvement has not been due to a change in our biology or cognition, but rather because of “the changes in our cultural and material milieu that have given our peaceable motives the upper hand.” I concur with Pinker on this, with one exception: our culture, as Kevin Kelly has pointed out, is a part of the vast technological web we have woven up to this time, the same technological web we have coevolved with and are currently merging with. Our memetic and cultural legacy has evolved, as we have along with it.6 Our fates are interwoven and can no longer be separated from each other.

Whether that is irony, karma, or some great cosmic punchline, I’m not really certain, but in light of all that technology has done for us throughout these many hundreds of millennia, our being able to give it something so special—so human—as emotion and consciousness feels somehow poetic. There will be those who say we shouldn’t pursue this because it’s too dangerous, that the risks are too great, the threats to who we are and what we’ve built up to are now too overwhelming. But really, we probably don’t have a say in the matter. As Kevin Kelly has explained, technology has its own trajectory; it will happen when it is ready to happen. Our choices will be in helping to define the course these new developments will take. Then there are those AI scientists, engineers, cognitive scientists, psychologists, philosophers, and theorists who will say this can’t be done.


pages: 161 words: 44,488

The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology by William Mougayar

Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, business logic, business process, centralized clearinghouse, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cryptocurrency, decentralized internet, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, fixed income, Ford Model T, global value chain, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, market clearing, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, prediction markets, pull request, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, smart contracts, social web, software as a service, too big to fail, Turing complete, Vitalik Buterin, web application, Yochai Benkler

Says David Shaum, the inventor of digital cash and privacy technologies: “Untraceable communication is fundamental to freedom of inquiry, freedom of expression, and increasingly to online privacy generally, including person-to-person communication. To address these needs a system should support, ideally within a combined anonymity set, the most common use cases: chat, photo/video sharing, feed following, searching, posting, payments, all with various types of potentially pseudonymous authentication.” In 1994, Kevin Kelly, author of Out of Control, wrote this: A pretty good society needs more than just anonymity. An online civilization requires online anonymity, online identification, online authentication, online reputations, online trust holders, online signatures, online privacy, and online access. All are essential ingredients of any open society.

He believed that the path to a functioning economy—or society—was decentralization, and asserted that a decentralized economy complements the dispersed nature of information spread throughout society.1 WHAT HAPPENED TO THE DECENTRALIZED INTERNET? Let us remember the intended vision of the Internet. It was very much about openness in decentralization and distribution of services, with minute controls at the centers. At the dawn of the Internet life in 1994, Kevin Kelly wrote in his book, Out of Control, three important comments to remember: The network is the icon of the 21st century. The net icon has no center—it is a bunch of dots connected to other dots. A decentralized, redundant organization can flex without distorting its function, and thus it can adapt.

Notes Berners-Lee and the website’s community: We are concerned about the growing number of threats to the very existence of the open Web, such as censorship, surveillance, and concentrations of power. The Web that drives economic progress and knowledge, is the one where anyone can create websites to share culture and information. It’s the Web where new businesses bloom, where government transparency is a reality, and where citizens document injustice. Wow. What Kevin Kelly and Web We Want are saying is pure music to the ears of today’s believers that a more decentralized Internet can shepherd us into a better future. If you are content with the Web today, stop and think for a minute whether you are happy with this situation. Web We Want observes: Millions of spam blogs and websites are visited by bots to cash in on ads.


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The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date by Samuel Arbesman

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, bioinformatics, British Empire, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, data science, David Brooks, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Galaxy Zoo, Gregor Mendel, guest worker program, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index fund, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, National Debt Clock, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, p-value, Paul Erdős, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, SimCity, social contagion, social graph, social web, systematic bias, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation

A quote from Science Daily gives a sense of how unbelievable this is: On just two stops in the southeast Atlantic Angola Basin, they found almost 700 different copepod species (99 percent of them unfamiliar) in just 5.4 square meters (6.5 square yards), nearly twice the number of species described to date in the entire southern hemisphere. Kevin Kelly refers to this sort of distribution as the “long tail of life.” In the media world, a small fraction of movies accounts for the vast amount of success and box office take—these are the blockbusters. The same thing happens on the Internet: a tiny group of Web sites commands most of the world’s attention.

Brooks looked at how robots have improved over the years and found that their movement abilities—how far and how fast a robot can move—have gone through about thirteen doublings in twenty-six years. That means that we have had a doubling about every two years: right on schedule and similar to Moore’s Law. Kevin Kelly, in his book What Technology Wants, has cataloged a wide collection of technological growth rates that fit an exponential curve. The doubling time of each kind of technology, as shown in the following table, acts as a sort of half-life for it and is indicative of exponential growth: It’s the amount of time before what you have is out-of-date and you’re itching to upgrade.

Cosmic Variance, 2010; http://blogs.discover magazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/05/23/physics-and-the-immortality-of-the-soul/. 37 A quote from Science Daily: Census of Marine Life. “Giant Undersea Microbial Mat Among Discoveries Revealed by Marine Life Census.” Science Daily, April 18, 2010. 38 Kevin Kelly refers to this sort of distribution: Kelly, Kevin. “The Long Tail of Life.” The Technium, 2010; http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2010/04/the_long_tail_o.php. CHAPTER 4: MOORE’S LAW OF EVERYTHING 41 The @ symbol has been on keyboards: Rawsthorn, Alice. “Why @ Is Held in Such High Design Esteem.”


Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business climate, citizen journalism, computer vision, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Dennis Ritchie, digital divide, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, experimental economics, experimental subject, Extropian, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, more computing power than Apollo, move 37, Multics, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, pez dispenser, planetary scale, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, social intelligence, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, web of trust, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Paul Saffo, Director, Institute for the Future “To track where technology bends society, I’ve learned to follow Howard Rheingold. He always leads a grand tour, and this time is no different. In this book, he takes you to the edge of the global brain as made real by thumb tribes and mobile networks. You don’t want to leave.” Kevin Kelly, Editor-at-Large, Wired “From techno-animism and hyper-coordination, to smartifacts and social networks, this insightful and engaging guided tour through the next communications renaissance is at turns inspiring, frightening, but always fascinating. Smart Mobs is Rheingold’s greatest achievement.”

Text design by Brent Wilcox Set in 10.5-point New Caledonia by the Perseus Books Group EBA 06 07 08 09 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 ALSO BY HOWARD RHEINGOLD The Virtual Community Tools for Thought They Have a Word for It Virtual Reality Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming (coauthor) Higher Creativity (coauthor) Excursions to the Far Side of the Mind The Cognitive Connection (coauthor) ACKNOWLEDGMENTS TO THE FOLLOWING PEOPLE: THANK YOU! I COULD NEVER HAVE DONE this without you. Marc A. Smith convinced me that I could weave a book from our many-stranded conversations about cooperation, communication, and computation and then stuck with me to inspire, provoke, support, and educate over the two years it took to do it. Kevin Kelly, who has patiently pushed, persuaded, edited, and criticized my work for more than a decade, suggested that I turn one of the chapter titles into the name of this book. My agents, John Brockman and Katinka Matson, who never settle for less, rejected my first two attempts at a book proposal and then found me an editor who understood what I was trying to do.

When it comes to hives and swarms, the emergent capabilities of decentralized self-organization can be surprisingly intelligent. What happens when the individuals in a tightly coordinated group are more highly intelligent creatures rather than simpler organisms like insects or birds? How do humans exhibit emergent behavior? As soon as this question occurred to me, I immediately recalled the story Kevin Kelly told at the beginning of Out of Control, his 1994 book about the emergent behaviors in biology, machinery, and human affairs.58 He described an event at an annual film show for computer graphics professionals. A small paddle was attached to each seat in the auditorium, with reflective material of contrasting colors on each side of the paddle.


pages: 416 words: 112,268

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, ImageNet competition, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, luminiferous ether, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, OpenAI, openstreetmap, P = NP, paperclip maximiser, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, positional goods, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Thales of Miletus, The Future of Employment, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Bayes, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transport as a service, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, zero-sum game

Prediction depends on having the right abstractions—for example, I can predict that “I” will be “on stage in Wheeler Auditorium” on the Berkeley campus on the last Tuesday in April, but I cannot predict my exact location down to the millimeter or which atoms of carbon will have been incorporated into my body by then. Machines are also subject to certain speed limits imposed by the real world on the rate at which new knowledge of the world can be acquired—one of the valid points made by Kevin Kelly in his article on oversimplified predictions about superhuman AI.53 For example, to determine whether a specific drug cures a certain kind of cancer in an experimental animal, a scientist—human or machine—has two choices: inject the animal with the drug and wait several weeks or run a sufficiently accurate simulation.

The Google search engine and AlphaGo have almost nothing in common, besides being products of two subsidiaries of the same parent corporation, and so it makes no sense to say that one is more intelligent than the other. This makes notions of “machine IQ” problematic and suggests that it’s misleading to describe the future as a one-dimensional IQ race between humans and machines. Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired magazine and a remarkably perceptive technology commentator, takes this argument one step further. In “The Myth of a Superhuman AI,”4 he writes, “Intelligence is not a single dimension, so ‘smarter than humans’ is a meaningless concept.” In a single stroke, all concerns about superintelligence are wiped away.

The following article by a renowned physicist provides a good introduction to the current state of understanding and technology: John Preskill, “Quantum computing in the NISQ era and beyond,” arXiv:1801.00862 (2018). 36. On the maximum computational ability of a one-kilogram object: Seth Lloyd, “Ultimate physical limits to computation,” Nature 406 (2000): 1047–54. 37. For an example of the suggestion that humans may be the pinnacle of physically achievable intelligence, see Kevin Kelly, “The myth of a superhuman AI,” Wired, April 25, 2017: “We tend to believe that the limit is way beyond us, way ‘above’ us, as we are ‘above’ an ant. . . . What evidence do we have that the limit is not us?” 38. In case you are wondering about a simple trick to solve the halting problem: the obvious method of just running the program to see if it finishes doesn’t work, because that method doesn’t necessarily finish.


pages: 283 words: 85,824

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Brewster Kahle, business logic, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital Maoism, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Gilder, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Laura Poitras, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Naomi Klein, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, oil rush, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, post-work, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Works Progress Administration, Yochai Benkler, young professional

,” NYTimes.com, November 30, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/ll/30/opinion/global/maria-popova-evgeny-morozov-susan-greenfield-are-we-becoming-cyborgs.html?pagewanted=all. 43. Joe Coscarelli, “Gabriel Snyder to The Atlantic Wire: On Growing Up an Aggregator,” VillageVoice.com, January 31, 2011, http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/01/gabriel_snyder.php. 4: UNEQUAL UPTAKE 1. Kevin Kelly says the “atom is the past” and George Gilder talks of overthrowing material tyranny. Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 25. George Gilder, “Happy Birthday Wired,” Wired, June 2001. 2. Susan P. Crawford, “The New Digital Divide,” New York Times, December 4, 2011, SR1. 3.

But when the commons are sold or traded on Wall Street, the vast disparities between us, the peasants, and them, the lords, become more obvious and more objectionable.”13 Computer scientist turned techno-skeptic Jaron Lanier has staked out the most extreme position in relation to those he calls the “lords of the computing clouds,” arguing that the only way to counteract this feudal structure is to institute a system of nanopayments, a market mechanism by which individuals are rewarded for every bit of private information gleaned by the network (an interesting thought experiment, Lanier’s proposed solution may well lead to worse outcomes than the situation we have now, due to the twisted incentives it entails). New-media cheerleaders take a different view.14 Consider the poet laureate of digital capitalism, Kevin Kelly, cofounder of Wired magazine and longtime technology commentator. It is not feudalism and exploitation that critics see, he argued in a widely circulated essay, but the emergence of a new cooperative ethos, a resurgence of collectivism—though not the kind your grandfather worried about. “The frantic global rush to connect everyone to everyone, all the time, is quietly giving rise to a revised version of socialism,” Kelly raves, pointing to sites like Wikipedia, YouTube, and Yelp.

Dan Hunter and John Quiggin, “Money Ruins Everything,” Hastings Communications and Entertainment Law Journal 30 (2008). 15. Clay Shirky says it is not labor if people enjoy it. Jeffrey R. Young, “The Souls of the Machine,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 13, 2010. 16. C. Wright Mills, White Collar (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 224. 17. Ibid., 237. 18. Kevin Kelly, “Better Than Human: Why Robots Will—and Must—Take Our Jobs,” Wired, December 24, 2012. 19. Shirky fails to mention that many of these hours are inevitably spent filling out forms, looking at porn, watching TV online, etc. 20. Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (New York: Penguin Press, 2010), 209.


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The Bitcoin Guidebook: How to Obtain, Invest, and Spend the World's First Decentralized Cryptocurrency by Ian Demartino

3D printing, AltaVista, altcoin, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, buy low sell high, capital controls, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, decentralized internet, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, forensic accounting, global village, GnuPG, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, initial coin offering, Jacob Appelbaum, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, litecoin, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Oculus Rift, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, printed gun, QR code, ransomware, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, Skype, smart contracts, Steven Levy, the medium is the message, underbanked, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

Although remittance, distributed funding, micropayments, and accessible investing are often pointed to as the areas where Bitcoin can make the most headway today, the original motivation behind the early iterations of electronic cash was primarily to address these security concerns. In his 1994 book Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, Wired magazine editor Kevin Kelly outlined what he thought was needed for an Internet economy to fully take off. Kelly argued, “A pretty good society needs more than just anonymity. An online civilization requires online anonymity, online identification, online authentication, online reputations, online trust holders, online signatures, online privacy and online access.

What the Internet needs, according to Kelly, is both anonymity to provide privacy and identification, verification, reputation, and signatures to provide security. The two desires seem to be fundamentally at odds. How can you have both privacy and identification? The answer lies in cryptography and encryption, as Kevin Kelly and the “cypherpunks” of the time had correctly predicted: [I]t seems to me that encryption technology civilizes the grid-locking avalanche of knowledge and data that networked systems generate. Without this taming spirit, the Net becomes a web that snares its own life. It strangles itself by its own prolific connections.

It already is a global currency that is instant and, like the Internet, open for use by nearly everyone. Early Internet pioneers did not talk about the speculative possibilities that the Bitcoin ecosystem is so obsessed with today. That unfortunate aspect of the Bitcoin culture only arose after the wild price swings. Kevin Kelly, the first executive editor of Wired magazine, predicted the development of an electronic money system and the effect it would have on our world in his 1994 book Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World. Kelly wrote: By its decentralized, distributed nature, encrypted emoney has the same potential for transforming economic structure as personal computers did for overhauling management and communication structure.


pages: 181 words: 52,147

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future by Vivek Wadhwa, Alex Salkever

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, deep learning, DeepMind, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, gigafactory, Google bus, Hyperloop, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, life extension, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, microbiome, military-industrial complex, mobile money, new economy, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Davenport, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

Chemically and logically, they are the same substance. Whereas human legislators can succumb to bias, an A.I. might be far more even-handed in applying the law. A.I. will provide similar benefits—and take over human jobs—in most areas in which data are processed and decisions required. WIRED magazine’s founding editor, Kevin Kelly, likened A.I. to electricity: a cheap, reliable, industrial-grade digital smartness running behind everything. He said that it “will enliven inert objects, much as electricity did more than a century ago. Everything that we formerly electrified we will now ‘cognitize.’ This new utilitarian A.I. will also augment us individually as people (deepening our memory, speeding our recognition) and collectively as a species.

Newer practices of managing sensitive data can put users in charge or, alternatively, collect only the data necessary to perform the task at hand. We need a radical shift in how we think about data collection, centering system design on users’ data management and their privacy rights rather than layering them on as an afterthought. Users will vote with their online presence. Noted futurist and author Kevin Kelly observes in his book The Inevitable that “vanity trumps privacy”—that we are willing to give incredibly revealing details about ourselves in exchange for social validation: “They’ll take transparent personalized sharing. . . . If today’s social media has taught us anything about ourselves as a species, it is that the human impulse to share overwhelms the human impulse for privacy.”6 This has been true, in part, because the costs of losing control of our data are hidden and hard to understand.

Daniela Hernandez, “Artificial intelligence is now telling doctors how to treat you,” WIRED 6 February 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/06/ai-healthcare (accessed 21 October 2016). 5. Thomas H. Davenport, “Let’s automate all the lawyers,” Wall Street Journal 25 March 2015, http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2015/03/25/lets-automate-all-the-lawyers (accessed 21 October 2016). 6. Kevin Kelly, “The three breakthroughs that have finally unleashed AI on the world,” WIRED 27 October 2014, http://www.wired.com/2014/10/future-of-artificial-intelligence (accessed 21 October 2016). 7. Matt McFarland, “Elon Musk: ‘With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon,’ ” Washington Post 24 October 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2014/10/24/elon-musk-with-artificial-intelligence-we-are-summoning-the-demon (accessed 21 October 2016). 8.


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The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

Just as it is much harder to create a 100-percent self-driving car than one that merely drives in normal conditions on a highway, creating a machine-based system for covering all possible medical cases is radically more difficult than building one for the most common situations. As with chess, a partnership between Dr. Watson and a human doctor will be far more creative and robust than either of them working alone. As futurist Kevin Kelly put it “You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots.”7 Sensing Our Advantage So computers are extraordinarily good at pattern recognition within their frames, and terrible outside them. This is good news for human workers because thanks to our multiple senses, our frames are inherently broader than those of digital technologies.

In the former group Susan Athey, David Autor, Zoe Baird, Nick Bloom, Tyler Cowen, Charles Fadel, Chrystia Freeland, Robert Gordon, Tom Kalil, Larry Katz, Tom Kochan, Frank Levy, James Manyika, Richard Murnane, Robert Putnam, Paul Romer, Scott Stern, Larry Summers, and Hal Varian have helped our thinking enormously. In the latter category are Chris Anderson, Rod Brooks, Peter Diamandis, Ephraim Heller, Reid Hoffman, Jeremy Howard, Kevin Kelly, Ray Kurzweil, John Leonard, Tod Loofbourrow, Hilary Mason, Tim O’Reilly, Sandy Pentland, Brad Templeton, and Vivek Wadhwa. All of them were incredibly generous with their time and tolerant of our questions. We did our best to understand the insights they shared with us, and apologize for whatever mistakes we made in trying to convey them in this book.

Garry Kasparov, “The Chess Master and the Computer,” New York Review of Books, February 11, 2010, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/feb/11/the-chess-master-and-the-computer/. 4. “Chess Quotes,” http://www.chessquotes.com/player-karpov (accessed September 12, 2013). 5. Kasparov, “The Chess Master and the Computer.” 6. Evan Esar, 20,000 Quips & Quotes (Barnes and Noble, 1995), p. 654. 7. Kevin Kelly, “Better than Human: Why Robots Will—and Must—Take Our Jobs,” Wired, December 24, 2012. 8. Zara’s approach is described in more detail in a Harvard Business Case Study by Andy and two colleagues: Andrew McAfee, Vincent Dessain, and Anders Sjöman, “Zara: IT for Fast Fashion,” Harvard Business School, 2007 (Case number 604081-PDF-ENG). 9.


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Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

As Eich told a TEDx audience in Vienna in October 2016, “Try to imagine a world in which you own your own dossier; it’s your own online life—you should own your own data. If you own it, then you can give terms of service [to the giant walled gardens on the Web], as well as them giving you their ‘terms of service’ that no one ever reads. . . . This would create a new web.” In a world of abundant information but scarce time, what do people value most? As Kevin Kelly declares, “The only things that are increasing in cost while everything else heads to zero are human experiences. . . . Cheap abundant [virtual reality] will be an experience factory.”1 I first met Brendan Eich when he joined me on the advisory board of the Los Angeles-based startup OTOY. My entrance into what Kelly describes as the experience factory also came courtesy of OTOY.

Its inventor-founder, Jules Urbach, has been turning computer models for 3D scenes into digital images that can be sent across the Net, shown on any screen, and experienced as real. OTOY’s metaverse is something entirely new. Its virtual worlds will be almost indistinguishable for many purposes from the topology of the real world. As Kevin Kelly breathlessly describes it, “We’ll use it to visit environments too dangerous to risk in the flesh, such as war zones, deep seas, or volcanoes. Or we’ll use it for experiences we can’t easily get to as humans—to visit the inside of a stomach, the surface of a comet. Or to swap genders, or [as Jaron Lanier wants] become a lobster.

“The technology was not mature,” Stephen decided. Despite the disappointment, he still did not want to work on “something that wasn’t mine.” In early 2015, Gary Bradski—the robotics pioneer who developed computer vision at Intel, founded the Willow Garage robotics incubator, which convinced Wired’s Kevin Kelly that “robots have wants,” and started Industrial Perception, which made “stevedore robots” that could, as Stephen Balaban described it, “pick up and chuck a box so elegantly” that Google bought them—that Gary Bradski—invited Balaban to join his deep-learning team at Magic Leap. Launched in 2010, the Google-funded virtual reality venture in Florida had heretofore raised half a billion dollars while generating more national magazine covers than virtual reality advances.


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Alone Together by Sherry Turkle

Albert Einstein, Columbine, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, fake news, Future Shock, global village, Hacker Ethic, helicopter parent, Howard Rheingold, industrial robot, information retrieval, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rodney Brooks, Skype, social intelligence, stem cell, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Great Good Place, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, Year of Magical Thinking

I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary.”7 Thoreau’s quest inspires us to ask of our life with technology: Do we live deliberately? Do we turn away from life that is not life? Do we refuse resignation? Some believe that the new connectivity culture provides a digital Walden. A fifteen-year-old girl describes her phone as her refuge. “My cell phone,” she says, “is my only individual zone, just for me.” Technology writer Kevin Kelly, the first editor of Wired, says that he finds refreshment on the Web. He is replenished in its cool shade: “At times I’ve entered the web just to get lost. In that lovely surrender, the web swallows my certitude and delivers the unknown. Despite the purposeful design of its human creators, the web is a wilderness.

We are willing to put aside a program’s lack of understanding and, indeed, to work to make it seem to understand more than it does—all to create the fantasy that there is an alternative to people. This is the deeper “ELIZA effect.” Trust in ELIZA does not speak to what we think ELIZA will understand but to our lack of trust in the people who might understand. Kevin Kelly asks, “What does technology want?” and insists that, whatever it is, technology is going to get it. Accepting his premise, what if one of the things technology wants is to exploit our disappointments and emotional vulnerabilities? When this is what technology wants, it wants to be a symptom. SYMPTOMS AND DREAMS Wary of each other, the idea of a robot companion brings a sense of control, of welcome substitution.

And, of course, no matter how much “wilderness” Kelly finds on the Web, we are not in a position to let the virtual take us away from our stewardship of nature, the nature that doesn’t go away with a power outage. We let things get away from us. Even now, we are emotionally dependent on online friends and intrigued by robots that, their designers claim, are almost ready to love us.15 And brave Kevin Kelly says what others are too timid to admit: he is in love with the Web itself. It has become something both erotic and idealized. What are we missing in our lives together that leads us to prefer lives alone together? As I have said, every new technology challenges us, generation after generation, to ask whether it serves our human purposes, something that causes us to reconsider what they are.


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The Googlization of Everything: by Siva Vaidhyanathan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data acquisition, death of newspapers, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full text search, global pandemic, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, libertarian paternalism, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pirate software, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, single-payer health, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, web application, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

For a brief description of the costly dynamic tension between anarchy and oligarchy in the digital world, see Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Anarchist in the 219 220 NOTES TO PAGES xiii–3 Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (New York: Basic Books, 2004). 5. For examples of simplistic, naive visions of how technology works in the world, see Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The Rise Of Neo-biological Civilization (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994); Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (New York: Viking, 1998); Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Knopf, 1995); Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Viking, 1999). 6.

How can we vet and judge its utility and truth? How can we connect the most people with the best knowledge? Google, of course, offers answers to those questions. It’s up to us to decide whether Google’s answers are good enough. SH UFFL IN G TH E PAGES In May 2006, the Wired magazine contributor Kevin Kelly published in the New York Times Magazine his predictive account of flux and change in the book-publishing world. That article outlined what he claimed “will” (not “might” or “could”) happen to the book business and the practices of writing and reading under a new regime fostered by Google’s plan to scan millions of books from university and public libraries and offer searchable texts to Internet users.

Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama Bin Laden (New York: Free Press, 2001). CH APTER 5. TH E GO O GLI ZAT I O N O F KNOWL E D G E 1. Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 2. Kevin Kelly, “Scan This Book!” New York Times Magazine, May 14, 2006, 42. 3. Ibid. 4. See John Updike, “The End of Authorship,” New York Times Book Review, June 25, 2006. 5. See Neil Netanel, “Google Book Search Settlement,” Balkinization, blog, October 28, 2008, http://balkin.blogspot.com. Also see James Grimmelmann, “Author’s Guild Settlement Insta-Blogging,” The Laboratorium, blog, October 28, 2008, http://laboratorium.net; Lawrence Lessig, “On the Google Book Search agreement,” Lessig Blog, October 29, 2008, http://lessig.org/blog; Paul Courant, “The Google Settlement: From the Universal Library to the Universal Bookstore,” Au Courant, blog, October 28, 2008, http://paulcourant.net; Open Content Alliance, “Let’s Not Settle for this Settlement,” Open Content Alliance (OCA), blog, November 5, 2008, www.opencontentalliance.org. 248 NOTES TO PAGES 153–58 6.


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Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science by Michael Nielsen

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, conceptual framework, dark matter, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Higgs boson, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, means of production, medical residency, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, P vs NP, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, selection bias, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, social intelligence, social web, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, University of East Anglia, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, Yochai Benkler

Astronomy and Astrophysics, 500(2):L33–L36, 2009. eprint arXiv:0905.1851. [106] Garry Kasparov. The chess master and the computer. New York Review of Books, 57(2), February 11, 2010. [107] Garry Kasparov with Daniel King. Kasparov Against the World. KasparovChess Online, 2000. [108] Kevin Kelly. Speculations on the future of science. Edge: The Third Culture, 2006. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kelly06/kelly06_index.html. [109] Kevin Kelly. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking, 2010. [110] Richard A. Kerr. Recently discovered habitable world may not exist. Science Now, October 12, 2010. http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/10/recently-discovered-habitable-world.html

p 3: The term collective intelligence was introduced by the philosopher Pierre Lévy [124]. A stimulating recent attempt to measure collective intelligence and to relate it to qualities of participants in the group is [243]. p 3 the process of science will . . . change more in the next twenty years than it has in the past 300 years: the author Kevin Kelly has made a similar claim in [108] (see also [109]): “There will be more change in the next 50 years of science than in the last 400 years.” There is some broad overlap in my reasoning and Kelly’s, e.g., we both emphasize the importance of collaboration and large-scale data collection. There are also some considerable differences in our reasoning, e.g., Kelly emphasizes changes such as triple-blind experiments, and more prizes in science, while I believe these will play a comparatively minor role in change, and that the following three areas are the most critical: (1) collective intelligence and data-driven science, and the way they change how science is done; (2) the changing relationship between science and society; and (3) the challenge of achieving a much more open scientific culture.

A full answer to this question is complex, but in brief, the Complexity Zoo has a much narrower scope than the qwiki, and because of this narrower scope a single dedicated person (Scott Aaronson, now of MIT) was able to build it out to the point where it became an extremely useful and well-known resource in the computer science community. The combination of its already high profile and its narrow scope has helped attract a few people to make occasional contributions to its upkeep. p 176: The term “wiki-science” seems to have been introduced in an essay by Kevin Kelly [108]. Similar ideas were proposed independently (and, in some cases, earlier) by many people. An intntere discussion involving some early contributors to wikis may be found at the Meatball wiki: [137] and [138]. p 178: The job and graduation data for physics are based on the American Institute of Physics’ “Latest Employment Data for Physicists and Related Scientists,” available at http://www.aip.org/statistics/.


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Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky

Andrew Keen, behavioural economics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, citizen journalism, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, Dean Kamen, experimental economics, experimental subject, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, invention of movable type, invention of the telegraph, Kevin Kelly, lolcat, means of production, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, seminal paper, social contagion, social software, Steve Ballmer, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Fanning designed a system that shaped the users’ cumulative behavior away from spitefulness and toward sharing; and like all applications that rely on the cumulative participation of the users, Napster provided the means to share, but only the users could create the actual value for one another. As the visionary Kevin Kelly wrote in an essay called “Triumph of the Default,” engineers can influence the behavior of their users: Therefore the privilege of establishing what value the default is set at is an act of power and influence. Defaults are a tool not only for individuals to tame choices, but for systems designers—those who set the presets—to steer the system.

Backflip.com assumed that the personal utility was paramount; it provided an option for users to share their bookmarks, but users had to opt into it, which few did. Delicious, by contrast, didn’t provide this option; it always shared all your bookmarks. (It later added private bookmarks, but only after it achieved success as a “public-only” service.) As Kevin Kelly noted in his piece “Triumph of the Default” (see Chapter 4), the careful use of defaults can shape how users behave, because they communicate some expectation (the expectation has to be one the users are happy to follow). Backflip concentrated on personal value and assumed social value was optional.

Ante, “Napster’s Shawn Fanning: The Teen Who Woke Up Web Music,” BusinessWeek, April 12, 2000, Bloomberg, http://www.businessweek.com/ebiz/0004/em0412.htm (accessed January 9, 2010). 120 Napster acquired tens of millions of users in less than two years : Benny Evangelista, “News Analysis: Internet Music Will Still Play on Despite Napster’s Uncertain Future,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 18, 2001, Hearst Communications, http://www.sfgate.com/c/a/2001/02/18/BU39387.DTL (accessed January 9, 2010). 124 “He who receives ideas from me”: Quoted in John Pitman, “Open Access to Professional Information,” IMS Bulletin 36.8 (2007): 13. 125 “Triumph of the Default”: Kevin Kelly, “Triumph of the Default,” The Technium, June 22, 2009, Creative Commons, http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2009/06/triumph_of_the.php (accessed January 9, 2010). 126 tired of their country’s divisive politics: Sabrina Tavernise, “Young Pakistanis Take One Problem into Their Own Hands,” The New York Times, May 18, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/world/asia/19trash.html (accessed January 9, 2010).


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Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport

Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cal Newport, data science, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, financial independence, game design, Hacker News, index fund, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mr. Money Mustache, Pepto Bismol, pre–internet, price discrimination, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk

But then you start talking to scholars and writers who study the Amish seriously, and you begin to hear confusing statements that muddy these waters. John Hostetler, for example, who literally wrote the book on their society, claims the following: “Amish communities are not relics of a bygone era. Rather, they are demonstrations of a different form of modernity.” The technologist Kevin Kelly, who spent a significant amount of time among the Lancaster County Amish, goes even further, writing: “Amish lives are anything but antitechnological. In fact, on my several visits with them, I have found them to be ingenious hackers and tinkers, the ultimate makers and do-it-yourselvers. They are often, surprisingly, pro-technology.”

The problem is not electricity; it’s the fact that the grid connects them too strongly to the world outside of their local community, violating the Amish commitment to the biblical tenet to “be in the world, but not of it.” Once you encounter this more nuanced approach to technology, you can no longer dismiss the Amish lifestyle as a quaint curiosity. As John Hostetler explained, their philosophy is not a rejection of modernity, but a “different form” of it. Kevin Kelly goes a step further and claims that it’s a form of modernity that we cannot ignore given our current struggles. “In any discussion about the merits of avoiding the addictive grasp of technology,” he writes, “the Amish stand out as offering an honorable alternative.” It’s important to understand what exactly makes this alternative honorable, as it’s in these advantages that we’ll uncover a strong argument for the third principle of minimalism, which claims that approaching decisions with intention can be more important than the impact of the actual decisions themselves

,” FAQs, Facebook Investor Relations, https://investor.fb.com/resources/default.aspx, accessed July 11, 2018. “Amish communities are not relics”: John A. Hostetler, Amish Society, 4th ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), ix. “Amish lives are anything but antitechnological”: Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Viking, 2010), 217. “cruising down the road”: Kelly, What Technology Wants, 219. “smoking, noisy contraption”: Kelly, What Technology Wants, 218. In one memorable passage: Kelly, What Technology Wants, 221. Kelly is actually talking about a strict Mennonite family instead of an Amish family, but the border between strict Mennonites and normal Amish is blurred, so the example is relevant for our purposes.


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The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, bank run, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, connected car, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Filter Bubble, Freestyle chess, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, old-boy network, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, placebo effect, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, robo advisor, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, value engineering, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero-sum game

ALSO BY KEVIN KELLY Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World Asia Grace What Technology Wants Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities VIKING An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 penguin.com Copyright © 2016 by Kevin Kelly Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission.

Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. ISBN 9780525428084 (hardcover) ISBN 9780698183650 (ebook) Version_1 CONTENTS Also by Kevin Kelly Title Page Copyright INTRODUCTION 1. BECOMING 2. COGNIFYING 3. FLOWING 4. SCREENING 5. ACCESSING 6. SHARING 7. FILTERING 8. REMIXING 9. INTERACTING 10. TRACKING 11. QUESTIONING 12. BEGINNING ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES INDEX INTRODUCTION When I was 13, my father took me to visit a computer trade show in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

(Mei’s Answer),” Quora, March 18, 2015. Half of them are there for virtual sex: Frank Rose, “How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life,” Wired, July 24, 2007. urinal in the men’s restroom: Nicholas Negroponte, “Sensor Deprived,” Wired 2(10), October 1, 1994. “not enough Africa in them”: Kevin Kelly, “Gossip Is Philosophy,” Wired 3(5), May 1995. Project Jacquard: Virginial Postre, “Google’s Project Jacquard Gets It Right,” BloombergView, May 31, 2015. prototype from Northeastern University: Brian Heater, “Northeastern University Squid Shirt Torso-On,” Engadget, June 12, 2012. Sensory Substitution Vest: Shirley Li, “The Wearable Device That Could Unlock a New Human Sense,” Atlantic, April 14, 2015.


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The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? by David Brin

affirmative action, airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, data acquisition, death of newspapers, Extropian, Garrett Hardin, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, Iridium satellite, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, packet switching, pattern recognition, pirate software, placebo effect, plutocrats, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, telepresence, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UUNET, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, workplace surveillance , Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

At the opposite end of the “seriousness” spectrum from Adams, we find Dartmouth physicist Arthur Kantrowitz and philanthropist-investor George Soros, who have taken up the cause Karl Popper championed a generation ago and are campaigning that an “open society” is healthiest when it lives up to its name. Both men have been vigorous in promoting the notion that free speech and transparency are not only good but absolutely essential for maintaining a free, creative, and vigorous civilization. Kevin Kelly, executive editor of Wired magazine, expressed the same idea with the gritty clarity of informationage journalism: “The answer to the whole privacy question is more knowledge. More knowledge about whoʼs watching you. More knowledge about the information that flows between us—particularly the meta-information about who knows what and where itʼs going.”

Would another culture put up with the likes of Stewart Brand, always poking at stagnant structures, from state government to the stuffy profession of architecture? Would Steve Jobs or Andrew Grove be billionaires in an economy based on inherited advantage? Where else might happy magicians like Howard Rheingold and Kevin Kelly be more influential than establishment priests or scientists? Would important power brokers hang on the words of Esther Dyson, Sherry Turkle, and Dorothy Denning if this culture did not value original minds? Listening to such remarkable individuals, one can tell they know how lucky they are. Few other cultures would reward oddball iconoclasts whose sole common attribute is a hatred of clichés.

Yet the management of great enterprises ultimately comes down to the judgment (and guesswork) of directors, generals, and public officials. Things may be worse than most leaders believe. Earlier in this book we referred to modern observers who think we have entered an era of unpredictability. In Out of Control, Kevin Kelly described how chaos theory and new notions of emergent properties mean that complex systems will tend to behave in unpredictable ways as tiny perturbations propagate through time, almost as if they are taking on a life of their own. Elsewhere we discuss how open criticism can ameliorate such problems.


pages: 274 words: 75,846

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, A Pattern Language, adjacent possible, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple Newton, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, borderless world, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, disintermediation, don't be evil, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, fundamental attribution error, Gabriella Coleman, global village, Haight Ashbury, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Netflix Prize, new economy, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, recommendation engine, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social software, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, The future is already here, the scientific method, urban planning, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Just as some Marxists believed that the economic conditions of a society would inevitably propel it through capitalism and toward a world socialist regime, it’s easy to find engineers and technodeterminist pundits who believe that technology is on a set course. Sean Parker, the cofounder of Napster and rogue early president of Facebook, tells Vanity Fair that he’s drawn to hacking because it’s about “re-architecting society. It’s technology, not business or government, that’s the real driving force behind large-scale societal shifts.” Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired, wrote perhaps the boldest book articulating the technodeterminist view, What Technology Wants, in which he posits that technology is a “seventh kingdom of life,” a kind of meta-organism with desires and tendencies of its own. Kelly believes that the technium, as he calls it, is more powerful than any of us mere humans.

It didn’t get a very good reception—in fact, he was just about booed off the stage. “‘We just want to do cool stuff,’ was the attitude,” Scott told me later. “ ‘Don’t bother me with this politics stuff.’ ” Technodeterminists like to suggest that technology is inherently good. But despite what Kevin Kelly says, technology is no more benevolent than a wrench or a screwdriver. It’s only good when people make it do good things and use it in good ways. Melvin Kranzberg, a professor who studies the history of technology, put it best nearly thirty years ago, and his statement is now known as Kranzberg’s first law: “Technology is neither good or bad, nor is it neutral.”

execbios. 178 “come to Google because they choose to”: Greg Jarboe, “A ‘Fireside Chat’ with Google’s Sergey Brin,” Search Engine Watch, Oct. 16, 2003, accessed Dec. 16,2010, http://searchenginewatch.com/3081081. 178 “the future will be personalized”: Gord Hotckiss, “Just Behave: Google’s Marissa Mayer on Personalized Search,” Searchengineland, Feb. 23, 2007, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, http://searchengineland.com/just-behave-googles-marissa-mayer-on-personalized-search-10592. 179 “It’s technology, not business or government”: David Kirpatrick, “With a Little Help from his Friends,” Vanity Fair (Oct. 2010), accessed Dec. 16, 2010, www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/10/sean-parker-201010. 179 “seventh kingdom of life”: Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Viking, 2010). 180 “shirt or fleece that I own”: Mark Zuckerberg, remarks to Startup School Conference, XConomy, Oct. 18, 2010, accessed Feb. 8, 2010, www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2010/10/18/mark-zuckerberg-goes-to-startup-school-video//. 181 “ ‘the rest of the world is wrong’ ”: David A.


pages: 306 words: 78,893

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away by Doug Henwood

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, book value, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital divide, electricity market, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, feminist movement, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, government statistician, greed is good, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Mary Meeker, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, occupational segregation, PalmPilot, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, tech worker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, union organizing, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Back to the present. Modern mythmaking held that new technologies overturn old hierarchies, leading to a virtual social revolution—not in the very old-fashioned world of organized politics, of course, but in 24 After the New Economy the new one of wireless web connections.^^ When I interviewed Wired's Kevin Kelly, I interrupted his effusions to ask him what relevance they had in a world where the statistics showed that the gap between rich and poor—nationally and globally—has never been so wide, a world where half the population has never even made a phone call, Kelly responded by saying that there's never been so good a time to be poor, though he didn't offer any evidence.

As bugged computers, barcode-tracked packages and sateUite-tagged vehicles proUferate, redundant procedures and jobs can be eUminated and the extra work shifted to a core of intimidated and intensely supervised employees. If this is what productivity means, can we take a break now? 3 Income There's never been such a great time to he poor! —Kevin Kelly, ex-editor, Wired One of the supposed benefits of the New Economy is a new egalitarian-ism. Driven by dynamic markets, not stodgy old welfare states, it has reportedly given us the toppling of old hierarchies, the erosion of inherited privileges, and the democratization of wealth. In fact, the distribution of income in the U.S. in the early 2000s is about the most unequal it's ever been—and the same can be said of the distribution of world income.

Though it's sobering to learn that, according to a Scudder Kemper Investments poll, over 80% of Americans have neither heard nor read of a New Economy (reported in Business 2.0, September 12,2000, p. 36). 2. For a classic statement, see Wired's "Encyclopedia of the New Economy" at <hotwired.lycos.com/special/ene/>. There's also former Wired editor Kevin Kelly's "New Rules of the New Economy," <www.wired.coni/5.09/networkeconomy/>, as well as his exuberant but thinly argued expansion of that article into a book. New Rules for the New Economy (Kelly 1999). Kelly—now deposed as editor of Wired, a magazine long past its prime—combines born-again Christianity, Social Darwinism, and classic American huck-sterish optimism into a single package. 3.


pages: 395 words: 116,675

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, altcoin, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon tax, Columbian Exchange, computer age, Corn Laws, cosmological constant, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, Donald Davies, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Eben Moglen, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, endogenous growth, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fail fast, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, George Santayana, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, imperial preference, income per capita, indoor plumbing, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, land reform, Lao Tzu, long peace, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Necker cube, obamacare, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, twin studies, uber lyft, women in the workforce

In the early days of electricity, Park Benjamin, author of The Age of Electricity, observed that ‘not an electrical invention of any importance has been made but that the honour of its origin has been claimed by more than one person’. This phenomenon is so common that it must be telling us something about the inevitability of invention. As Kevin Kelly documents in his book What Technology Wants, we know of six different inventors of the thermometer, three of the hypodermic needle, four of vaccination, four of decimal fractions, five of the electric telegraph, four of photography, three of logarithms, five of the steamboat, six of the electric railroad.

Inexorable technological progress Simultaneous discovery and invention mean that both patents and Nobel Prizes are fundamentally unfair things. And indeed, it is rare for a Nobel Prize not to leave in its wake a train of bitterly disappointed individuals with very good cause to be bitterly disappointed. Nor is this matter confined to science and technology. Kevin Kelly catalogues many instances of simultaneous release of films with similar plots and of books with similar themes. As he drily remarks, after listing the many uncanny premonitions of Harry Potter themes in obscure books that J.K. Rowling never read: ‘Because a lot of money swirls around Harry Potter we have discovered that, strange as it sounds, stories of boy wizards in magical schools with pet owls who enter their other worlds through railway station platforms are inevitable at this point in Western culture.’

In retrospect, 1970 was probably the moment when plastic and aluminium made carrying wheels with the case practical for the first time. In practice, inventions rarely run late. They turn up at just the moment in history when it makes most sense that they do so. The first laptop, in 1982, came when computers had at last got small enough not to crush your knees through the floor. The sea fashions boats Kevin Kelly’s 2010 book is not the only one in recent years that has begun to describe technology in evolutionary terms. In 2009 Brian Arthur of the Santa Fe Institute published a book called The Nature of Technology: What it is and How it Evolves, in which he concluded ‘that novel technologies arise by combination of existing technologies and that (therefore) existing technologies beget further technologies . . . we can say that technology creates itself out of itself’.


pages: 369 words: 80,355

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room by David Weinberger

airport security, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, book scanning, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, Computer Lib, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, David Brooks, Debian, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of journalism, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, Gregor Mendel, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, linked data, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, P = NP, P vs NP, PalmPilot, Pluto: dwarf planet, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, semantic web, slashdot, social graph, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize

When Carr’s initial article came out in The Atlantic, there was some wonderful discussion of it among the elite set of thinkers—including Carr—who converse at Edge.org.14 Danny Hillis, a computing pioneer, agrees that something is making us stupid, but thinks that the “the flood of information” is the culprit. He also points to the role of politics. The writer Kevin Kelly wonders whether Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms” because he started using a typewriter, as Carr says, or if it was because “Nietzsche was ill and dying.” Larry Sanger, co-founder (and then critic) of Wikipedia, agrees that we’re becoming less able to string together thoughts, but thinks we should be blaming ourselves, not our technology.

Thus, the links that we all encounter in every encounter with the Web thoroughly transform the shape of knowledge, the role of authorities and credentials, and the reasons and places we allow our inquiries to stop. Permission-Free The first two characteristics of knowledge’s new infrastructure seem well-aligned with what we’ve taken to be “what knowledge wants,” to modify the title of an excellent book by Kevin Kelly.4 Who could complain about there being an overabundance of knowledge that is easily traversable via links? The Net being permission-free, on the other hand, feels like a challenge to traditional knowledge. Knowledge has been like a club that accepts new members—a book, an article, an idea—only after they’ve been examined by a credentialed board of experts.

Chapter 9: Building the New Infrastructure of Knowledge 1 Michael Barker, at the Harvard University Library, confirmed this as a ballpark figure in an email dated March 3, 2011. 2 James Crawford, “On the Future of Books,” October 14, 2010, Inside Google Books blog, http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/10/on-future-of-books.html. 3 Robert Darnton, “A Library Without Walls,” New York Review of Books, October 10, 2010, http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/oct/04/library-without-walls/. Disclosure: I am a member of the Digital Public Library of America’s “technical workstream,” and the library lab that I co-direct will have entered the DPLA’s call for project ideas before this book is printed. 4 Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (Penguin, 2010). 5 James Aitken Wylie, The History of Protestantism with Five Hundred and Fifty Illustrations by the Best Artist, Vol. 1 (Cassell, 1899), p. 113, http://books.google.com/books?id=kFU-AAAAYAAJ. 6 See Ethan Zuckerman’s excellent post “Shortcuts in the Social Graph,” October 14, 2010, http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2010/10/14/shortcuts-in-the-social-graph/. 7 During the 2008 presidential campaign, Sarah Palin was accused of pressuring a local librarian to censor some books.


pages: 314 words: 83,631

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by Andrew Blum

air freight, cable laying ship, call centre, digital divide, Donald Davies, global village, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, if you build it, they will come, inflight wifi, invisible hand, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, messenger bag, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, packet switching, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, satellite internet, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, undersea cable, urban planning, UUNET, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

The New York Times fretted: Ken Belson, “Senator’s Slip of the Tongue Keeps on Truckin’ Over the Web,” New York Times, July 17, 2006 (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/17/business/media/17stevens.html). “The cyborg future is here”: Clive Thompson, “Your Outboard Brain Knows All,” Wired, October 2007 (http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-10/st_thompson). The Silicon Valley philosopher Kevin Kelly: Kevin Kelly, “The Internet Mapping Project,” June 1, 2009 (http://www.kk.org/ct2/2009/06/the-internet-mapping-project.php). Sure enough, one stepped forward: Lic. Mara Vanina Oses “The Internet Mapping Project,” June 3, 2009 (http://psiytecnologia.wordpress.com/2009/06/03/the-internet-mapping-project/).

I’d feel better about outsourcing my life to machines if I could at least know where they were, who controls them, and who put them there. From climate change to food shortages to trash to poverty, the great global scourges of modern life are always made worse by not knowing. Yet we treat the Internet as if it were a fantasy. The Silicon Valley philosopher Kevin Kelly, faced with this chasm between the physical here and the missing virtual there, became curious if there might be a way to think of them together again. On his blog he solicited hand sketches of the “maps people have in their minds when they enter the Internet.” The goal of this “Internet Mapping Project,” as he described it, was to attempt to create a “folk cartography” that “might be useful for some semiotician or anthropologist.”


pages: 297 words: 83,651

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built, Faber & Faber, London: 2010, Kindle loc. 120. 25. To break an addiction, the neuroscientist Marc Lewis has argued, Marc Lewis, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease, Scribe: London, 2015. 26. The whole earth, according to this dispensation . . Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants, Viking: New York, 2010, pp. 26 and 515. 27. The technium was ‘actually a divine phenomenon . . . Kevin Kelly, ‘How Computer Nerds Describe God’, Christianity Today, 1 November 2002. 28. From Manuel Castells’ celebration of online ‘creative autonomy . . . Manuel Castells, Communication Power, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2009; Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Allen Lane: London, 2008. 29.

At its worst, cyber-utopianism has been a neo-liberal sublimation of 1960s communalism, reflecting the journey from the hippy Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog to Wired magazine. The whole earth, according to this dispensation, is a ‘global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us’, as executive editor of Wired, Kevin Kelly, put it.26 This conception, which he calls ‘the technium’, saw Kelly, Brand and their confederates serenaded by venture capital and lauded at Davos. But for Kelly, it had a more mystical significance. The technium was ‘actually a divine phenomenon that is a reflection of God’, he told Christianity Today in doxological tones.27 More circumspect in his book, he ventured that ‘if there is a God, the arc of the technium is aimed right at him’.


pages: 481 words: 125,946

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence by John Brockman

Adam Curtis, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, bread and circuses, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, constrained optimization, corporate personhood, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, discrete time, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial engineering, Flash crash, friendly AI, functional fixedness, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information trail, Internet of things, invention of writing, iterative process, James Webb Space Telescope, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, loose coupling, machine translation, microbiome, mirror neurons, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Y2K

STANISLAS DEHAENE Two Cognitive Functions Machines Still Lack MATT RIDLEY Among the Machines, Not Within the Machines STEPHEN M. KOSSLYN Another Kind of Diversity LUCA DE BIASE Narratives and Our Civilization MARGARET LEVI Human Responsibility D. A. WALLACH Amplifiers/Implementers of Human Choices RORY SUTHERLAND Make the Thing Impossible to Hate BRUCE STERLING Actress Machines KEVIN KELLY Call Them Artificial Aliens MARTIN SELIGMAN Do Machines Do? TIMOTHY TAYLOR Denkraumverlust GEORGE DYSON Analog, the Revolution That Dares Not Speak Its Name S. ABBAS RAZA The Values of Artificial Intelligence BRUCE PARKER Artificial Selection and Our Grandchildren NEIL GERSHENFELD Really Good Hacks DANIEL L.

So the fear that computers will become evil are unfounded, because it will never occur to them to take such actions against us. As well, both utopian and dystopian visions of AI are based on a projection of the future quite unlike anything history has given us. Instead of utopia or dystopia, think protopia, a term coined by the futurist Kevin Kelly, who described it in an Edge Conversation this way: “I call myself a protopian, not a utopian. I believe in progress in an incremental way where every year it’s better than the year before but not by very much—just a micro amount.”7 Almost all progress in science and technology, including computers and artificial intelligence, is of a protopian nature.

Those are tomorrow’s problems even more so. Yesterday’s “machines that think” problem will never appear upon the public stage. The machine that thinks is not a machine. It doesn’t think. It’s not even an actress. It’s a moldy dress-up chest full of old, mouse-eaten clothes. CALL THEM ARTIFICIAL ALIENS KEVIN KELLY Senior maverick, Wired; author, Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities The most important thing about making machines that can think is that they will think differently. Because of a quirk in our evolutionary history, we are cruising as if we were the only sentient species on our planet, leaving us with the incorrect idea that human intelligence is singular.


pages: 533

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

Largely as a result of the commercial and political world into which it was born, the internet has increasingly come under the direction and control of large corporate and political entities that filter and shape our online experience. Additionally, we can’t assume that technology means progress. In What Technology Wants (2010), Kevin Kelly memorably shows that ours is not the first age in which the beneficial promise of technology was massively overhyped. Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite, believed that his explosives would be a stronger deterrent to war ‘than a thousand world conventions’. The inventor of the machine gun believed his creation would ‘make war impossible’.

James Gleick, The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood (London: Fourth Estate, 2012), 42. 48. Harold Innis, Empire and Communications (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 30. 49. Anthony M. Townsend, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014), 59–60. 50. Benkler, Wealth of Networks, 30. 51. Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Penguin, 2010), 191–2. 52. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, ‘Notes on Electrification’, February 1921, reprinted (1977) in Collected Works, Vol. 42 (Moscow:Progress Publishers): 280–1, cited in Sally Wyatt, ‘Technological Determinism is Dead; Long Live Technological Determinism’, in Philosophy of Technology, 458. 53.

., ‘Mastering the Game of Go Without Human Knowledge’, Nature 550 (19 October 2017): 354–9. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 30/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS Notes 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 373 Susskind and Susskind, Future of the Professions, 165. Ibid. Ibid. Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that Will Shape Our Future (New York:Viking, 2016), 31. Emma Hinchliffe, ‘IBM’s Watson Supercomputer Discovers 5 New Genes Linked to ALS’, Mashable UK, 14 December 2016 <http:// mashable.com/2016/12/14/ibm-watson-als-research/?utm_ cid=mash-com-Tw-tech-link%23sd613jsnjlqd#HJziN5r0aGq5> (accessed 28 November 2017).


pages: 159 words: 45,073

GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, Diane Coyle, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial intermediation, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Les Trente Glorieuses, Long Term Capital Management, Mahbub ul Haq, mutually assured destruction, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, new economy, Occupy movement, Phillips curve, purchasing power parity, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, University of East Anglia, working-age population

To give another example, conventional statistics would count a musician as more productive if she gave twice as many performances by performing a Mozart concerto at double speed.10 The economist William Baumol identified this productivity challenge in the performing arts long ago, as well as its application to other services such as health care. The same phenomenon applies in the increasingly creative digital economy. The tech guru Kevin Kelly writes: Nobody ever suggested that Picasso should spend fewer hours painting per picture in order to boost his wealth or improve the economy. The value he added to the economy could not be optimized for productivity. Generally any task that can be measured by the metrics of productivity—output per hour—is a task we want automation to do.

Andrew Walker, “UK Productivity Puzzle Baffles Economists,” BBC World Service, 17 October 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-19981498. 9. Diane Coyle, The Weightless World (Oxford: Capstone, 1996). 10. W. J. Baumol and W. G. Bowen, “On the Performing Arts: The Anatomy of Their Economic Problems,” American Economic Review 55, no. 1/2 (1965): 495–502. 11. Kevin Kelly, “The Post-Productive Economy,” The Technium, 1 January 2013, http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2013/01/the_post-produc.php. 12. Paul Krugman, “Robots and Robber Barons,” New York Times, 9 December 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/opinion/krugman-robots-and-robber-barons.html?_r=0. 13.


pages: 532 words: 139,706

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, death of newspapers, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, facts on the ground, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google Earth, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, semantic web, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, spectrum auction, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, X Prize, yield management, zero-sum game

But publishers did not agree to allow all books to become part of search. The gulf between Google and the publishers and authors was vast. Google wanted to push the envelope of copyright, expanding the definition of fair use to allow more extensive quotations from books. It stressed the rights of search users, echoing the views of Web pioneers like Kevin Kelly, the “senior maverick” at Wired magazine, who said that in return for government copyright protection, authors and publishers had a “copyduty” to “allow that work to be searched.” Google was offering to pay the cost of moving and scanning the books; what publisher—or library or university or author—could refuse that offer?

Most consumers trust the information in the New York Times, the Think Differentness of Apple, the taste of Coca Cola, the safety of a Volvo, the bargain prices at Wal-Mart or Southwest Airlines. If we think of the Internet as a copying machine that produces free information, as one of the founders of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly, wrote on his blog, then “how does one make money selling free copies?” Kelly’s answer: “When copies are free, you need to sell things which cannot be copied.” The first of these, he said, was “trust,” which is not duplicable. “Trust must be earned, over time.” That trust is founded, in part, on a feeling that a company both serves noble ends and yields wealth for its shareholders.

(2004-2005) 122 a faux documentary by two young journalists: EPIC 2014 available on YouTube. 122 ”evil empire“: author interview with Sheryl Sandberg, October 10, 2007. 122 ”Did not begin until Google went public“: author interview with Eric Schmidt, April 16, 2008. 122 It took Microsoft fifteen years: time line on Microsoft.com. 123 ”There’s that same ’think big’ attitude“: Steven Lurie, quoted in Gary Rivlin, ”Relax, Bill Gates; It’s Google’s Turn as the Villain,“ New York Times, August 24, 2005. 123 their ”moon shot“: Jeffrey Toobin, ”Google’s Moon Shot,“ The New Yorker, April 18, 2007. 123 ”Google decides not to use that content“: Copies of Google library contracts with the University of Michigan and the University of California, 2006. 124 ”copyduty“: Kevin Kelly ”Scan This Book!“ New York Times Magazine, May 14, 2006. 124 ”People don’t buy books“: author interview with Sergey Brin, March 26, 2008. 125”Google went to libraries“: author interview with Richard Sarnoff, January 16, 2008. 125 He mentioned ”the huge risk“: author interview with Paul Aiken, February 14, 2008. 126 ”Fair use is as important a right as copyright infringement“: author interviews with David Drummond, September 11, 2007, and March 25, 2008. 126 ”finding a way to move forward“: author interview with John Hennessy June 9, 2008. 127 ”If they had a copyright lawyer“: author interview with Tim Wu, September 20, 2007. 127 ”Our patents, trademarks, trade secrets“: Google IPO prospectus, 2004. 127 ”I think that’s true“: author interview with Megan Smith, April 17, 2008. 128 ”We’re a technology company“: author interview with David Eun, September 18, 2007. 128 ”It’s probably both“: author interview with Paul Aitken, February 14, 2008. 128 ”The first thing he said was“: author interview with Mel Karmazin, May 13, 2008. 128 That year, Yahoo generated profits of $1.1 billion: Richard Siklos, ”When Terry Met Jerry Yahoo“ New York Times, January 29. 2006. 129 Google acquired fifteen smaller digital companies: financial results for 2005 available on Google.com. 129 The circulation of daily newspapers ... fall more steeply: Newspaper Association of America Web site. 129 falling 20 percent on average: Dick Edmonds, ”A Bad Year for Newspaper Stocks—a Worse Year for the Gray Lady“ Poynter Online, January 12, 2006. 130 U.S. content and software companies lost: Alan Cane, ”Attacking the Pirates,“ Financial Times, February 28, 2007. 130 About one billion songs per month: Ethan Smith, ”Sales of Music, Long in Decline, Plunge Sharply,“ Wall Street Journal, March 21, 2007. 130 ”I don’t believe they have any incentive“: author interview with Sir Howard Stringer, February 8, 2008. 130 three years earlier, in 2002: National Cable and Telecommunications Association. 130 The radio industry was also squeezed: ”Digitalization of the Media Industry: How Close to a Tipping Point?


pages: 294 words: 96,661

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity by Byron Reese

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, basic income, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cognitive bias, computer age, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, dark matter, DeepMind, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, estate planning, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, full employment, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Moravec's paradox, Nick Bostrom, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, OpenAI, pattern recognition, profit motive, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

For instance, AI will soon take all the satellite data we have and find ancient cities for archaeologists to dig up, keep track of populations of wild animals, and monitor vegetation growth. Then it will take all the traffic data and use it to help us build smarter roads, time traffic lights more effectively, and reduce accidents. The list is endless. Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine, summed all this up when he tweeted, “The business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI.” So why can an AI do all those things for us, but at the same time have all the limits we just described? It is because we’re good at teaching AIs to do one thing at a time.

Those who answered our foundational question about what they are as “machine,” as well as those who see themselves as monists, may very well regard the AGI as alive, while others may not make that determination, or waver, in good conscience, uncomfortably on the fence. The second question, “What are humans for?” is concisely framed by Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired: We’ll spend the next decade—indeed, perhaps the next century—in a permanent identity crisis, constantly asking ourselves what humans are for. . . . The greatest benefit of the arrival of artificial intelligence is that AIs will help define humanity. We need AIs to tell us who we are.

He then goes on to add, “And we’ve certainly seen that recently with Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, all saying AI is just taking off and it’s going to take over the world very quickly. And the thing that they share is none of them work in this technological field.” And finally, many in the industry are almost giddy with optimism about AI. Kevin Kelly is one of them. He believes that AI will “enliven inert objects, much as electricity did more than a century ago. Everything that we formerly electrified we will now cognitize. This new utilitarian AI will also augment us individually as people (deepening our memory, speeding our recognition) and collectively as a species.”


pages: 289 words: 99,936

Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age by Virginia Eubanks

affirmative action, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, call centre, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, desegregation, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, game design, global village, index card, informal economy, invisible hand, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, microcredit, new economy, post-industrial society, race to the bottom, rent control, rent stabilization, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social contagion, South of Market, San Francisco, tech worker, telemarketer, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban planning, web application, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

In the popular press, accounts of the information economy posit that increased instability and volatility can offer more horizontal forms of power, free workers to retool their skills and renegotiate their work arrangements, and sweep away old forms of inequity.12 The combination of new IT and leaner, neoliberal governance, optimists argue, results in rapidly increasing wealth and flatter hierarchies, although these claims have been somewhat muted in recent years.13 The most popular of these narratives, penned by business writers, futurists, and management gurus, often make it to the bestseller lists, suggesting that they tap into widely held hopes 56 Chapter 4 and beliefs about the power of IT and the new economy to dismantle outof-date institutions, decentralize power, and create broad-based equity.14 For example, Kevin Kelly, executive editor of Wired magazine, argues in his 1998 book, New Rules for the New Economy, that the network economy is based on the principles of flux. He writes, “Change, even in its shocking forms, is rapid difference. Flux, on the other hand, is more like the Hindu god Shiva, a creative force of destruction and genesis.

High-Tech Development in an Unflat World The vulnerability of American workers, particularly those already marginalized by race, class, and gender, became increasingly clear as the global financial crisis touched more people’s lives and brought the risks of the new economy to the doorsteps of middle-class homes. There is nothing intrinsic to the information economy that delivers the level playing field, flattened hierarchies, and increased opportunity promised by writers like Kevin Kelly or Thomas Friedman. The information economy does not sweep inequality away before it in a cleansing deluge. Rather, it injects more unpredictable, explosive change into an economic field already marked by durable disparity. The information economy is not Noah’s flood, it is Hurricane Katrina. On the Gulf Coast, while the hurricane itself was not entirely predictable, its effects certainly were, if attention was paid to the existing topography of inequality.

Quality replaces quantity, knowledge replaces physical capital, and flexible networks replace rigid organization charts” (Henwood 2003, 3–4). 14. Among the most popular are Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1976), Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave (1980), John Naisbett’s Megatrends (1984), Peter Drucker’s Post-Capitalist Society (1993), Bill Gates’s The Road Ahead (1996), Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control (1995) and New Rules for the New Economy (1998), Esther Dyson’s Release 2.0 (1997), Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat (2005), and Don Tapscott’s Wikinomics (2006). 15. Volatility is increasingly the topic of policy discussions about inequality and development. As Joshua Aizenman and Brian Pinto argue in Managing Economic Volatility and Crises: A Practitioner’s Guide (2005), there is a significant relationship between economic volatility and inequality.


Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age by Alex Wright

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, barriers to entry, British Empire, business climate, business intelligence, Cape to Cairo, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Babbage, Computer Lib, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, linked data, Livingstone, I presume, lone genius, machine readable, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norman Mailer, out of africa, packet switching, pneumatic tube, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog

“Half or more of computer science is heads” (meaning, roughly, hippies), wrote Stewart Brand in a landmark profile of the Bay Area computer science scene for Rolling Stone magazine.17 Imbued with an ethos of individual freedom and self-expression, many of the early acolytes of the digital revolution—like Brand, Kevin Kelly, Howard Rheingold, and others—came of age during this period when top-down schemes were seen as tools of suppression and control, administered by “the Man.” Those counterculture idealists all opposed war and believed in the possibility of emerging technologies to usher in a new age of planetary consciousness and spiritual enlightenment.

Applying this model, Heylighen believes, will finally transform the chaos of the Web “into an intelligent, adaptive, selforganizing system of shared knowledge.”20 That notion of an emergent, evolving system has found plenty of adherents in the years since the Web first started to command a broad public audience. As Wired executive editor Kevin Kelly put it: “The revolution launched by Netscape’s IPO was only marginally about hypertext and human knowledge. At its heart was a new kind of participation that has since developed into an emerging culture based on sharing.” Kelly goes on, however, to evoke the same strain of technological optimism that marked the essays of the early twentieth-century visionaries, predicting that “the ways of participating unleashed by hyperlinks are creating a new type of thinking— part human and part machine—found nowhere else on the planet or in history.”21 Such a notion of networked, machine-aided thought seems barely removed from Wells’s aspirations for a “greater mental superstructure,” Otlet’s “mechanical and collective brain,” or Engelbart’s hopes for “augmenting human intellect.” 287 C ATA L O G I N G T H E WO R L D That notion of an emergent, bottom-up system has also fueled speculation about the possibility of so-called collective intelligence, the notion that new forms of thought may emerge out of the ether of collaborative intellectual work taking place on the Web.

And while he might well have been flummoxed by the anything-goes ethos of present-day social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter, he also imagined a system that allowed groups of individuals to take part in collaborative experiences like lectures, opera performances, or scholarly meetings, where they might “applaud” or “give ovations.” It seems a short conceptual hop from here to Facebook’s ubiquitous “Like” button.26 The notion of a “world brain” once evoked by H. G. Wells and Otlet has found plenty of adherents in the modern era. Contemporary 292 E ntering the S trea m p­ undits like Ray Kurzweil, Howard Bloom, Kevin Kelly, and others have all advocated the possibility of a global planetary awakening, as the Web takes us to the next step in the evolution of human consciousness. In the end, what distinguishes Otlet’s vision from these cyber-utopians is his belief in the positive role of institutions. More than simply individuals were enlightened; institutions too could be enlightened.


pages: 323 words: 95,939

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Andrew Keen, bank run, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, cashless society, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, disintermediation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, Elliott wave, European colonialism, Extropian, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, Inbox Zero, invention of agriculture, invention of hypertext, invisible hand, iterative process, James Bridle, John Nash: game theory, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, messenger bag, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, passive investing, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Pan Syndrome, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, social graph, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

Mathew Barrett Gross and Mel Gilles, The Last Myth (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2012). 2. Rocco Castoro, “Ray Kurzweil: That Singularity Guy,” Vice, April 1, 2009, www.vice.com. 3. John Brockman, “The Technium and the 7th Kingdom of Life: A Talk with Kevin Kelly,” Edge, July 19, 2007, www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kelly07/kelly07_index.html. 4. Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Viking, 2010), 187. 5. Ibid., 188. 6. Ibid., 189. 7. Ibid., 356. 8. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986). 9.

Consciousness, such as it is, is better performed by some combination of microchips and nanobots than our old carbon sacks, and what we think of as people are discontinued. Kurzweil may push the envelope on this line of thought, but a growing cadre of scientists and commentators have both wittingly and unwittingly gotten on his singularity bandwagon. Their credentials, intelligence, and persuasiveness make their arguments difficult to refute. Kevin Kelly, for instance, convincingly portrays technology as a partner in human evolution. In his book What Technology Wants, he makes the case that technology is emerging as the “seventh kingdom of life on Earth”—along with plants, insects, fungi, and so on. Although he expresses himself with greater humility and admirable self-doubt than Kurzweil, Kelly also holds that technology’s growth and development is inevitable, even desirable.


The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do by Erik J. Larson

AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, Boeing 737 MAX, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Georg Cantor, Higgs boson, hive mind, ImageNet competition, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, retrograde motion, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yochai Benkler

T H E E VOLU T ION A RY T ECH NOLOGISTS Many AI enthusiasts who hold to an inevitability thesis (superintelligent machines are coming, no ­matter what we do) hold to this ­because it plays on evolutionary themes, and thus con­ve­niently absolves individual 42 T he S implified W orld scientists from the responsibility of needing to make scientific breakthroughs or develop revolutionary ideas. Artificial intelligence just evolves, like we did. We can call the futurists and AI believers in this camp evolutionary technologists, or ETs. The ET view is popu­lar among new age technologists like Wired cofounder Kevin Kelly, who argues in his 2010 book What Technology Wants that AI w ­ on’t come about as the work of a “mad scientist,” but simply as an evolutionary pro­cess on the planet, much like natu­ral evolution.6 According to this view, the world is becoming “intelligenized” (Kelly’s word), and more and more complex and intelligent forms of technology are emerging without explicit h­ uman design.7 Such thinkers also might envision the World Wide Web as a g­ iant, growing brain. ­

Yochai Benkler, Harvard University professor of Entrepreneurial ­Legal Studies, proclaimed in his widely read The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom in 2006 that a new era was upon us, a kind of revolution where large numbers of networked p­ eople would take on collaborative proj­ects online, all for the public good, without requirements like paychecks.3 Wikipedia seemed to buttress his point, a case of collaborative production without expectation of financial recompense. Wired editor Kevin Kelly (and ­others) l­ater called Benkler’s paean to online collaboration a hive mind, a nod to the social intelligence of bees, without a whisper of 242 T he ­F uture of the M yth irony or derision. Benkler himself prefaced his academically serious rallying cry to the Web 2.0 world with a quote from John Stuart Mill: “­Human nature is not a machine to be built a­ fter a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living ­thing.” 4 It’s an excellent quote.

John Von Neumann, Theory of Self-­R eproducing Automata, ed. Arthur W. Banks (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966), fifth lecture, 78. 4. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013). 5. Stuart Russell, ­Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Prob­lem of Control (New York: Viking, 2019), 37. 6. Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Penguin, 2010). 7. Strangely, or maybe refreshingly, Kelly has since distanced himself from the AI myth. Writing in Wired in 2017, he argues that “intelligenization” ­isn’t leading to superintelligence ­a fter all. He points out that intelligence is varied and polymorphous, and that seemingly unintelligent animals 286 N O T E S T O P A G E S 4 3 – 51 like squirrels remember the locations of potentially thousands of buried nuts for l­ ater consumption, a feat which ­humans would no doubt fail to replicate.


pages: 196 words: 54,339

Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, clockwork universe, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, digital capitalism, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, gig economy, Google bus, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, invisible hand, iterative process, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, new economy, patient HM, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, theory of mind, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

The cycles of life are understood not as opportunities to learn or let go, but as inconveniences to ignore or overcome Steven Salzberg, “Did a Biotech CEO Reverse Her Own Aging Process? Probably Not,” Forbes, August 1, 2016. 44. Or they sell the printers at a loss and then overcharge us for the ink cartridges Chris Hoffman, “Why Is Printer Ink So Expensive?” How-To Geek, September 22, 2016. 45. Technology is not driving itself Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (London: Penguin, 2011). They worked for themselves, fewer days per week, with greater profits, and in better health Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York: Basic Books, 1993). They came up with two main innovations Douglas Rushkoff, Life, Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back (New York: Random House, 2011). 46.

the New York Stock Exchange was actually purchased by its derivatives exchange in 2013 Nina Mehta and Nandini Sukumar, “Intercontinental Exchange to Acquire NYSE for $8.2 Billion,” Bloomberg, December 20, 2012. 47. digital technology came to the rescue, providing virtual territory for capital’s expansion Joel Hyatt, Peter Leyden, and Peter Schwartz, The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity (New York: Basic Books, 2000). Kevin Kelly, New Rules for a New Economy (London: Penguin, 1999). corporate returns on assets have been steadily declining for over seventy-five years John Hagel et al., foreword, The Shift Index 2013: The 2013 Shift Index Series (New York: Deloitte, 2013). 48. One or two superstars get all the plays, and everyone else sells almost nothing M.


pages: 222 words: 54,506

One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com by Richard L. Brandt

Amazon Web Services, automated trading system, big-box store, call centre, cloud computing, deal flow, drop ship, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Free Software Foundation, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, new economy, Pershing Square Capital Management, science of happiness, search inside the book, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, software patent, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

He has already dropped one version to $139—cheaper, as his TV ads say, than a good pair of designer sunglasses. In October 2009, blogger John Walkenbach graphed the declining price of the Kindle, and noticed it was on a straight-line trajectory that pointed to zero in the second half of 2011. Author and blogger Kevin Kelly asked Bezos about that trend line in August 2010. Bezos smiled and said, “Oh, you noticed that.” And then smiled again. Then Michael Arrington at TechCrunch came up with a business model that would make it possible. In January 2010, Amazon made a great offer to select customers: Buy a Kindle, but if you don’t like it, get a full refund—and keep the device.

(as he wrote in: John Sargent, “A Message from Macmillan CEO John Sargent,” Macmillanspeaks.com, February 3, 2010, http://blog.macmillanspeaks.com/a-message-from-macmillan-ceo-john-sargent/. 146. John Walkenbach graphed: John Walkenbach, “Another Kindle 2 Price Reduction,” J-Walk Blog, October 7, 2009. http://j-walkblog.com/index.php?/weblog/posts/another_kindle_2_price_reduction/. 146. Bezos smiled and said: Kevin Kelly, “Free Kindle This November,” kk.org, February 2011, www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/02/free_kindle_thi.php. 146. He quotes “a reliable: Michael Arrington, “Amazon Wants to Give a Free Kindle to All Amazon Prime Subscribers,” TechCrunch, February 12, 2010, http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/12/amazon-wants-to-give-a-free-kindle-to-all-amazon-prime-subscribers/.


pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Alignment Problem, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, endogenous growth, energy transition, European colonialism, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, frictionless market, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hacker Conference 1984, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, Laplace demon, launch on warning, life extension, long peace, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahbub ul Haq, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, negative emissions, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, obamacare, ocean acidification, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, radical life extension, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, Social Justice Warrior, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y2K

Sullivan, Sam Taub (Uppsala Conflict Data Program), Kyla Thomas, Jennifer Truman (Bureau of Justice Statistics), Jean Twenge, Bas van Leeuwen (OECD Clio Infra), Carlos Vilalta, Christian Welzel (World Values Survey), Justin Wolfers, and Billy Woodward (Science Heroes). David Deutsch, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Kevin Kelly, John Mueller, Roslyn Pinker, Max Roser, and Bruce Schneier read a draft of the entire manuscript and offered invaluable advice. I also profited from comments by experts who read chapters or excerpts, including Scott Aronson, Leda Cosmides, Jeremy England, Paul Ewald, Joshua Goldstein, A. C. Grayling, Joshua Greene, Cesar Hidalgo, Jodie Jackson, Lawrence Krauss, Branko Milanović, Robert Muggah, Jason Nemirow, Matthew Nock, Ted Nordhaus, Anthony Pagden, Robert Pinker, Susan Pinker, Stephen Radelet, Peter Scoblic, Martin Seligman, Michael Shellenberger, and Christian Welzel.

Soon, cheap, solar-powered LED lamps will transform the lives of the more than one billion people without access to electricity, allowing them to read the news or do their homework without huddling around an oil drum filled with burning garbage. The declining proportion of our lives we have to forfeit for light, appliances, and food may be part of a general law. The technology expert Kevin Kelly has proposed that “over time, if a technology persists long enough, its costs begin to approach (but never reach) zero.”19 As the necessities of life get cheaper, we waste fewer of our waking hours obtaining them, and have more time and money left over for everything else—and the “everything else” gets cheaper, too, so we can experience more of them.

Let’s start with the historical sweep: whether mass destruction by an individual is the natural outcome of the process set in motion by the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. According to this narrative, technology allows people to accomplish more and more with less and less, so given enough time, it will allow one individual to do anything—and given human nature, that means destroy everything. But Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine and author of What Technology Wants, argues that this is in fact not the way technology progresses.40 Kelly was the co-organizer (with Stewart Brand) of the first Hackers’ Conference in 1984, and since that time he has repeatedly been told that any day now technology will outrun humans’ ability to domesticate it.


pages: 285 words: 58,517

The Network Imperative: How to Survive and Grow in the Age of Digital Business Models by Barry Libert, Megan Beck

active measures, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, business intelligence, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, disintermediation, diversification, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, future of work, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of writing, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, late fees, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Oculus Rift, pirate software, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, software as a service, software patent, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Wall-E, women in the workforce, Zipcar

First eBook Edition: June 2016 ISBN: 978-1-63369-205-3 eISBN: 978-1-63369-206-0 Dedications To my wife, who taught me the power of love To my two sons, who taught me the value of life To my friends, who taught me the importance of kindness —Barry Libert To my mother, my lifelong reference point for both greatness and practicality —Megan Beck To my invaluable networks: To my reverse mentors—children, granddaughter, students, and staff To my friends, colleagues, clients, and research collaborators To my beloved late wife, Dina, whose love and inspiration have accompanied me throughout my life —Jerry Wind Special Thanks Susan Corso for her insight and editing George Calapai for his inspired digital platform CONTENTS Part One THE PROMISE The Value Is in the Network • Digital Networks Are Eating the World • Networks Have Big Advantages Part Two THE PRINCIPLES Ten Strategies for Creating Network Value Introduction to the Ten Principles • Principle 1, Technology: From Physical to Digital • Principle 2, Assets: From Tangible to Intangible • Principle 3, Strategy: From Operator to Allocator • Principle 4, Leadership: From Commander to Co-creator • Principle 5, Customers: From Customers to Contributors • Principle 6, Revenues: From Transaction to Subscription • Principle 7, Employees: From Employees to Partners • Principle 8, Measurement: From Accounting to Big Data • Principle 9, Boards: From Governance to Representation • Principle 10, Mindset: From Closed to Open Aspire to These Ten Principles Part Three THE PIVOT Five Steps for Implementing Network Business Models Introduction to PIVOT • Pinpoint: Identify Your Current Business Model • Inventory: Take Stock of All Your Assets • Visualize: Create Your New Network Business Model • Operate: Enact Your Network Business Model • Track: Measure What Matters for a Network Business Reflecting on PIVOT Part Four THE PRACTICE Becoming a Network Leader • Leaders Need to Think and Act Differently • You Are the Leader of Your Own Network Notes Index Acknowledgments About the Authors A CALL TO ACTION The Digital Revolution gets all the headlines these days. But turning slowly beneath the fast-forward turbulence . . . is a much more profound revolution—the Network Economy. —Kevin Kelly, founder, Wired magazine HISTORY HAS CROSSED A CRITICAL INFLECTION POINT. THE formal frameworks used to design and structure firms, lead, govern, and value them are becoming obsolete. The driving force behind this accelerating change is a shift from tangible to intangible, physical to digital, and firm-based to network-based business models.

Doing the hard work and realizing the value of digital networks in your organization—well, that’s your job. Join the network movement to access our digital tools, audit your business model, and create a plan for growth at openmatters.com. NETWORKS HAVE BIG ADVANTAGES In the network economy, success is self-reinforcing: it obeys the law of increasing returns. —Kevin Kelly, founder, Wired magazine CONNECTING THINGS CREATES GREAT POWER. A link, a channel, a highway—all act as permanent conduits over which many things can flow. Networks, pathways between many nodes, have always been important to the economy. Consider the US interstate highway system, which was authorized by President Eisenhower in 1956.


pages: 385 words: 111,113

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

“Gartner predicts one in three jobs will be converted to software, robots and smart machines by 2025,” said Gartner research director Peter Sondergaard. “New digital businesses require less labor; machines will make sense of data faster than humans can.”10 How we interact with robots will determine how successful we will be in the new economy and society that is coming. Kevin Kelly, former editor of Wired magazine, said, “This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines. You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots.”11 Robots will change everything from how we work, play, socialise and care for ourselves.

Regardless, we do need a legal framework for the operation of self-driving cars, robotic healthcare workers, drones and other such robots that allow their safe operation. I think the rights of robots are wrapped up in those same considerations. Are we prepared to enter the era of machines and robots? Some people have been ready for decades. Others may never be ready, as long as they live. Kevin Kelly offers a helpful perspective, as quoted earlier: “You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots.” If you want a yes or no answer for society as a whole, and one big reason, the answer is no and the reason is because robots will be able to replace 50 to 70 per cent of the jobs we do today, and that is something the vast majority of workers and dependents are not ready for, and which no government on earth, not even Japan’s, is properly preparing its people for.

After 40 years, it is still considered one of the defining essays on robotics in society. 4 International Federation of Robotics, http://www.ifr.org/industrial-robots/statistics/. 5 IEEE.org, http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/041410-world-robot-population. 6 iRobot financial reports 7 Michael Addady, “The number of drones expected to sell during the holidays is scaring the government,” Fortune, 29 September 2015. 8 Author’s own estimate based on PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), IHC research and annual vehicle sales projections 9 As do autonomous vehicles, the Hubble Space Telescope and my iRobot vacuum cleaner 10 http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/smart-robots-will-take-third-jobs-2025-gartner-says/ 11 Kevin Kelly, “Better than human: Why Robots Will—and Must—Take our Jobs,” Wired, 24 December 2014, http://www.wired.com/2012/12/ff-robots-will-take-our-jobs/. 12 “Amazon Acquires Kiva Systems in Second-Biggest Takeover,” Bloomberg Business, 19 March 2012. 13 Called Hangar One, the hangar is located at Moffett Federal Airfield.


pages: 339 words: 105,856

Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey

agricultural Revolution, CRISPR, Donner party, hive mind, Kevin Kelly, RFID, side project

It was on the New York Times Best Sellers list, and the five individual parts were clogging up the top of Amazon’s science fiction Best Sellers lists. It was a bizarre feeling, a mix of exhilaration and embarrassment. I was sure I didn’t deserve any of this. The feeling was crippling at times. Around the same time, I read Kevin Kelly’s excellent book What Technology Wants. Kevin helps dispel the illusion of singular creators, discoverers, and inventors. What is true of the sciences I believe is also true of art. Success in art lies as much in the changing tastes of the crowd as in the offerings. There is a varied froth of material being generated at all times, much of it along narrow themes, and when the need from the audience becomes great enough, one stream of that art is rewarded.

A thunderclap, followed by another, long strides taking him past us, a flutter of wind in my hair, the four of us frozen as Max bolts from the trailer and out of sight, doing the opposite of what he was built for, choosing an action arrived at on his own. Afterword One of my favorite questions to ask my futurist friends is “When do you think AI will come online?” I asked Rod Brooks once, and he laughed and said it was too far away to even contemplate. I asked Sam Harris, and he thought it would be very soon. But it was my friend Kevin Kelly who gave me the most shocking answer. “It’s already here,” he said. This felt like an answer designed to shock rather than illuminate, but hearing Kevin’s rationalization, I came away in agreement. Machines are already doing what we very recently said would be impossible (driving cars; winning at chess, go, and Jeopardy!

They can share their information with each other and with all future machines. The AI only needs to learn to walk once. It only needs to master chess once. And it has them mastered forever. When the strangeness happens, I think it’ll be a glitch. We might not even understand what caused it or be able to reproduce it at first. Kevin Kelly thinks we won’t even know it happened for the longest time. “What’s the first thing AI will do when it becomes self-aware?” he asked me. “What?” I wanted to know. “Hide,” Kevin said. “The first thing it’ll do is hide.” Silo Stories In the Air Gears whir; an escapement lets loose; wound springs explode a fraction of an inch, and a second hand lurches forward and slams to a stop.


pages: 416 words: 106,582

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking by John Brockman

23andMe, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biofilm, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, butterfly effect, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data acquisition, David Brooks, delayed gratification, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Garrett Hardin, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, market design, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, open economy, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, power law, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Satyajit Das, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, security theater, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, sugar pill, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Jon Kleinberg E Pluribus Unum The challenge for a distributed system is to achieve this illusion of a single unified behavior in the face of so much underlying complexity. Stefano Boeri A Proxemics of Urban Sexuality Even the warmest and most cohesive community can rapidly dissolve in the absence of erotic tension. Kevin Kelly Failure Liberates Success Failure is not something to be avoided but something to be cultivated. Nicholas A. Christakis Holism Holism takes a while to acquire and appreciate. It is a grown-up disposition. Robert R. Provine TANSTAAFL “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” [is] a universal truth having broad and deep explanatory power in science and daily life.

Even the most insurmountable ethnic or religious barriers can suddenly disappear in the furor of intercourse; even the warmest and most cohesive community can rapidly dissolve in the absence of erotic tension. To understand how our cosmopolitan and multigendered cities work, we need a proxemics of urban sexuality. Failure Liberates Success Kevin Kelly Editor-at-large, Wired magazine; author, What Technology Wants We can learn nearly as much from an experiment that doesn’t work as from one that does. Failure is not something to be avoided but something to be cultivated. That’s a lesson from science that benefits not only laboratory research but design, sport, engineering, art, entrepreneurship, and even daily life itself.

I want to find the hidden meanings, the unexpected correlations that reveal trends and risk factors of which I had been unaware. In an era of oversharing, we need to think more about data-driven self-discovery. A small but fast-growing self-tracking movement is already showing the potential of such thinking, inspired by Kevin Kelly’s quantified self and Gary Wolf’s data-driven life. With its mobile sensors and apps and visualizations, this movement is tracking and measuring exercise, sleep, alertness, productivity, pharmaceutical responses, DNA, heartbeat, diet, financial expenditure—and then sharing and displaying its findings for greater collective understanding.


pages: 379 words: 109,612

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future by John Brockman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asperger Syndrome, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, biofilm, Black Swan, bread and circuses, British Empire, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Danny Hillis, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, financial engineering, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Google Earth, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lone genius, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, social distancing, social graph, social software, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telepresence, the medium is the message, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yochai Benkler

The Net’s Impact on Our Minds and Future Edited by John Brockman To KHM Contents Cover Title Page Preface: The Edge Question Introduction: The Dawn of Entanglement: W. Daniel Hillis The Bookless Library: Nicholas Carr The Invisible College: Clay Shirky Net Gain: Richard Dawkins Let Us Calculate: Frank Wilczek The Waking Dream: Kevin Kelly To Dream the Waking Dream in New Ways: Richard Saul Wurman Tweet Me Nice: Ian Gold and Joel Gold The Dazed State: Richard Foreman What’s Missing Here?: Matthew Ritchie Power Corrupts: Daniel C. Dennett The Rediscovery of Fire: Chris Anderson The Rise of Social Media Is Really a Reprise: June Cohen The Internet and the Loss of Tranquility: Noga Arikha The Greatest Detractor to Serious Thinking Since Television: Leo Chalupa The Large Information Collider, BDTs, and Gravity Holidays on Tuesdays: Paul Kedrosky The Web Helps Us See What Isn’t There: Eric Drexler Knowledge Without, Focus Within, People Everywhere: David Dalrymple A Level Playing Field: Martin Rees Move Aside, Sex: Seth Lloyd Rivaling Gutenberg: John Tooby The Shoulders of Giants: William Calvin Brain Candy and Bad Mathematics: Mark Pagel Publications Can Perish: Robert Shapiro Will the Great Leveler Destroy Diversity of Thought?

Some well-designed prizes for milestone achievements in the simulation of matter could have a substantial effect by focusing attention and a bit of glamour toward this tough but potentially glorious endeavor. How about, for example, a prize for calculating virtual water that boils at the same temperature as real water? The Waking Dream Kevin Kelly Editor-at-large, Wired; author, What Technology Wants We already know that our use of technology changes how our brains work. Reading and writing are cognitive tools that change the way in which the brain processes information. When psychologists use neuroimaging technology such as MRI to compare the brains of literates and illiterates working on a task, they find many differences—and not just when the subjects are reading.

All we do is keep close track of what the others are thinking and doing. Often we collaborate directly, but most of the time we don’t. Everyone in my guild has his or her own guild, each of which is largely different from mine. I’m probably not considered a member of some of them. My guild nowadays consists of Danny Hillis, Brian Eno, Peter Schwartz, Kevin Kelly, John Brockman, Alexander Rose, and Ryan Phelan. Occasionally we intersect institutionally via the Long Now Foundation, Global Business Network, or Edge.org. One’s guild is a conversation extending over years and decades. I hearken to my gang because we have overlapping interests, and my gang keeps surprising me.


pages: 371 words: 107,141

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

Wii Fit and its successor Wii Fit Plus would go on to sell a combined forty-three million copies, but it was the quantified self movement that would ultimately have the greatest lasting influence on health and wellness gamification.62 While the principles behind the movement are old, the term “quantified self” was originated by Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly in October 2007.63 As Kelly put it, “Unless something can be measured, it cannot be improved. So we are on a quest to collect as many personal tools that will assist us in quantifiable measurement of ourselves.” The movement spread quickly thanks to a 2010 talk at TED@Cannes (naturally), followed by the first-ever Quantified Self conference in 2011.64 In keeping with his interest in the spiritual as well as the technological, Kelly’s initial goal was “self-knowledge of one’s body, mind and spirit,” but the quantified self movement soon became fixated on things that were measurable with interesting new gadgets like the Nike+ FuelBand or hacked hardware like the Wii Balance Board.65 Some early enthusiasts were enthralled by just how much they could measure if they put their mind to it.

Joel Spolsky, “State of the Stack 2010 (A Message from Your CEO),” The Overflow, Stack Overflow, January 24, 2011, https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/01/24/state-of-the-stack-2010-a-message-from-your-ceo; Erica Swallow, “How Nike Outruns the Social Media Competition,” Mashable, September 22, 2011, https://mashable.com/2011/09/22/nike-social-media/?europe=true. 11. Kevin Kelly, “Healthvault, Phase 1,” Quantified Self, October 8, 2007, https://web.archive.org/web/20130117170255/https://quantifiedself.com/2007/page/3. 12. Ian Bogost, “Persuasive Games: Exploitationware,” Game Developer, May 3, 2011, www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134735/persuasive_games_exploitationware.php?

“Yearly Archives: 2007, page 3,” Quantified Self, accessed November 26, 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20170629220503/http://quantifiedself.com/2007/page/3. 64. April Dembosky, “Invasion of the Body Hackers,” Financial Times, June 10, 2011, www.ft.com/content/3ccb11a0-923b-11e0-9e00-00144feab49a?. 65. Kevin Kelly, “What Is the Quantified Self?” Quantified Self, October 5, 2007, https://web.archive.org/web/20111101100244/http://quantifiedself.com/2007/10/what-is-the-quantifiable-self; Gary Wolf, “Eric Boyd: Learning from My Nike FuelBand Data,” Quantified Self, April 5, 2013, https://quantifiedself.com/blog/eric-boyd-learning-from-my-nike-fuelband-data; Gary Wolf, “Matt Cutts Hacks His WiiFit for Biometrics,” Quantified Self, February 4, 2009, https://quantifiedself.com/blog/matt-cutts-hacks-his-wiifit-fo. 66.


pages: 235 words: 62,862

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek by Rutger Bregman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Branko Milanovic, cognitive dissonance, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Graeber, Diane Coyle, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, George Gilder, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, income inequality, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, low skilled workers, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, precariat, public intellectual, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wage slave, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey

“Value” and “productivity” cannot be expressed in objective figures, even if we pretend the opposite: “We have a high graduation rate, therefore we offer a good education” – “Our doctors are focused and efficient, therefore we provide good care” – “We have a high publication rate, therefore we are an excellent university” – “We have a high audience share, therefore we are producing good television” – “The economy is growing, therefore our country is doing fine…” The targets of our performance-driven society are no less absurd than the five-year plans of the former U.S.S.R. To found our political system on production figures is to turn the good life into a spreadsheet. As the writer Kevin Kelly says, “Productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring.”29 Governing by numbers is the last resort of a country that no longer knows what it wants, a country with no vision of utopia. A Dashboard for Progress “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics,” a British prime minister purportedly scoffed.

For example in education, with standardized testing using multiple-choice questions, online lectures, and larger classes. But these efficiency gains come at the cost of quality. 28. Susan Steed and Helen Kersley, “A Bit Rich: Calculating the Real Value to Society of Different Professions,” New Economics Foundation (December 14, 2009). http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/entry/a-bit-rich 29. Kevin Kelly, “The Post Productive Economy,” The Technium (January 1, 2013). http://kk.org/thetechnium/2013/01/the-post-produc 30. Simon Kuznets, “National Income, 1929-1932,” National Bureau of Economic Research (June 7, 1934). http://www.nber.org/chapters/c2258.pdf 31. Coyle, p. 14. 32. Simon Kuznets, “How to Judge Quality,” The New Republic (October 20, 1962). 9 Beyond the Gates of the Land of Plenty 1.


pages: 222 words: 70,132

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

King had no way of envisioning the addictive nature of the Internet, a place where we would be willing to share our most intimate secrets with a faceless corporation whose business model is to get into our heads and harvest our attention. And as any parent of a teenager who sleeps with a smartphone will agree, one hardly needs to be awake to interface with Google or Facebook. We continue to surrender more of our private lives believing in the myth of convenience bequeathed to us by benign corporations. As Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired, remarked, “Everything will be tracked, monitored, sensored, and imaged, and people will go along with it because ‘vanity trumps privacy,’ as already proved on Facebook. Wherever attention flows, money will follow.” But Kelly, one of the original techno-determinists, may be wrong.

But in 1989 something weird happened. The notion of the “hacker ethic” became a contested trope. It started with an online forum on the WELL organized by Harper’s Magazine. The subject was hacking, and Paul Tough, a Harper’s editor, had recruited Brand and a few of his most important WELL members, including Howard Rheingold, Kevin Kelly, and John Perry Barlow, to participate. Barlow, a shaggy, bearded man with a fondness for colorful cowboy shirts, is a true American character. He is a failed Wyoming rancher, a former Catholic mystic, and a former Grateful Dead lyricist. He was also an early proponent of cyberspace as the new American frontier—as lawless as Wyatt Earp’s Tombstone.


pages: 243 words: 65,374

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

A. Roger Ekirch, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, big-box store, British Empire, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Hans Lippershey, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jacquard loom, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Live Aid, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, Murano, Venice glass, planetary scale, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, techno-determinism, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, walkable city, women in the workforce

Because new modes of measuring force us to think about the world in a new light. Just as the microseconds of quartz and cesium opened up new ideas that transformed everyday life in countless ways, the slow time of the Long Now clock helps us think in new ways about the future. As Long Now board member Kevin Kelly puts it: If you have a Clock ticking for 10,000 years what kinds of generational-scale questions and projects will it suggest? If a Clock can keep going for ten millennia, shouldn’t we make sure our civilization does as well? If the Clock keeps going after we are personally long dead, why not attempt other projects that require future generations to finish?

I’m grateful to the many talented people we interviewed for this project, some of whom were kind enough to read portions of the manuscript in draft: Terri Adams, Katherine Ashenburg, Rosa Barovier, Stewart Brand, Jason Brown, Dr. Ray Briggs, Stan Bunger, Kevin Connor, Gene Chruszcs, John DeGenova, Jason Deichler, Jacques Desbois, Dr. Mike Dunne, Caterina Fake, Kevin Fitzpatrick, Gai Gherardi, David Giovannoni, Peggi Godwin, Thomas Goetz, Alvin Hall, Grant Hill, Sharon Hudgens, Kevin Kelly, Craig Koslofsky, Alan MacFarlane, David Marshall, Demetrios Matsakis, Alexis McCrossen, Holley Muraco, Lyndon Murray, Bernard Nagengast, Max Nova, Mark Osterman, Blair Perkins, Lawrence Pettinelli, Dr. Rachel Rampy, Iegor Reznikoff, Eamon Ryan, Jennifer Ryan, Michael D. Ryan, Steven Ruzin, Davide Salvatore, Tom Scheffer, Eric B.


pages: 244 words: 66,977

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It by Tien Tzuo, Gabe Weisert

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, Brexit referendum, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, connected car, data science, death of newspapers, digital nomad, digital rights, digital twin, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fiat currency, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lean Startup, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mary Meeker, megaproject, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear winter, pets.com, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, smart meter, social graph, software as a service, spice trade, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, transport as a service, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WeWork, Y2K, Zipcar

THE FUTURE OF MANUFACTURING When you take the raw data generated by all these millions of digital twins and interpret that data with analytic software, then you can sell that new intelligence as a service that can become as valuable as having electricity, Wi-Fi, or running water in your house. Another word for these kinds of analytic services, of course, is artificial intelligence. Kevin Kelly, in his great book The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future, describes a future when AI will function much like electricity does today, distributed and ubiquitous: “This common utility will serve you as much IQ as you want but no more than you need. Like all utilities, AI will be supremely boring, even as it transforms the Internet, the global economy, and civilization.

chief digital transformation officer and president Matt Anderson Gabe Weisert, “Arrow Electronics: The Biggest IoT Innovator You’ve Never Heard Of,” Zuora Subscribed Magazine, www.zuora.com/guides/arrow-electronics-the-biggest-iot-innovator-youve-never-heard-of. What’s the value I can create Guillaumes Vives, “How Do You Price a Connected Device?” Zuora, November 19, 2015, www.zuora.com/2015/11/19/how-do-you-price-a-connected-device. Everything that we formerly electrified Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future (New York: Viking, 2016). This ‘as-a-service’ approach can give the supplier McKinsey & Company, “Unlocking the Potential of the Internet of Things,” www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/digital-mckinsey/our-insights/the-internet-of-things-the-value-of-digitizing-the-physical-world.


pages: 55 words: 17,493

Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered by Austin Kleon

David Heinemeier Hansson, dumpster diving, Golden Gate Park, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lone genius, Russell Brand, side project, Wunderkammern

—Russell Brand “Make no mistake: This is not your diary. You are not letting it all hang out. You are picking and choosing every single word.” —Dani Shapiro Always remember that anything you post to the Internet has now become public. “The Internet is a copy machine,” writes author Kevin Kelly. “Once anything that can be copied is brought into contact with the Internet, it will be copied, and those copies never leave.” Ideally, you want the work you post online to be copied and spread to every corner of the Internet, so don’t post things online that you’re not ready for everyone in the world to see.


pages: 297 words: 77,362

The Nature of Technology by W. Brian Arthur

Andrew Wiles, Boeing 747, business process, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, computer age, creative destruction, double helix, endogenous growth, financial engineering, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, haute cuisine, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, locking in a profit, Mars Rover, means of production, Myron Scholes, power law, punch-card reader, railway mania, Recombinant DNA, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, technological singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

We use this collective meaning when we blame “technology” for speeding up our lives, or talk of “technology” as a hope for mankind. Sometimes this meaning shades off into technology as a collective activity as in “technology is what Silicon Valley is all about.” I will allow this too as a variant of technology’s collective meaning. The technology thinker Kevin Kelly calls this totality the “technium,” and I like this word. But in this book I prefer to simply use “technology” for this because that reflects common use. The reason we need three meanings is that each points to technology in a different sense, a different category, from the others. Each category comes into being differently and evolves differently.

I am grateful to both, and to Emily’s team. A number of people read the manuscript and gave me useful feedback. Particularly valuable were Michael Heaney, Henry Lichstein, Jim Newcomb, Kate Parrot, and Jim Spohrer. For technical and definitional advice at various points I thank Giovanni Dosi, Doyne Farmer, Arnulf Grübler, John Holland, Kevin Kelly, Geoffrey Marcy, Nebojsa Nakicenovic, Richard Rhodes, and Peter Schuster. Boeing engineers Mike Trestik and Joseph Sutter commented on the aircraft material. My sons Ronan Arthur and Sean Arthur provided much needed writing criticism. Brid Arthur helped me plan the flow of the book, and Niamh Arthur helped edit the final draft.


pages: 292 words: 76,185

Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One by Jenny Blake

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Cal Newport, cloud computing, content marketing, data is the new oil, diversified portfolio, do what you love, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fear of failure, future of work, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lean Startup, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, passive income, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, solopreneur, Startup school, stem cell, TED Talk, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, white picket fence, young professional, zero-sum game

Developing a community takes time, and strong ties will be more helpful than large stats. Whether 50, 500, or 5,000 people, it is not the size of your platform but the level of engagement that matters. This inner circle will become your best advocates, supporters, connectors, and someday, perhaps, customers and clients. Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired magazine, suggests aiming for “1,000 True Fans,” or people who will purchase “anything and everything you produce.” Building a community and becoming a thought leader should not be about a selfish aim for fame. As Dorie Clark, author of Stand Out: How to Find Your Breakthrough Idea and Build a Following Around It, wrote, “It’s about solving real problems and making a difference in a way that creates value for yourself and others.

it is futile to ask: Geoff Colvin, Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2015), 42, 44; Oliver Burkeman, “Are Machines Making Humans Obsolete?” Guardian, September 18, 2015. Chapter 7: Make Yourself Discoverable “Well-being is enhanced”: Brian R. Little, Me, Myself, and Us: The Science of Personality and the Art of Well-Being (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014), 196. suggests aiming for “1,000 True Fans”: Kevin Kelly, “1,000 True Fans,” KK.org, March 4, 2008, kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/. “data is the new oil”: Michael Palmer, “Data Is the New Oil,” ANA Marketing Maestros, November 3, 2006, ana.blogs.com/maestros/2006/11/data_is_the_new.html. STAGE THREE: PILOT “Making assumptions and then taking them personally”: Don Miguel Ruiz with Janet Mills, The Voice of Knowledge: A Practical Guide to Inner Peace (San Rafael, CA: Amber-Allen Publishing, 2004).


pages: 474 words: 130,575

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

Louis Rossetto, the founder of a new, hip tech magazine called Wired, compared computer engineers to Prometheus: they brought gifts of the gods to us mortals that spurred “social changes so profound their only parallel is probably the discovery of fire,” he wrote in his magazine’s inaugural issue.1 Kevin Kelly, a bearded evangelical Christian and Wired editor, agreed with his boss: “No one can escape the transforming fire of machines. Technology, which once progressed at the periphery of culture, now engulfs our minds as well as our lives. As each realm is overtaken by complex techniques, the usual order is inverted, and new rules established.

They bet that Negroponte would help prime the investment pump, with his money and involvement brining in other big players who would be willing to invest far greater sums in Wired. They were right. After he came on board, investment money flowed in like water. To help him craft the new magazine, Rossetto hired Stewart Brand’s old apprentice as Wired’s founding executive editor: Kevin Kelly. Pudgy, with an Amish-style beard, Kelly had worked for Stewart Brand in the late 1980s, just as the aging counterculture promoter was beginning to push his publishing business away from communes and into the booming personal computer industry. Kelly was an energetic and eager acolyte, a man ripe for a righteous mission.

Rossetto expanded this quote into a full-blown manifesto in Wired’s UK edition: “The most fascinating and powerful people today are not politicians or priests, or generals or pundits, but the vanguard who are integrating digital technologies into their business and personal lives, and causing social changes so profound that their only parallel is probably the discovery of fire.” 2. Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (New York: Viking Adult, 1998). 3. Rich Karlgaard and Michael Malone, “City vs. Country: Tom Peters & George Gilder Debate the Impact of Technology on Location,” Forbes ASAP, February 27, 1995. 4. “Task Force to Focus on Information Revolution,” Deseret (UT) News, September 15, 1993, http://www.deseretnews.com/article/309821/TASK-FORCE-TO-FOCUS-ON-INFORMATION-REVOLUTION.html. 5.


Howard Rheingold by The Virtual Community Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier-Perseus Books (1993)

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Alvin Toffler, Apple II, bread and circuses, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, commoditize, conceptual framework, disinformation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, experimental subject, General Magic , George Gilder, global village, Gregor Mendel, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Ivan Sutherland, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, license plate recognition, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Great Good Place, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, urban decay, UUNET, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

By the time I had been esconced in the WELL for a year, it seemed evident to me that the cultural experiment of a self-sustaining online salon was succeeding very well. At that point, as I was becoming convinced that we were all setting some sort of cultural precedent, I interviewed online both Matthew McClure and Kevin Kelly, who had been part of the original group that founded the WELL. One of the advantages of computer conferencing is the community memory that preserves key moments in the history of the community. Sure enough, although I had not looked at it in years, the online oral history was still around, in the archives 26-04-2012 21:42 howard rheingold's | the virtual community 6 de 27 http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/2.html conference.

The Deadheads came online and seemed to know instinctively how to use the system to create a community around themselves, for which I think considerable thanks are due to Maddog, Marye, and Rosebody. Not long thereafter we saw the concept of the online superstar taken to new heights with the advent of the True Confessions conference. . . . Suddenly our future looked assured. . . ." Kevin Kelly had been editor of Whole Earth Review for several years when the WELL was founded. The Hackers' Conference had been his idea. Kelly recalled the original design goals that the WELL's founders had in mind when they opened for business in 1985. The design goals were: 26-04-2012 21:42 howard rheingold's | the virtual community 7 de 27 http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/2.html 1) That it be free.

And most of the WELL population understood the difference between a kid out for a joyride on his modem and more serious cases of electronic thieves 26-04-2012 21:46 howard rheingold's | the virtual community 12 de 36 http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/9.html or vandals. Then Harper's magazine offered WELL management a social experiment they couldn't refuse. The magazine's editors had invited John P. Barlow, Mitch Kapor, Cliff Stoll (author of The Cuckoo's Egg, a best-seller about the successful hunt for a KGB-sponsored ring of German hackers), Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly (one of the founders of the WELL), Dave Hughes, and a number of other cyberspace debaters from the WELL and beyond to meet in a private conference on the WELL with several of the young fellows who hack into other people's computer systems. I remember the night the chain of events began. None of us could have known at the time that it would involve the FBI and Secret Service and grow into the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.


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Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

,” Mashable, June 22, 2012; Kristin Burnham, “Facebook’s WhatsApp Buy: 10 Staggering Stats,” InformationWeek, Feb. 21, 2014. 4 Put another way, every ten minutes: Verlyn Klinkenborg, “Trying to Measure the Amount of Information That Humans Create,” New York Times, Nov. 12, 2003. 5 The cost of storing: McKinsey Global Institute, Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity, May 2011; Kevin Kelly speaking at the Web 2.0 conference in 2011, http://​blip.​tv/​web2expo/​web-​2-​0-​expo-​sf-​2011-​kevin-​kelly-​4980011. 6 Across all industries: World Economic Forum, Personal Data: The Emergence of a New Asset Class, Jan. 2011. 7 Eventually, your personal details: Cory Doctorow, “Personal Data Is as Hot as Nuclear Waste,” Guardian, Jan. 15, 2008. 8 That’s one account: Emma Barnett, “Hackers Go After Facebook Sites 600,000 Times Every Day,” Telegraph, Oct. 29, 2011; Mike Jaccarino, “Facebook Hack Attacks Strike 600,000 Times per Day, Security Firm Reports,” New York Daily News, Oct. 29, 2011. 9 Because 75 percent of people: “Digital Security Firm Says Most People Use One Password for Multiple Websites,” GMA News Online, Aug. 9, 2013. 10 Many social media companies: “LinkedIn Hack,” Wikipedia; Jose Pagliery, “2 Million Facebook, Gmail, and Twitter Passwords Stolen in Massive Hack,” CNNMoney, Dec. 4, 2013. 11 Transnational organized crime groups: Elinor Mills, “Report: Most Data Breaches Tied to Organized Crime,” CNET, July 27, 2010. 12 Such was the case: Jason Kincaid, “Dropbox Security Bug Made Passwords Optional for Four Hours,” TeckCrunch, June 20, 2011. 13 Later, however, it was revealed: John Markoff, “Cyberattack on Google Said to Hit Password System,” New York Times, April 19, 2010; Kim Zetter, “Report: Google Hackers Stole Source Code of Global Password System,” Wired, April 20, 2010. 14 According to court documents: John Leyden, “Acxiom Database Hacker Jailed for 8 Years,” Register, Feb. 23, 2006; Damien Scott and Alex Bracetti, “The 11 Worst Online Security Breaches,” Complex.​com, May 9, 2012. 15 More recently, in 2013, the data broker Experian: Brian Krebs, “Experian Sold Customer Data to ID Theft Service,” Krebs on Security, Oct. 20, 2013. 16 Experian learned of the compromise: Byron Acohido, “Scammer Dupes Experian into Selling Social Security Nos,” USA Today, Oct. 21, 2013; Matthew J.

To those individuals who generously agreed to review galley copies of this book and offer their comments on the work, you have my respect and considerable appreciation for taking the time out of your incredibly busy schedules to do so. In particular, I’d like to say thank you to Peter Diamandis, Ray Kurzweil, Kevin Kelly, Daniel Pink, David Eagleman, Christopher Reich, Interpol president Khoo Boon Hui, Ed Burns, Frank Abagnale, and P. W. Singer. To Sarah Stephens and Adam Kaslikowski, thank you both for the countless hours you spent reading through the earliest versions of Future Crimes and your deeply insightful comments on the work along the way.

,” IEEE Spectrum, May 29, 2014. 27 “it can read”: Brandon Keim, “I, Nanny,” Wired, Dec. 18, 2008. 28 To help alleviate: Mai Iida, “Robot Niche Expands in Senior Care,” Japan Times, June 19, 2013. 29 Thousands of Paro units: Anne Tergesen and Miho Inada, “It’s Not a Stuffed Animal, It’s a $6,000 Medical Device,” Wall Street Journal, June 21, 2010. 30 One of the fastest-growing: “Your Alter Ego on Wheels,” Economist, March 9, 2013. 31 Robots such as the MantaroBot: Serene Fang, “Robot Care for Aging Parents,” Al Jazeera America, Feb. 27, 2014. 32 With the push of a button: Ryan Jaslow, “RP-VITA Robot on Wheels Lets Docs Treat Patients Remotely,” CBS News, Nov. 19, 2013. 33 Already Starwood hotels: “Robots Are the New Butlers at Starwood Hotels,” CNBC, Aug. 12, 2014. 34 A 2013 study: Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, “The Future of Employment,” Oxford Martin, Sept. 17, 2013, http://​www.​oxfordmartin.​ox.​ac.​uk/. 35 Those working in the transportation field: For an excellent discussion on the future of robots, automation, and work, see Kevin Kelly, “Better Than Human: Why Robots Will—and Must—Take Our Jobs,” Wired, Dec. 24, 2012; Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014). 36 News outlets such as: Francie Diep, “Associated Press Will Use Robots to Write Articles,” Popular Science, July 1, 2014. 37 Many believe that it is the growth: Paul Krugman, “Robots and Robber Barons,” New York Times, Dec. 9, 2012. 38 In mid-2014, a young woman: Lindsey Bever, “Seattle Woman Spots Drone Outside Her 26th-Floor Apartment Window, Feels ‘Violated,’ ” Washington Post, June 25, 2014. 39 “Air is a public”: Rebecca J.


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The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

. … Making sense of our new—and ever changing—landscape requires piecing together your stories neighborhood-by-neighborhood and state-by-state. That’s where you come in.”34 1,000 True Fans Pro-am journalism is not the sole completely new model for journalism now emerging. Another is the cultivation by bloggers of ardent micro-audiences. In March 2008, Wired magazine cofounder Kevin Kelly wrote a blog post arguing that in the digital era, artists can survive so long as they generate 1,000 true fans, each of whom might pay $100 a year: If you have 1,000 fans that sums up to $100,000 per year, which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks. One thousand is a feasible number.

Over a thousand people uploaded recordings of themselves singing the song; Ze went on to combine the uploaded audio recordings into a single track, which sounded like it was being sung by a crowd: you’re not alone anymore. Watching A Show with Ze Frank is not passive; it can even be a lot of work. It’s television meets “cognitive surplus”—and it is a model for entertainment that encourages niche community. As we saw briefly in chapter 3, Kevin Kelly has argued that artists—be they musicians, novelists, or filmmakers—need only 1,000 true fans willing to subsidize their work if they are to survive. But the “1,000 true fans” theory doesn’t entirely play out in practice; some pursuits are big, risky, game-changing, and expensive. As of now, the online world (and YouTube in particular) seems far better equipped to support quirky, niche acts rather than the big-vision, big-impact entertainment that Hollywood at its best has put out.


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Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

An aircraft engine has as many as three thousand sensors measuring billions of data points per voyage. And as we mentioned in Chapter One, a Google car, with its lidar (light radar) scanning the surrounding environment with sixty-four lasers, collects almost a gigabyte of data per second per car. This revolution is also impacting our human bodies. In 2007, Wired magazine editors Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly created the Quantified Self (QS) movement, which focuses on self-tracking tools. The first Quantified Self conference was held in May 2011, and today the QS community has more than 32,000 members in thirty-eight countries. Many new devices have been spun out of this movement. One of them is Spire, a QS device that measures respiration.

The popular “freemium” model is just such a case: many websites offer a basic level of service at no cost, while also enabling users to pay a fee to upgrade to more storage, statistics or extra features. Advertising, cross-subsidies and subscription business models are other ways of layering profit-generating operations on top of what is essentially free baseline information. Kevin Kelly expanded further on this idea in a seminal post entitled “Better than Free,” which appeared on his Technium blog in 2008. In digital networks anything can be copied and is thus “abundant.” So how do you add or extract value? What is valuable for customers? What is the new scarcity? What are the new value drivers?


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Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid

Alvin Toffler, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cross-subsidies, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, Frank Gehry, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Gilder, George Santayana, global village, Goodhart's law, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Productivity paradox, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Y2K

Readers of Toffler's (1980) Third Wave will recognize the first three terms here, particularly the first, demassification, to which Toffler adds three subtypes: demassification of media, production, and society. Notions of disintermediation and decentralization are features, for example, in the work of George Gilder or Kevin Kelly's (1997) writing on the "new economy." There are more "Ds" that could be added, such as Kevin Kelly's displacement and devolution. 22. Downes and Mui, 1998. 23. Coase, 1937. Coase's theory should be seen not so much as an attack on neoclassical individualism as an attempt to save it from itself. We return to transaction cost theory briefly in our discussion of the future of the firm in chapter 6.


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Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat

AI winter, air gap, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Automated Insights, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, California energy crisis, cellular automata, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, don't be evil, drone strike, dual-use technology, Extropian, finite state, Flash crash, friendly AI, friendly fire, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, lone genius, machine translation, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, rolling blackouts, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart grid, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

IA, or intelligence augmentation, has a similar potential for disaster as stand-alone AI, mitigated somewhat by the fact that a human takes part, at least at first. But that advantage will quickly disappear. We’ll talk more about IA later. First, I want to pay attention to Vinge’s notion that intelligence could emerge from the Internet. Technology thinkers, including George Dyson and Kevin Kelly, have proposed that information is a life-form. The computer code that carries information replicates itself and grows according to biological rules. But intelligence, well that’s something else. It’s a feature of complex organisms, and it doesn’t come by accident. At his home in California, I had asked Eliezer Yudkowsky if intelligence could emerge from the exponentially growing hardware of the Internet, from its five trillion megabytes of data, its more than seven billion connected computers and smart phones, and its seventy-five million servers.

It’s a problem we face every time: Vinge, Vernor, True Names and Other Dangers (Wake Forest: Baen Books, 1987), 47. Through the sixties and seventies: Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity.” Good has captured the essence of the runaway: Ibid. Technology thinkers including: Kelly, Kevin, “Q&A: Hacker Historian George Dyson Sits Down With Wired’s Kevin Kelly,” WIRED, February 17, 2012, http://www.wired.com/magazine/2012/02/ff_dysonqa/all/ (accessed June 5, 2012). At his home in California: Wisegeek, “How Big is the Internet?” last modified 2012, http://www.wisegeek.com/how-big-is-the-internet.htm (accessed July 5, 2012). Per dollar spent: Kurzweil, Ray, The Age of Spiritual Machines (New York: Viking Penguin, 1999), 101–105. 9: THE LAW OF ACCELERATING RETURNS Computing is undergoing: King, Rachael, “IBM training computer chip to learn like a human,” SFGate.com, November 7, 2011, http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-11-07/business/30371975_1_computers-virtual-objects-microsoft (accessed January 5, 2012).


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About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks by David Rooney

Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, COVID-19, Danny Hillis, Doomsday Clock, European colonialism, Ford Model T, friendly fire, High speed trading, interchangeable parts, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, smart grid, Stewart Brand, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, éminence grise

The ambition of this clock is to help unite a fractured world—a world that, despite its differences, looks up together at one Moon. Looking long into the future and far out into space helps put our earthly concerns into perspective. Like the Long Now clock, Longplayer and Aluna are machines for making good conversations. Long Now board member Kevin Kelly has asked, “If a Clock can keep going for ten millennia, shouldn’t we make sure our civilization does as well?” The virologist Jonas Salk had previously inquired, “Are we being good ancestors?”8 And this takes us back to Japan, where we started this journey of hope and peace. SEVENTY MILES FROM Osaka is the Japanese city of Ise, which is home to the Ise Jingu, or Grand Shrine, a complex of 125 Shinto shrines covering an area the size of central Paris.

., 231. 4.Quoted in Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility (London: Phoenix, 2000), 2. 5.Ibid., 2. 6.Quoted in ibid., 4–5. 7.Brian Eno, “Bells and Their History, and The Long Now Foundation” (CD insert), in January 07003: Bell Studies for The Clock of The Long Now (CD), 2003, 4. 8.Kevin Kelly, “Clock in the Mountain,” accessed July 7, 2020, longnow.org/clock; Jonas Salk, “Are We Being Good Ancestors?,” World Affairs: The Journal of International Issues 1, no. 2 (December 1992): 16–18. 9.Brand, Clock of the Long Now, 53. 10. Alexander Rose, “How to Build Something That Lasts 10,000 Years,” BBC Future, June 11, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190611-how-to-build-something-that-lasts-10000-years. 11.


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Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War by Paul Scharre

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Air France Flight 447, air gap, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, brain emulation, Brian Krebs, cognitive bias, computer vision, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, DevOps, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, fail fast, fault tolerance, Flash crash, Freestyle chess, friendly fire, Herman Kahn, IFF: identification friend or foe, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Hawkins, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Loebner Prize, loose coupling, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, sensor fusion, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, Tesla Model S, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Valery Gerasimov, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche, Y2K, zero day

Horowitz, “Droning On: Explaining the Proliferation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles,” International Organization, 71 no. 2 (Spring 2017), 397–418. 5 “next industrial revolution”: “Robot Revolution—Global Robot & AI Primer,” Bank of America Merrill Lynch, December 16, 2015, http://www.bofaml.com/content/dam/boamlimages/documents/PDFs/robotics_and_ai_condensed_primer.pdf. 5 Kevin Kelly: Kevin Kelly, “The Three Breakthroughs That Have Finally Unleashed AI on the World,” Wired, October 27, 2014, http://www.wired.com/2014/10/future-of-artificial-intelligence/. 5 cognitization of machines: Antonio Manzalini, “Cognitization is Upon Us!,” 5G Network Softwarization, May 21, 2015, http://ieee-sdn.blogspot.com/2015/05/cognitization-is-upon-us.html. 6 “fully roboticized . . . military operations”: Robert Coalson, “Top Russian General Lays Bare Putin’s Plan for Ukraine,” Huffington Post, September 2, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-coalson/valery-gerasimov-putin-ukraine_b_5748480.html. 6 Department of Defense officials state: Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research Melissa Flagg, as quoted in Stew Magnuson, “Autonomous, Lethal Robot Concepts Must Be ‘On the Table,’ DoD Official Says,” March 3, 2016, http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?

Russia is building a suite of armed ground robots for war on the plains of Europe. Sixteen nations already have armed drones, and another dozen or more are openly pursuing development. These developments are part of a deeper technology trend: the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), which some have called the “next industrial revolution.” Technology guru Kevin Kelly has compared AI to electricity: just as electricity brings objects all around us to life with power, so too will AI bring them to life with intelligence. AI enables more sophisticated and autonomous robots, from warehouse robots to next-generation drones, and can help process large amounts of data and make decisions to power Twitter bots, program subway repair schedules, and even make medical diagnoses.


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Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar

Retailers, credit card companies, social networks, data brokers, and advertisers have been turning consumer privacy into the ultimate commodity. The consequence of this transformation is that we are more exposed, less in control of our public identities, than ever. HOW WE’VE GOTTEN PRIVACY WRONG Technological elites like to argue that privacy is dead or somehow superfluous. Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired magazine, cleverly summarized the situation: “Privacy is mostly an illusion, but you’ll have as much of it as you want to pay for.” His remark sounds like sophistry, but he’s largely, if unfortunately, correct. Our popular conception of privacy is rooted in some fundamental misunderstandings.

It does, however, mean that a great deal of money and corporate and political power is now being brought to bear on figuring out how to monetize personal information as never before. Bain and the WEF are not alone in this kind of thinking. Carlos Dominguez, a senior vice president at Cisco, has written about the rise of a new “trust economy,” in which privacy is monetized but companies that act more virtuously are rewarded. It might be, as Kevin Kelly theorized, that privacy will be something for which you have to pay. But it won’t be called that—it’ll be described as more personalized service or a way to get special offers. AT&T has offered some customers of its U-verse with GigaPower Internet service two choices. A “standard” plan is $99 per month; a “premier” plan is $29 cheaper—which should be a red flag.

The argument usually goes—and is presented as the enlightened conclusion of the progressive tech set—that with the advent of social media, we are all sharing more, we are exposing more of our lives, social norms are evolving, and privacy is less important. Somehow, we’ve become more tolerant of one another, forgiving personal failings and foibles that technology, in part, plays a role in revealing. Disclosure has, per Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, become synonymous with authenticity. In the spirit of Kevin Kelly, privacy may still exist as an idea, but it is an increasingly outmoded and impractical notion. Privacy, they say, retards innovation and the formation of relationships based on the new ethic of radical transparency. The problem with this line of argument is its narrow-mindedness. It is both ahistorical and reflective of a milieu whose social standards, if they are even uniform, may not represent other areas of the country, much less the world.


pages: 407 words: 90,238

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kotler, Jamie Wheal

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Future Shock, Hacker News, high batting average, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, hype cycle, Hyperloop, impulse control, independent contractor, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, TED Talk, time dilation, Tony Hsieh, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

While this study focused on a relatively benign example of persuasion, the very fact that DARPA was the one funding it should give us pause. Imagine newscasters or politicians wielding similar technology, able to pluck heartstrings, stoke outrage, inspire hope, and even trigger communitas, just by reading and tuning our neurobiology. If “focus-group politics” leaves us with a bad taste, how will “biofeedback politics” go down? Kevin Kelly, futurist and the cofounder of Wired magazine, has a few ideas. In a 2016 article on virtual reality darlings of the moment, Oculus and Magic Leap, Kelly examines VR’s potential as a technology of surveillance and control. “It’s very easy to imagine a company that succeeds in dominating the VR universe44 quickly stockpiling intimate data on not just what you and three billion other people ‘favorite’ but . . . a thousand other details.

id=1919&mid=46. 42. a multibillion-dollar industry that employ the best neuroscientists: Seth Ferranti, “How Screen Addiction Is Damaging Kids’ Brains,” Vice, August 6, 2016. 43. In their study, a trained storyteller: Author interview with Chris Berka, Advanced Brain Monitoring, the company responsible for conducting the study, January 27, 2015. 44. It’s very easy to imagine: Kevin Kelly, “The Untold Story of Magic Leap, the World’s Most Secretive Startup,” Wired, May 2016. 45. This comprehensive tracking”: Ibid. 46. “all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects”: Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932), p. 54. 47. “In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting”: Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (New York: Penguin, 2005), p. viii. 48. all power that derives from the control of information: Tim Wu, The Master Switch (New York: Knopf, 2010), p. 310. 49.


pages: 372 words: 89,876

The Connected Company by Dave Gray, Thomas Vander Wal

A Pattern Language, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, Berlin Wall, business cycle, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, folksonomy, Googley, index card, industrial cluster, interchangeable parts, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, loose coupling, low cost airline, market design, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, power law, profit maximization, Richard Florida, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Vanguard fund, web application, WikiLeaks, work culture , Zipcar

I also had tremendous help and support from my colleagues at Dachis Group, specifically: Jeff Dachis, Dion Hinchcliffe, Peter Kim, Ethan Farber, Brian Kotlyar, Susan Scrupski, Amanda Johnson, Lara Hendrickson, Lee Bryant, John De Oliveira, Erik Huddleston, Jen van der Meer, David Mastronardi, W. Scott Matthews, and Aric Wood. I have also had the privilege to receive help and advice from true luminaries, such as Richard Saul Wurman, Saul Kaplan, Kevin Kelly, Jared Spool, Peter Vander Auwera, Dan Roam, Thor Muller, Paul Pangaro, Lane Becker, Peter Morville, Lou Rosenfeld, Nilofer Merchant, John Hagel III, JP Rangaswami, Doc Searls, Stowe Boyd, Jay Cross, Marcia Conner, Ben Cerveny, Chris Brogan, Bob Logan, David Armano, Alex Osterwalder, and Don Norman.

Over time, the structure gets more rigid and inflexible. Notes for Chapter Six THE PERFORMANCE OF A SYSTEM “Systems Thinking” talk by Russell Ackoff, at The Learning and Legacy of Dr. W. Edwards Deming (event), 1994. Chapter 7. Complexity changes the game Everything that we are making, we are making more and more complex. — Kevin Kelly Wired Magazine The complexity of the new networked, interdependent economy creates an ambiguous, uncertain, competitive landscape. Companies must be flexible enough to rapidly respond to changes in their environments, or risk extinction. Return on Assets is Dwindling In The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion (Basic Books), John Hagel and John Seely Brown observe that return on assets—the measure of how efficiently a company can use its assets to generate profits—has steadily dwindled to almost a quarter of what it was in 1965.


pages: 329 words: 88,954

Emergence by Steven Johnson

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, AOL-Time Warner, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Douglas Hofstadter, edge city, epigenetics, game design, garden city movement, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, pez dispenser, phenotype, Potemkin village, power law, price mechanism, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, SimCity, slashdot, social intelligence, Socratic dialogue, stakhanovite, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush

You don’t program the slime mold cells to form clusters; you program them to follow patterns in the trails left behind by their neighbors. If you have enough cells, and if the trails last long enough, you’ll get clusters, but they’re not something you can control directly. And predicting the number of clusters—or their longevity—is almost impossible without extensive trial-and-error experimentation with the system. Kevin Kelly called his groundbreaking book on decentralized behavior Out of Control, but the phrase doesn’t quite do justice to emergent systems—or at least the ones that we’ve deliberately set out to create on the computer screen. Systems like StarLogo are not utter anarchies: they obey rules that we define in advance, but those rules only govern the micromotives.

This book was greatly enhanced by interviews I conducted with Manuel De Landa, Richard Rogers, Deborah Gordon, Rob Malda, Jeff Bates, Oliver Selfridge, Will Wright, David Jefferson, Evelyn Fox Keller, Rik Heywood, Mitch Resnick, Steven Pinker, Eric Zimmerman, Nate Oostendorp, Brewster Kahle, Andrew Shapiro, and Douglas Rushkoff. I recall more than a few casual conversations that also had an impact, primarily ones that involved David Shenk, Ruthie Rogers, Roo Rogers, Mitch Kapor, Kevin Kelly, Annie Keating, Nicholas Butterworth, Kim Hawkins, Rory Kennedy, Mark Bailey, Frank Rich, Denise Caruso, Liz Garbus, Dan Cogan, Penny Lewis, John Brockman, Rufus Griscom, Jay Haynes, Betsey Schmidt, Stephen Green, Esther Dyson, and my students at NYU’s ITP program, where Red Burns generously invited me to teach a graduate seminar on emergent software.


pages: 297 words: 89,820

The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness by Steven Levy

Apple II, Bill Atkinson, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, en.wikipedia.org, General Magic , Herbert Marcuse, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, reality distortion field, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, social web, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, technology bubble, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell

Downloading podcasts—of commercial and public radio shows or home-brew audio concoctions—adds the intimacy of old-fashioned radio to the mix. And by offering television shows and music videos for sale, Apple has generated a gold rush of a la carte programming that has, essentially, shuffled the now-obsolete television schedule. Can prose be far behind? Just as I was finishing this book, my former Wired editor Kevin Kelly wrote in The New York Times Magazine, in a manifesto on the future of the book, "Just as the music audience jiggles and reorders songs into new albums (or playlists,' as they are called in iTunes) the universal library will encourage the creation of virtual bookshelves. ... Indeed, some authors will begin to write books ... to be remixed as pages."

Notes Unless otherwise cited, The Perfect Thing is based on my own reporting, primarily personal interviews with people within and outside Apple. Of course my views benefited from the journalism and commentary of the countless people who have addressed themselves to the iPod in print and on the Internet. Author's Note xii a manifesto: Kevin Kelly, "What Will Happen to Books?," The New York Times Magazine, May 14,2006. Perfect 2 quaffing beer: Associated Press report (June 8, 2006) of a survey by the Student Monitor research firm. Seventy-three percent of 1,200 students surveyed said that the iPod was the number one in thing—beating a long winning streak by the previous champion, beer. 4 "younger listeners think the way the iPod thinks": Alex Ross, "Listen to This," The New Yorker, February 16,2004. 5 "iPod of the brain": David Malakoff, "iPod of the Brain," NPR Morning Edition, March 14, 2001. 5 "Nothingfits better": William Powers, "The Happy Dance," National Journal, January 13, 2006. 5 premiums: David Bernstein, "The Free Toaster?


Possiplex by Ted Nelson

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Bill Duvall, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Computer Lib, cuban missile crisis, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Herman Kahn, HyperCard, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Murray Gell-Mann, nonsequential writing, pattern recognition, post-work, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Vannevar Bush, Zimmermann PGP

he said to me over and over, and tears came down his face. I hoped these people would get their work done so that I could design decent Xanadu interfaces on my own, without having to listen to such inanities. I was not interested in discussions of interfaces, just in designing them singlehandedly. What would Kevin Kelly have said? ca.1989 I knew Kevin Kelly as an amiable editor and paintball adversary, but not exactly as a deep thinker. We were having drinks or coffee in San Rafael, and he asked how Xanadu structure kept links from breaking. I explained as clearly as I could about content stabilization and editing by pointer list.


pages: 407 words: 103,501

The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Netwo Rking by Mark Bauerlein

Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, business cycle, centre right, citizen journalism, collaborative editing, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital divide, disintermediation, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late fees, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, meta-analysis, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, pets.com, radical decentralization, Results Only Work Environment, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, search engine result page, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technology bubble, Ted Nelson, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, web application, Yochai Benkler

The mass embrace of hypertext is like the Seinfeld “Betrayal” episode: a cultural form that was once exclusively limited to avant-garde sensibilities, now happily enjoyed by grandmothers and third graders worldwide. I won’t dwell on this point, because the premise that increased interactivity is good for the brain is not a new one. (A number of insightful critics—Kevin Kelly, Douglas Rushkoff, Janet Murray, Howard Rheingold, Henry Jenkins—have made variations on this argument over the past decade or so.) But let me say this much: The rise of the Internet has challenged our minds in three fundamental and related ways: by virtue of being participatory, by forcing users to learn new interfaces, and by creating new channels for social interaction.

Between the bookends of Jobs and Page lies the rest of Silicon Valley, including radical communitarians like Craig Newmark (of Craigslist.com), intellectual property communists such as Stanford Law professor Larry Lessig, economic cornucopians like Wired magazine editor Chris “Long Tail” Anderson, and new media moguls Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle. The ideology of the Web 2.0 movement was perfectly summarized at the Technology Education and Design (TED) show in Monterey last year, when Kevin Kelly, Silicon Valley’s über-idealist and author of the Web 1.0 Internet utopia New Rules for the New Economy , said:Imagine Mozart before the technology of the piano. Imagine Van Gogh before the technology of affordable oil paints. Imagine Hitchcock before the technology of film. We have a moral obligation to develop technology.


pages: 320 words: 95,629

Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner by Po Bronson

23andMe, 3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, altcoin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, edge city, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fake news, financial independence, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, income inequality, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mars Rover, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, quantum entanglement, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, trade route, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

We like Duncan because he doesn’t fall into this pandering and wordsmithing. He’s honest and doesn’t mince words. He doesn’t manipulate perception. Some people are confident there will be new jobs in the future, but we can’t imagine them before they’ve been invented. “Look at how many yoga instructors there are,” said my colleague Kevin Kelly. “Twenty years ago, nobody would have imagined we would have so many yoga instructors. Back then, who would have thought you could make a living as a yoga instructor?” I understand the point, but I also think it’s not very satisfying. (There are 52,000 licensed yoga instructors in the United States, about half of them active.

It stresses them out to think of their children trying to learn in a public school, where there’s thirty-five students to every teacher—so they send them to a private school, where there’s only fifteen students per teacher. They hire admissions counselors and tutors and test-prep instructors. Just organizing all this causes them even more stress, so they pay massage therapists, and yoga teachers, and psychiatrists to get them back in the groove. So in a way, Kevin Kelly was inadvertently on point when he said the jobs of the future would be the equivalent of yoga teachers. The jobs of the future are all taking care of the well-off. There’s almost no end to it. One of the biggest stresses in these households is when things go wrong. The house has ants, or the front door lock is catchy, or they get in a fender bender.


Social Capital and Civil Society by Francis Fukuyama

Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, p-value, Pareto efficiency, postindustrial economy, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, scientific management, Silicon Valley, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, transaction costs, vertical integration, World Values Survey

Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); T h e Fatal Conceit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 13 Hayek, T h e Fatal Conceit, p . 8. 14 There is by now a huge literature on this subject. For a layman’s overview, see M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: T h e Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992); and Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The N e w Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994). For more formal accounts of spontaneous order, see John H . Holland, Hidden Order: H o w Adaptation Builds Complexity (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995) ; Stuart A.


pages: 98 words: 30,109

Remote: Office Not Required by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson

Broken windows theory, David Heinemeier Hansson, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Google Hangouts, job satisfaction, Kevin Kelly, remote working, Richard Florida, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Skype, The future is already here

—Richard Florida, author of the national bestseller The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life “In the near future, everyone will work remotely, including those sitting across from you. You’ll need this farsighted book to prepare for this inversion.” —Kevin Kelly, senior maverick for Wired magazine and author of What Technology Wants “Leave your office at the office. Lose the soul-sapping commutes. Jettison the workplace veal chambers and banish cookie-cutter corporate culture. Smart, convincing, and prescriptive, Remote offers a radically more productive and satisfying office-less future, better for all (well, except commercial landlords).”


pages: 102 words: 33,345

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by Jonathan Crary

augmented reality, Berlin Wall, dematerialisation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Fall of the Berlin Wall, invention of movable type, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, mass incarceration, megacity, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, vertical integration

This pseudo-historical formulation of the present as a digital age, supposedly homologous with a “bronze age” or “steam age,” perpetuates the illusion of a unifying and durable coherence to the many incommensurable constituents of contemporary experience. Of the numerous presentations of this delusion, the promotional and intellectually spurious works of futurists such as Nicholas Negroponte, Esther Dyson, Kevin Kelly, and Raymond Kurzweil can stand as flagrant examples. One of the underpinnings of this assumption is the popular truism that today’s teenagers and younger children are all now harmoniously inhabiting the inclusive and seamless intelligibility of their technological worlds. This generational characterization supposedly confirms that, within another few decades or less, a transitional phase will have ended and there will be billions of individuals with a similar level of technological competence and basic intellectual assumptions.


pages: 103 words: 32,131

Program Or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age by Douglas Rushkoff

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, big-box store, citizen journalism, cloud computing, digital map, East Village, financial innovation, Firefox, Future Shock, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, invention of the printing press, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, mirror neurons, peer-to-peer, public intellectual, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, WikiLeaks

To others, including me, You Own Your Own Words served as an ethical foundation: You, the human being on the other side of the modem, are responsible for what you say and do here. You are accountable. Given that the WELL was developed by farsighted cultural pioneers such as Stewart Brand, Larry Brilliant, Kevin Kelly, and Howard Rheingold, we shouldn’t be surprised that they sought to compensate for some of the disconnection online between people and their words. And that’s why, from the very beginning, I decided to be myself online. I’ve only used one name on the Internet: Rushkoff. I figured the only real danger was from government, corporations, or some other “big brother” out there using what I posted against me in some future McCarthy hearings.


pages: 378 words: 110,518

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

We know it will involve networks, knowledge work, the application of science and a large amount of green technology investment. The question is: can it be capitalism? Part II * * * We are now engaged in a grand scheme to augment, amplify, enhance and extend the relationships and communications between all beings and all objects. Kevin Kelly, 19971 5 The Prophets of Postcapitalism The jet engine was one of the core technologies of the post-1945 long wave. Invented during the Second World War, the turbofan – to give it its proper name – is a mature technology and should not be producing surprises. Yet it is. It works by sucking compressed air in at the front and firing a flame through it so that the air expands.

When we tried to write our first web page the IT department refused to allow us to store it on ‘their’ server, which was for doing the payroll. There was no email on my workplace Mac and no web access. Computers were for processing data and were linked together for specific tasks only. What a visionary, then, was the US journalist Kevin Kelly, to write this in 1997: The grand irony of our times is that the era of computers is over. All the major consequences of stand-alone computers have already taken place. Computers have speeded up our lives a bit, and that’s it. In contrast, all the most promising technologies making their debut now are chiefly due to communication between computers that is, to connections rather than to computations.21 Kelly’s article in Wired triggered a moment of recognition for my generation.


pages: 391 words: 105,382

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

He quotes O’Reilly: “The internet today is so much an echo of what we were talking about at Esalen in the ’70s—except we didn’t know it would be technology-mediated.” Levy then asks, rhetorically, “Could it be that the internet—or what O’Reilly calls Web 2.0—is really the successor to the human potential movement?” Levy’s article appears in the afterglow of Kevin Kelly’s ecstatic “We Are the Web” in Wired’s August issue. A Whole Earth Catalog editor before he helped launch Wired, Kelly serves as a nexus between hippie and hacker, a human fiber-optic cable beaming Northern Californian utopianism between generations. In his new article, a cover story, he surveys the recent history of the internet, from the Netscape IPO ten years ago, and concludes that the net has become a “magic window” that provides a “spookily godlike” perspective on existence.

If you read anything about Web 2.0, you’ll inevitably find praise heaped upon Wikipedia as a glorious manifestation of “the age of participation.” Wikipedia is an open-source encyclopedia; anyone who wants to contribute to its construction can add an entry or edit an existing one. Tim O’Reilly says that Wikipedia marks “a profound change in the dynamics of content creation”—a leap beyond the Web 1.0 model of Britannica Online. To Kevin Kelly, Wikipedia shows how the web is allowing us to pool our individual brains into a great collective mind. It’s a harbinger of the Machine. In theory, Wikipedia is a beautiful thing—it has to be a beautiful thing if the web is leading us to a higher consciousness. In reality, Wikipedia isn’t very good at all.


pages: 465 words: 109,653

Free Ride by Robert Levine

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Anne Wojcicki, book scanning, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, commoditize, company town, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Firefox, future of journalism, Googley, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Justin.tv, Kevin Kelly, linear programming, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, offshore financial centre, pets.com, publish or perish, race to the bottom, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

The Beatles sold hundreds of times as many albums as Gerry and the Pacemakers—contemporaries who also worked with the manager Brian Epstein and the producer George Martin—but few music fans would call that an injustice. Can musicians make money without reaching a big audience? Some technology pundits predict a world of niche culture, but understand how tough that could be for artists. In 2008, the former Wired editor Kevin Kelly wrote a blog post titled “1,000 True Fans.”39 Assuming each dedicated fan spent $100 per year on an artist’s work, he could bring in $100,000 a year, Kelly wrote, “which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks.” But the products Kelly believes acts should sell, such as vinyl records and T-shirts, cost money to produce, so an artist might keep only half of that $100 after expenses.

The settlements are private, but Bertelsmann’s finance chief, Thomas Rabe, said that they would probably cost the company €393 million (about $550 million). 37. For business reasons, the manager declined to identify the band. 38. Glenn Peoples, “The Long Tale?” Billboard, November 14, 2009. Disclosure: I assigned and helped edit this article, which showed that the so-called long tail applies to sales of albums, but not individual tracks. 39. Kevin Kelly, The Technium (blog), March 4, 2008. 40. “He certainly fronted them some regular living expense money in that critical year of 1966, when they were first getting established. He’s been occasionally described as their ‘patron.’ ” Author interview with Blair Jackson, author of Garcia: An American Life (New York: Viking, 1999).


pages: 518 words: 107,836

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy) by Benjamin Peters

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Anthropocene, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commons-based peer production, computer age, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Davies, double helix, Drosophila, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, index card, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, power law, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, scientific mainstream, scientific management, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, transaction costs, Turing machine, work culture , Yochai Benkler

A sideways look at some of the discourse about online commerce today proposes the enduring relevance of the Soviet socialist revolution that was consummated a century ago. Both the Internet and the Soviet command economy promise the revolutionary realization of the means for socialist or collectivist production on a mass scale. In the rhetoric of networking collective consciousness and crowd-sourced collaboration, we see the unlikely alliance of Wired editor Kevin Kelly’s hive mind, open-source software promoter Eric Raymond’s bazaar, and Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s collective farm.9 Long before Internet enthusiasts were around, Soviet enthusiasts were promising that workers (users) could meet the needs of the masses (crowds) through collective modes of resource sharing and collaboration (peer-to-peer production).

Light, “When Computers Were Women,” Technology and Culture 40 (3) (1999): 455–483; Nathan Ensmenger, The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010); and Mette Bryld and Nina Lykke, Cosmodolphins: Feminist Cultural Studies of Technology, Animals and the Sacred (New York: Zed Books, 2000). 7. David E. Hoffmann, The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy (New York: Random House, 2009), 150–154, 364–369, 422–423, 477. 8. Ibid., 153–154. 9. For sample references, see Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, Fourth Edition (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 2004), chap. 4; Eric Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary (New York: O’Reilly, 1999); and Leon Trotsky, Platform of the Joint Opposition (1927) (London: New Park Publications, 1973), especially “The Agrarian Question and Social Construction.” 10.


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The new village green: living light, living local, living large by Stephen Morris

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, Buckminster Fuller, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, computer age, cuban missile crisis, David Sedaris, deindustrialization, discovery of penicillin, distributed generation, Easter island, energy security, energy transition, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Firefox, Hacker Conference 1984, index card, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Elkington, Kevin Kelly, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McMansion, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Negawatt, off grid, off-the-grid, peak oil, precautionary principle, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review

The IBM Selectric typewriter now had changeable type fonts, bringing the world of typesetting, hitherto the exclusive province of printers and publishers, into the home. That was enough to convince a bunch of Berkeley counterculture mavens that the time was right to reinvent publishing. Stewart Brand enlisted family members, design instructor J. Baldwin, Kevin Kelly, and others to identify products, organizations, and services that passed the criteria of being useful as a tool, relevant to independent education, high quality or low cost, and easily available by mail. The idea was to provide “access to tools,” and the Catalog’s combination of youthful arrogance, orientation towards practicality, and haphazard (but groovy) organization were perfect for the nation’s first attention-deficit generation raised in a post-war era that had migrated to suburbia to watch television.

By 1972 Random House had come calling and had taken over the national distribution and the Catalog had been named winner of the National Book Award. The ripples from the original Whole Earth Catalog continue to be felt. The Catalog was published sporadically until 1998. Its alumni have been a vocal and visible lot. Kevin Kelly still publishes a weekly eZine called Cool Tools (find it at kk.org). Illegitimate step-child The Solar Living Sourcebook is in its thirteenth edition and has been continuously in print for the last twenty years. The founders of the Whole Earth Catalog cast a long collective shadow, but it was their ability to look forward that earned their niche in publishing history.


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The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory by Kariappa Bheemaiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, cellular automata, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, constrained optimization, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, Diane Coyle, discrete time, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, large denomination, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, power law, precariat, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, QR code, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent control, rent-seeking, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Washington Consensus

As per this study, and others2 that have begun investigating the concept of combinatorial evolution 3 of technology, invention can be conceptualised as combinatorial possibilities. In other words, invention is simply the novel combination of existing technological capabilities and is evolutionary4 in nature. This tendency of technology to build itself on previous or existing technologies is very similar to biological evolution. Kevin Kelly makes the analogy between biological evolution and technological evolution in a more succinct manner. As per his research, the long-term co-evolutionary trends seen in natural and technological paradigms share five common salient features: Specialisation, Diversity, Ubiquity , Socialization and Complexity .

Tools based on Agent Based Modelling (discussed below) are thus essential and help us detect and study the development of patterns. Studying the emergence of patterns based on the interactions between agents, allows us to study the evolutionary process of differentiation, selection, and amplification, from which arises novelty, order and complexity growth (see Kevin Kelly). This is important to note as in economics, goods and services exist in niches or cliques (see (iv) Networks above) which are created by other goods and services (combinatorial) and agents earn revenues based on which niche they exist in and which nodes they interact with (Kauffman, 1996). While the Walrasian economy has no macro properties that can be derived from its micro properties (for instance, the First and Second Welfare Theorems26), there is no mechanism for studying the emergence of novelty or growth in complexity.


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Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Carvin, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, butterfly effect, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, compensation consultant, conceptual framework, context collapse, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, iterative process, James Bridle, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, lifelogging, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, patent troll, pattern recognition, pre–internet, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, spaced repetition, superconnector, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Vannevar Bush, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize, éminence grise

That includes Tricia Wang, An Xiao Mina, Debbie Chachra, Liz Lawley, Zeynep Tufekci, Clay Shirky, Brooke Gladstone, Tom Igoe, Max Whitney, Terri Senft, Misha Tepper, Fred Kaplan, Howard Rheingold, danah boyd, Liz Lawley, Nick Bilton, Gary Marcus, Heidi Siwak, Ann Blair, Eli Pariser, Ethan Zuckerman, Ian Bogost, Fred Benenson, Heather Gold, Douglas Rushkoff, Rebecca MacKinnon, Cory Menscher, Mark Belinsky, Quinn Norton, Anil Dash, Cathy Marshall, Elizabeth Stock, Philip Howard, Denise Hand, Robin Sloan, Tim Carmody, Don Tapscott, Steven Johnson, Kevin Kelly, Nina Khosla, Laura Fitton, Jillian York, Hilary Mason, Craig Mod, Bre Pettis, Glenn Kelman, Susan Cain, Noah Schachtman, Irin Carmon, Matthew Battles, Cathy Davidson, Linda Stone, Jess Kimball, Phil Libin, Kati London, Jim Marggraff, Dan Zalewski, Sasha Nemecek, Laura Miller, Brian McNely, Duncan Watts, Kenyatta Cheese, Nora Abousteit, Deanna Zandt, David Wallis, Nick Denton, Alissa Quart, Stan James, Andrew Hearst, Gary Stager, Evan Selinger, Steven Demmler, and Vint Cerf.

Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas, “Are Inventions Inevitable? A Note on Social Evolution,” Political Science Quarterly 37, no. 1 (March 1922): 83–98. It’s worth noting that the discussion of multiples is itself, as you might expect, a multiple; many writers today who write about creativity discuss the phenomenon. Some of my favorite analyses include Kevin Kelly in What Technology Wants (New York: Penguin, 2010), Kindle edition; Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (New York: Penguin, 2010), 34–35; and Malcolm Gladwell, “In the Air,” The New Yorker, May 12, 2008, accessed March 22, 2013, www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell.


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The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties by Christopher Caldwell

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, computer age, crack epidemic, critical race theory, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Attenborough, desegregation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, Future Shock, George Gilder, global value chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, James Bridle, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, libertarian paternalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, Norman Mailer, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, post-industrial society, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

Certainly it would have surprised a pot-smoking, natural food–eating skinny-dipper at Woodstock to be told that the single greatest achievement of his generation would be to bring computers into corners of American life unimagined then—to put a television screen in everyone’s jacket pocket. Even if pessimists like Sale had the better of the political argument, twenty-first-century citizen/consumers were focused less on politics than on esthetics. Kevin Kelly, the editor of Wired magazine, insisted that the industrial technology, with its uniformity and regularity, was being superseded by “technology that’s decentralized, that plays on differences, that’s irregular on demand, that’s nonlinear, and that’s very interactive.” Such technology had been an aspiration of the counterculture, too.

“Data,” said Lawrence Summers: Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, “Human Work in the Robotic Future,” Foreign Affairs, July–August 2016, 139–50. “The personal computer”: Eric Zemmour, Le suicide français (Paris: Albin Michel, 2014), 218–19. (Author’s translation.) “evil . . . computerization enables”: Kevin Kelly, “Interview with the Luddite” (interview with Kirkpatrick Sale), Wired, June 1, 1995. “technology that’s decentralized”: Ibid. “the specter of technology”: Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (New York: Harper, 2005 [1974]), 246. the adjective “compelling”: Google Ngram Viewer.


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The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

The Smartness Economy: In the late 1800s, if you wanted a good idea for a new business, all that was required was to take an existing tool, say a drill or a washboard, and add electricity to it—thus creating a power drill or a washing machine. In his excellent book The Inevitable, author and Wired cofounder Kevin Kelly points out that we’re about to see an updated version of this economy, with AI replacing electricity. In other words, take any existing tool, and add a layer of smartness. So cell phones became smartphones and stereo speakers became smart speakers and cars become autonomous cars. Closed-Loop Economies: In nature, nothing is ever wasted.

See: https://lawreview.uchicago.edu/publication/razors-and-blades-myths. “franchise models”: Kerry Pipes, “History of Franchising: Franchising in the Modern Age,” Franchising.com. See: https://www.franchising.com/guides/history_of_franchising_part_two.html. In his excellent book The Inevitable: Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable (Viking, 2016), p. 33. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations: Christoph Jentzsch, “Decentralized Orgnizations to Automate Government.” See: https://archive.org/stream/DecentralizedAutonomousOrganizations/WhitePaper_djvu.txt. the multimillion-dollar economy: Maria Korolov, “Second Life GDP Totals $500 Million,” Hypergrid Business, November 11, 2015.


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The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

Inforgs are the perfect creatures for the hypernudge to rule when they have been refashioned to always be open to data flows and so continuously available for modulation. But by what? Presumably by some form of intelligence? We could bet everything on artificial intelligence, but few have taken this step. Perhaps modulation by human intelligence exercised at the collective level? US West Coast evangelist Kevin Kelly comes close to this when he celebrates the “technium” (his term for the supposed collective “autonomy” that develops from “the feedback loops in the technological system”).25 But why believe humans are intelligent at a collective level while ignoring or recklessly overriding humans’ ability to be independently intelligent at the individual level?

The reason is that, as part of the reshaping of social knowledge described in chapter 4, autonomy itself is being reconfigured by capitalist data practices. Data relations are becoming the means to a supposed new autonomy, bringing into conflict two aspects of the self, as subject and as object, while co-opting precisely the socially grounded notion of freedom (autonomy) that Hegel defended. Evangelists of technological connection such as Kevin Kelly see things differently. In his recent book The Inevitable, he names tracking as one of the twelve dimensions of technology’s transformation of society. By attributing this transformation to “what technology wants” (the name of his previous book), Kelly seeks to quarantine today’s profound transformations from ethical critique.


Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

Those earlier general-purpose technologies brought sweeping economic, social, and political changes. Likewise, the scale of potential change from artificial intelligence is staggering. By one estimate, nearly half of all tasks currently being done in the U.S. economy could be outsourced to automation using existing technology. Wired magazine cofounder Kevin Kelly has argued that “[AI] will enliven inert objects, much as electricity did more than a century ago. Everything that we formerly electrified we will now cognitize.” AI has applications in cybersecurity, surveillance, defense, border security, disinformation, and economic warfare, yielding major geopolitical advantages to whoever best harnesses these tools.

INTRODUCTION 1air combat maneuvering: Naval Air Training Command, Flight Training Instruction: Basic Fighter Maneuvering (BFM) Advanced NFO T-45C/VMTS (Corpus Christie, TX: Department of the Navy, 2018), https://www.cnatra.navy.mil/local/docs/pat-pubs/P-826.pdf. 1one of the most challenging skills: Colin “Farva” Price, “Navy F/A-18 Squadron Commander’s Take on AI Repeatedly Beating Real Pilot In Dogfight,” The Drive, August 24, 2020, https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/35947/navy-f-a-18-squadron-commanders-take-on-ai-repeatedly-beating-real-pilot-in-dogfight. 1air combat has evolved: John Stillion, Trends in Air-to-Air Combat: Implications for Future Air Superiority (Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2015), https://csbaonline.org/uploads/documents/Air-to-Air-Report-.pdf. 1“department of mad scientists”: Michael Belfiore, The Department of Mad Scientists: How DARPA Is Remaking Our World, from the Internet to Artificial Limbs (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), https://www.amazon.com/Department-Mad-Scientists-Remaking-Artificial/dp/0062000659. 2ACE program: “Training AI to Win a Dogfight,” Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, May 8, 2019, https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2019-05-08. 2flew with superhuman precision: Price, “Navy F/A-18 Squadron Commander’s Take.” 2forward-quarter gunshots: Naval Air Training Command, Flight Training Instruction. 2maneuvering to avoid a collision: Price, “Navy F/A-18 Squadron Commander’s Take.” 2“a gunshot that is almost impossible”: Joseph Trevithick, “AI Claims ‘Flawless Victory’ Going Undefeated In Digital Dogfight With Human Fighter Pilot,” The Drive, August 20, 2020, https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/35888/ai-claims-flawless-victory-going-undefeated-in-digital-dogfight-with-human-fighter-pilot. 3level of g-forces: Trevithick, “AI Claims ‘Flawless Victory.’” 3“The human will always be the limiting factor”: Price, “Navy F/A-18 Squadron Commander’s Take.” 3live flight demonstration: “Collaborative Air Combat Autonomy Program Makes Strides,” Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, March 18, 2021, https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2021-03-18a. 3“We envision a future”: “Training AI to Win a Dogfight.” 3another industrial revolution: Klaus Schwab, “The Fourth Industrial Revolution: What It Means, How to Respond,” World Economic Forum, January 14, 2016, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-fourth-industrial-revolution-what-it-means-and-how-to-respond/; Robot Revolution—Global Robot & AI Primer (Bank of America Merrill Lynch, December 16, 2015), https://www.bofaml.com/content/dam/boamlimages/documents/PDFs/robotics_and_ai_condensed_primer.pdf (page discontinued); Rob Thomas, “How AI Is Driving the New Industrial Revolution,” Forbes, March 4, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/ibm/2020/03/04/how-ai-is-driving-the-new-industrial-revolution/#7225c870131a; Sean Gallagher, “The Fourth Industrial Revolution Emerges from AI and the Internet of Things,” Ars Technica, June 18, 2019, https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/06/the-revolution-will-be-roboticized-how-ai-is-driving-industry-4-0/. 4nearly half of all tasks: James Manyika et al., Harnessing Automation for a Future That Works (McKinsey Global Institute, January 2017), https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/digital-disruption/harnessing-automation-for-a-future-that-works. 4“[AI] will enliven inert objects”: Kevin Kelly, “The Three Breakthroughs That Have Finally Unleashed AI on the World,” Wired, October 27, 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/10/future-of-artificial-intelligence/. 4AI has applications: For some examples of security-related applications of artificial intelligence, see Miles Brundage et al., The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation (February 2018), https://maliciousaireport.com/; and Michael C.

A. Berg (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1986), quoted in R. L. Gregory, The Oxford Companion to the Mind (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998), quoted in Shane Legg, “Machine Super Intelligence” (doctoral diss., University of Lugano, June 2008), 3–4. 284Copernican revolution: Kevin Kelly, “The Next 30 Digital Years,” YouTube, April 13, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhduPAy2bxo. 284Cambrian explosion: Gill Pratt has made this analogy with respect to robotics. Gill A. Pratt, “Is a Cambrian Explosion Coming for Robotics?” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 29, no. 3 (Summer 2015): 51–60, http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/jep.29.3.51. 285AI researchers vary widely in their predictions: Seth D.


pages: 144 words: 43,356

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence by Calum Chace

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, discovery of the americas, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Flash crash, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hedonic treadmill, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, life extension, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter Thiel, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, wage slave, Wall-E, zero-sum game

In a world of savvy consumers, the manufacturer which provides the most concise, easy-to-navigate advice is going to win market share. From supermarket supply chains to consumer goods to construction to exploring for minerals and oil, the ability to crunch bigger and bigger data sets and make sense of them is improving pretty much every type of human endeavour. Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired magazine, said the business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to predict: “Take X and add AI.” (15) To coin a phrase, blessed are the geeks, for they shall inherit the Earth. Healthcare is an interesting industry in this respect, because it has so far appeared to lag behind the general trend to improved performance from better information.


pages: 239 words: 45,926

As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Work, Health & Wealth by Juan Enriquez

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, borderless world, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, creative destruction, digital divide, double helix, Ford Model T, global village, Gregor Mendel, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Helicobacter pylori, Howard Rheingold, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, new economy, personalized medicine, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, spice trade, stem cell, the new new thing, yottabyte

One of the great minds on competitive analysis is Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter. He has looked at flowers as well as a myriad of other industries in various books, including The Competitive Advantage of Nations, Competitive Advantage, and Competitive Strategy. 7. A lot of people have written on this phenomenon of a new economy; one of my favorites is Wired editor Kevin Kelly. Many of the ideas in this chapter come from his book New Rules for the New Economy (New York: Viking, 1998). Peter F. Drucker has also been detailing these changes for decades, starting with The End of the Economic Man (1939). See also his Post-Capitalist Society (1993). 8. Robert Metcalf, founder of 3Com, argues the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of people in it. 9.


pages: 413 words: 119,587

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

It is also clear that technology and humanity coevolve, which again will pose the question of who will be in control. In Silicon Valley it has become fashionable to celebrate the rise of the machines, most clearly in the emergence of organizations like the Singularity Institute and in books like Kevin Kelly’s 2010 What Technology Wants. In an earlier book in 1994, Out of Control, Kelly came down firmly on the side of the machines. He described a meeting between AI pioneer Marvin Minsky and Doug Engelbart: When the two gurus met at MIT in the 1950s, they are reputed to have had the following conversation: Minsky: We’re going to make machines intelligent.

Humans Match Wits,” New York Times, November 9, 1991, http://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/09/us/can-machines-think-humans-match-wits.html. 6.Jonathan Grudin, “AI and HCI: Two Fields Divided by a Common Focus,” AI Magazine, Winter 2009, http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=138574. 7.John McCarthy, book review of B. P. Bloomfield, The Question of Artificial Intelligence: Philosophical and Sociological Perspectives, in Annals of the History of Computing 10, no. 3 (1988): 224–229. 8.Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization (New York: Perseus, 1994), 33–34. 2|A CRASH IN THE DESERT 1.Jerry Kaplan, presentation at Stanford University Probabilistic AI lunch meeting, May 6, 2013. 2.Defense Science Board, “The Role of Autonomy in DoD Systems,” U.S. Department of Defense, July 2012, http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/AutonomyReport.pdf. 3.James R.


pages: 448 words: 117,325

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, 3D printing, air gap, algorithmic bias, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, business process, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Firefox, Flash crash, George Akerlof, incognito mode, industrial robot, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, invention of radio, job automation, job satisfaction, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, loose coupling, market design, medical malpractice, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NSO Group, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, printed gun, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, real-name policy, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, sparse data, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, The Market for Lemons, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, Uber for X, Unsafe at Any Speed, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

Adam Thierer (11 Mar 2012), “Avoiding a precautionary principle for the Internet,” Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamthierer/2012/03/11/avoiding-a-precautionary-principle-for-the-internet. Andy Stirling (8 Jul 2013), “Why the precautionary principle matters,” Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2013/jul/08/precautionary-principle-science-policy. 155We don’t want to—and can’t: Kevin Kelly has written about how to be deliberate in deciding which technologies society should use, and how to roll them out. Kevin Kelly (2010), What Technology Wants, Viking, https://books.google.com/books?id =_ToftPd4R8UC. 156International cooperation is coming: It’s starting. This arrest was made by Spanish police, with support from the FBI; Romanian, Belarusian, and Taiwanese authorities; and several cybersecurity companies.


pages: 454 words: 139,350

Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy by Benjamin Barber

airport security, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, computer age, Corn Laws, Corrections Corporation of America, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, global village, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Norbert Wiener, North Sea oil, off-the-grid, pirate software, Plato's cave, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, undersea cable, vertical integration, young professional, zero-sum game

Also see Tony Judt, “The New Old Nationalisms,” The New York Review of Books, May 26, 1994, pp. 44–51. 3. Two recent books, the one by Zbigniew Brzezinski cited above about the “global turmoil” of ethnic nationalism (Jihad), the other by Kevin Kelly about computers and “the rise of neo-biological civilization [McWorld]” both carry the title “Out of Control.” See Brzezinski, Out of Control; and Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994). The metaphor is everywhere: for example, in Andrew Bard Schmookler’s The Illusion of Choice (Albany: State University of New York at Albany Press, 1993), Part III on runaway markets is also entitled “Out of Control.” 4.


pages: 588 words: 131,025

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands by Eric Topol

23andMe, 3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anne Wojcicki, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, Big Tech, bioinformatics, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, connected car, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, gamification, global village, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, job automation, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, lifelogging, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize

We’ve already seen some examples of how physicians react to the threat of being marginalized, along with their general reluctance to adapt to new technology. Now we get into the “Second Machine Age”101 question as to whether the new digital landscape will reboot the need for doctors and health professionals. Kevin Kelly, a cofounder of Wired, has asserted: “The role tasks of any information-intensive job can be automated. It doesn’t matter if you are a doctor, lawyer, architect, reporter, or even programmer: The robot takeover will be epic.”102 An emergency medicine physician likened the current practice of medicine to a Radio Shack store in his piece “Doctor Dinosaur: Physicians may not be exempt from extinction.”103 In late 2013, Korean doctors threatened to go on an all-out strike if the government went ahead with new telemedicine laws that would support clinical diagnoses to be made remotely.

On either end of it are intelligent human beings who are ready to assume quite different roles from what the history of medicine has established. Patients will always crave and need the human touch from a doctor, but that can be had on a more selective basis with the tools at hand. Instead of doctors being squeezed, resorting to computer automation can actually markedly expand their roles. As Kevin Kelly wrote, “the rote tasks of any information-intensive job can be automated. It doesn’t matter if you are a doctor, lawyer, architect, reporter, or even programmer.”102 The Economist weighed in on this too: “The machines are not just cleverer, but they also have access to far more data. The combination of big data and smart machines will take over some occupations wholesale.”153 But smart doctors need not feel threatened, for their occupation is secure.


pages: 168 words: 50,647

The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5 by Taylor Pearson

Airbnb, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Black Swan, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Hangouts, Hacker Conference 1984, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, means of production, Oculus Rift, passive income, passive investing, Peter Thiel, power law, remote working, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, telemarketer, the long tail, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog

To download the full interview with Derek Sivers about how he turned a side project, CD Baby, into a 75 person business and the qualities of musicians that are successful selling online (and how those lessons transfer to other industries), go to http://taylorpearson.me/eoj 31. To download an interview with Dan on how he turned a $40,000 per year web design agency Into a $40,000 per month recurring revenue service, go to http://taylorpearson.me/eoj Chapter 8 32. Kevin Kelly, write about his the phenomenon in more detail at http://kk.org/thetechnium/2008/03/1000-true-fans/ 33. To hear more from Andrew about the lifestyle and business possibilities enabled by the eCommerce drop shipping model and why individuals with hard skills and ambition has more opportunity than ever and why those without are screwed, download his interview at http://taylorpearson.me/eoj 34. http://www.innosight.com/innovation-resources/strategy-innovation/upload/creative-destruction-whips-through-corporate-america_final2012.pdf Chapter 9 35. http://www.softwarebyrob.com/ and http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ 36.


pages: 171 words: 54,334

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia by Becky Hogge, Damien Morris, Christopher Scally

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, disintermediation, DIY culture, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, mass immigration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

Wiener is described by the reviewer – presumably Brand – as “one of the founders of an n-dimensional world whose nature we’ve yet to learn. He is also one of the all-time nice men.” In a talk he gave in 2005, Apple CEO Steve Jobs called the Whole Earth Catalog “one of the bibles of my generation”, describing it as a Google in paperback form, idealistic and overflowing with incredible tools. Wired founder Kevin Kelly compared it to the modern-day blogosphere, calling it “a great example of user-generated content” thanks to Brand’s habit of encouraging readers to submit their own reviews and earn themselves a fee of $10. It won a National Book Award – the first, and probably only time, a catalogue ever won such a plaudit.


pages: 462 words: 150,129

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, food miles, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Medieval Warm Period, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, packet switching, patent troll, Pax Mongolica, Peter Thiel, phenotype, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, working poor, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

This world can already be glimpsed on the web, in what John Barlow calls ‘dot-communism’: a workforce of free agents bartering their ideas and efforts barely interested in whether the barter yields ‘real’ money. The explosion of interest in the free sharing of ideas that the internet has spawned has taken everybody by surprise. ‘The online masses have an incredible willingness to share’ says Kevin Kelly. Instead of money, ‘peer producers who create the stuff gain credit, status, reputation, enjoyment, satisfaction and experience’. People are willing to share their photographs on Flickr, their thoughts on Twitter, their friends on Facebook, their knowledge on Wikipedia, their software patches on Linux, their donations on GlobalGiving, their community news on Craigslist, their pedigrees on Ancestry.com, their genomes on 23andMe, even their medical records on PatientsLikeMe.

This notion has been explored by Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil. See Kurzweil, R. 2005. The Singularity Is Near. Penguin. p. 355 ‘says Stephen Levy.’ Levy, S. 2009. Googlenomics. Wired, June 2009. p. 356 ‘says the author Clay Shirky’. Shirky, C. 2008. Here Comes Everybody. Penguin. p. 356 ‘Says Kevin Kelly’. Kelly, K. 2009. The new socialism. Wired, June 2009. p. 358 ‘The wrong kind of chiefs, priests and thieves could yet snuff out future prosperity on earth.’ Meir Kohn has written eloquently on this point. See www.dartmouth.edu/~mkohn/Papers/lessons% 201r3.pdf. p. 359 ‘Said Lord Macaulay’.


pages: 598 words: 134,339

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, Airbnb, airport security, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, congestion charging, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, drone strike, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, failed state, fault tolerance, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, national security letter, Network effects, Occupy movement, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, RFID, Ross Ulbricht, satellite internet, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, South China Sea, sparse data, stealth mode startup, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, unit 8200, urban planning, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero day

Jason Leopold (30 Oct 2013), “Revealed: NSA pushed 9/11 as key ‘sound bite’ to justify surveillance,” Al Jazeera, http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/10/30/revealed-nsa-pushed911askeysoundbitetojustifysurveillance.html. Clay Shirky has noted: Clay Shirky (14 Mar 2010), Remarks at South by Southwest (SXSW), Austin, TX, quoted in Kevin Kelly (2 Apr 2010), “The Shirky principle,” Kevin Kelly, http://kk.org/thetechnium/2010/04/the-shirky-prin. And then the laws will change: Stewart Baker (24 Feb 2014), Remarks at 2014 Executive Security Action Forum Annual Meeting, RSA Conference, San Francisco, California. Jack Goldsmith again: Jack Goldsmith (9 Aug 2013), “Reflections on NSA oversight, and a prediction that NSA authorities (and oversight, and transparency) will expand,” Lawfare, http://www.lawfareblog.com/2013/08/reflections-on-nsa-oversight-and-a-prediction-that-nsa-authorities-and-oversight-and-transparency-will-expand.


pages: 661 words: 156,009

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

Given the perceived shift in recent decades (in the Western world, at least) from an industrial to a postindustrial society, the continued dependence of information-economy firms like Amazon on material infrastructure and the manipulation of physical objects is surprising, if not paradoxical. Despite repeated claims that the defining characteristic of the information society is “the displacement in our economy of materials by information,” as Wired magazine editor Kevin Kelly has described it—or, in the even more succinct and memorable words of MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte, the inevitable shift “from atoms to bits”—what has in fact occurred is a massive increase in our interaction with our physical environment.12 Information technologies allow humans to visualize, explore, and exploit our environment more efficiently.

Timothy Wu, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age (New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2018); Susan Crawford, Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 12. Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 1996); Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (New York: Penguin Books, 1999). 13. Joshua Ganz, “Inside the Black Box: A Look at the Container,” Prometheus 13, no. 2 (1995), 169–183; Alexander Klose, The Container Principle: How a Box Changes the Way We Think (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). 14.


Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To by David A. Sinclair, Matthew D. Laplante

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atul Gawande, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biofilm, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, creative destruction, CRISPR, dark matter, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, helicopter parent, income inequality, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, life extension, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, plutocrats, power law, quantum entanglement, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, seminal paper, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, union organizing, universal basic income, WeWork, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The American physicist Albert Michelson, who won a Nobel Prize for measuring the speed of light, gave a speech at the University of Chicago in 1894, declaring that there was probably little else to discover in physics besides additional decimal places.1 He died in 1931, as quantum mechanics was in full swing. And in his 1995 book, The Road Ahead, Bill Gates made no mention of the internet, though he substantially revised it about a year later, humbly admitting that he had “vastly underestimated how important and how quickly” the internet would come to prominence.2 Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine, who has a better track record than most at predicting the future, has a golden rule: “Embrace things rather than try and fight them. Work with things rather than try and run from them or prohibit them.”3 We often fail to acknowledge that knowledge is multiplicative and technologies are synergistic.

Kelly added a key point to that excellent mantra: “It’s by use [that] we figure out what things are good for. Which is perhaps another way of saying “Go with the flow and see where it takes you.” J. Altucher, “One Rule for Predicting What You Never Saw Coming . . . ,” The Mission, July 15, 2016, https://medium.com/the-mission/kevin-kelly-one-rule-for-predicting-what-you-never-saw-coming-1e9e4eeae1da. 4. L. Gratton and A. Scott, The 100 Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity (London and New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018). 5. A phrase originating with the theologian Theodore Parker but made famous by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and used several times by President Barack Obama. 6.


Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery by Andrew Greenway,Ben Terrett,Mike Bracken,Tom Loosemore

Airbnb, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, butterfly effect, call centre, chief data officer, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, data science, Diane Coyle, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, G4S, hype cycle, Internet of things, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, loose coupling, M-Pesa, machine readable, megaproject, minimum viable product, nudge unit, performance metric, ransomware, robotic process automation, Silicon Valley, social web, The future is already here, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, work culture

Officials are not the opposite side of the coin from their ministers; they are playing a different game. They are also human beings, and the vast majority clearly want to do a good job. Lots are desperate for change. Many people are already doing their best in fact, but the system they are in thwarts them. Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, once said, ‘Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution’, calling it the Shirky Principle in honour of Clay Shirky, an expert on institutions and how they behave.13 Bureaucracies will also, as one experienced British official put it, tend to ‘resolve ambiguity in favour of continuity’.


pages: 200 words: 60,987

The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America by Steven Johnson

Albert Einstein, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, Danny Hillis, discovery of DNA, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kevin Kelly, planetary scale, seminal paper, side project, South Sea Bubble, stem cell, Stewart Brand, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

First, NYU’s School of Journalism, for letting me teach a graduate seminar on Cultural Ecosystems, and my students there who contributed so many helpful ideas (and who, I’m thankful to report, shot down more than a few of my less helpful ones). My friends at the Long Now Foundation—Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, Brian Eno, Danny Hillis, and Alexander Rose—were kind enough to invite me to discuss the “long zoom” approach to cultural history at one of their seminars in long-term thinking in 2007. I was also lucky enough to be invited to discuss these issues onstage with Brian at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.


pages: 245 words: 64,288

Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy by Pistono, Federico

3D printing, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, future of work, gamification, George Santayana, global village, Google Chrome, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, illegal immigration, income inequality, information retrieval, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, longitudinal study, means of production, Narrative Science, natural language processing, new economy, Occupy movement, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, post scarcity, QR code, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, Rodney Brooks, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, slashdot, smart cities, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, technological singularity, TED Talk, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce

I had many discussions regarding the issue of technological unemployment, particularly during my Graduate Study Program at Singularity University, NASA Ames Research Center, where I had the opportunity to speak with some of the greatest minds on the field, including the authors of the book “Race Against the Machine” Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, founding executive editor of Wired magazine Kevin Kelly, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge. I stand by my thesis, that the economy will not abide in creating new jobs at the same pace with which technology destroys them. Many disagree with me, and we could have a discussion about that, but I think this is missing the point.


pages: 288 words: 64,771

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey

Airbnb, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Build a better mousetrap, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, invisible hand, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, patent troll, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, software patent, subscription business, tail risk, tech bro, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

Eliot once wrote, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” 34.For the seminal article on this topic, see William F. Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas, “Are Inventions Inevitable? A Note on Social Evolution,” Political Science Quarterly 37, no. 1 (1922): 83–98. For further interesting discussion, see Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Viking Adult, 2010), ch. 7. 35.See Christopher A. Cotropia and Mark A. Lemley, “Copying in Patent Law,” North Carolina Law Review 87, no. 5 (2009): 1421–66. Chapter 5 1.Morris M. Kleiner, “Occupational Licensing: Protecting the Public Interest or Protectionism?”


pages: 241 words: 70,307

Leadership by Algorithm: Who Leads and Who Follows in the AI Era? by David de Cremer

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, bitcoin, blockchain, business climate, business process, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, data is not the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, future of work, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, race to the bottom, robotic process automation, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, Turing test, work culture , workplace surveillance , zero-sum game

In today’s business climate, we again see this pattern emerge through algorithms taking care of management and humans accounting for the leadership responsibilities. This idea indicates that the way to run organizations in the future will be to follow a collaboration model, where algorithms and humans jointly create value. As Kevin Kelly in his book, The Inevitable, notes: “This is not a race against the machines … This is a race with the machines.”¹⁰⁵ * * * 89 Tarnoff, B. (2017). ‘Silicon Valley siphons our data like oil. But the deepest drilling has just begun.’ The Guardian. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/23/silicon-valley-big-data-extraction-amazon-whole-foods-facebook 90 Thorp, J. (2012).


Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture by Designing the Mind, Ryan A Bush

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cognitive bias, cognitive load, correlation does not imply causation, data science, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, drug harm reduction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fundamental attribution error, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, impulse control, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, meta-analysis, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, price anchoring, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, Walter Mischel

Brown, and Simon C. Moore, “Money and Happiness: Rank of Income, Not Income, Affects Life Satisfaction,” Psychological Science, February 18, 2010, https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610362671. “Emotional Competency - Envy,” accessed November 25, 2020, http://www.emotionalcompetency.com/envy.htm. Kevin Kelly, “68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice,” The Technium (blog), accessed November 25, 2020, https://kk.org/thetechnium/68-bits-of-unsolicited-advice/. “How to Deal with Extreme Envy,” Time, accessed November 25, 2020, https://time.com/4358803/jealousy-envy-advice/. Wilco W. van Dijk et al., “The Role of Self-Evaluation and Envy in Schadenfreude,” European Review of Social Psychology 26, no. 1 (January 1, 2015): 247–82, https://doi.org/10.1080/10463283.2015.1111600.


pages: 295 words: 66,912

Walled Culture: How Big Content Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Keep Creators Poor by Glyn Moody

Aaron Swartz, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Brewster Kahle, connected car, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, full text search, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, non-fungible token, Open Library, optical character recognition, p-value, peer-to-peer, place-making, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, rent-seeking, text mining, the market place, TikTok, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

It derives its power from the special bond that links creators with their most loyal fans, and the fact that the Internet allows them to connect, wherever either party may be located. It removes what Fight for the Future’s campaigns and communications director Lia Holland has called the ‘choke point that is created by these big moneyed interests between creators and their fans that want to support them.’740 One of the earliest and best expositions of the concept came from Kevin Kelly,741 former Executive Editor at Wired magazine, in an essay he wrote in 2008. He has updated the idea in the light of more recent developments that make it even more compelling and easier to realise: “To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans.


pages: 741 words: 179,454

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

In the summer of 1999, James Glassman, enjoying the attention that Dow 36,000 was receiving, faced off against Barton Biggs, Morgan Stanley’s skeptical equity strategist, in a debate on the new economy. Glassman argued that the Internet was the most important invention of the twentieth century. He was mirroring the views of Kevin Kelly, executive editor of Wired: How many times in the history of mankind have we wired up the planet to create a single marketplace? How often have entire new channels of commerce been created by digital technology? When has money itself been transformed into thousands of instruments of investment?

Bernstein (1996) “The basics of investing and portfolio theory” (www.efficientfrontier.com). 20. Devin Leonard “Treasury’s got Bill Gross on speed dial” (20 June 2009) New York Times. 21. Ibid. 22. Louis Rukeyser (26 July 2002) Wall Street Week, CNBC. 23. Peter Applebome “Contemplating the boobs we were” (27 December 2008) New York Times. 24. Kevin Kelly “Prophets of boom” (September 1999) Wired. 25. Ibid: 151. 26. John Cassidy (2002) dot.con, Perennial, New York: 254–5. Chapter 7—Los Cee-Ca-Go Boys 1. Milton Friedman “Schools: Chicago” (Autumn 1974) University of Chicago Magazine 11–16: 11. 2. P.J. O’Rourke (1998) Eat The Rich, Atlantic Monthly Press, New York: 123. 3.


pages: 345 words: 75,660

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb

Abraham Wald, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Air France Flight 447, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Black Swan, blockchain, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, fulfillment center, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, high net worth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, information retrieval, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Bostrom, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, profit maximization, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Levy, strong AI, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

It speaks in a language that top executives and policy makers will understand. Every leader needs to read this book.” — DOMINIC BARTON, Global Managing Partner, McKinsey & Company “This book makes artificial intelligence easier to understand by recasting it as a new, cheap commodity—predictions. It’s a brilliant move. I found the book incredibly useful.” — KEVIN KELLY, founding executive editor, Wired; author, What Technology Wants and The Inevitable Copyright HBR Press Quantity Sales Discounts Harvard Business Review Press titles are available at significant quantity discounts when purchased in bulk for client gifts, sales promotions, and premiums. Special editions, including books with corporate logos, customized covers, and letters from the company or CEO printed in the front matter, as well as excerpts of existing books, can also be created in large quantities for special needs.


pages: 280 words: 74,559

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, computer vision, CRISPR, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, dematerialisation, DIY culture, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gregor Mendel, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, land reform, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, low earth orbit, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, means of production, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, off grid, pattern recognition, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, post scarcity, post-work, price mechanism, price stability, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, profit motive, race to the bottom, rewilding, RFID, rising living standards, Robert Solow, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, SoftBank, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, working-age population

This condition would be that each instrument could do its own work, at the word of command or by intelligent anticipation, like the statues of Daedalus or the tripods made by Hephaestus, of which Homer relates that ‘Of their own motion they entered the conclave of Gods on Olympus’, as if a shuttle should weave of itself, and a plectrum should do its own harp playing. Aristotle 4 Full Automation: Post-Scarcity in Labour Productivity is for robots. Kevin Kelly When Capital Becomes Labour In 2011 the Economist, in circulation since 1843, posed its readers a question: ‘What happens when … machines are smart enough to become workers? In other words, when capital becomes labour?’ While early giants of classical political economy, such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, did not view capitalist society as defined by conflict between classes, they did presume that labour would always remain distinct from ‘capital stock’, and that workers could never equate to human-made goods used in production such as machinery, tools and buildings.


pages: 259 words: 73,193

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection by Michael Harris

4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Burning Man, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Google Glasses, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, moral panic, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, pre–internet, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social web, Steve Jobs, technological solutionism, TED Talk, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, traumatic brain injury, Turing test

But we now have near perfect replication online. We are now becoming, by Blackmore’s estimation, teme machines—servants to the evolution of our own technologies. The power shifts very quickly from the spark of human intention to the absorption of human will by a technology that seems to have intentions of its own. Kevin Kelly takes this notion to the nth degree in his 2010 book, What Technology Wants, where he anthropomorphizes technologies and asks what they would like us to do. “The evolution of technology converges in much the same manner as biological evolution,” he argues. He sees parallels to bioevolution in the fact that the number of lines of code in Microsoft Windows, for example, multiplied ten times since 1993, becoming more complex as time goes on just as biological organisms tend to do.


pages: 267 words: 78,857

Discardia: More Life, Less Stuff by Dinah Sanders

A. Roger Ekirch, Atul Gawande, big-box store, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, clean water, clockwatching, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, credit crunch, do what you love, endowment effect, Firefox, game design, Inbox Zero, income per capita, index card, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, Kevin Kelly, late fees, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Merlin Mann, Open Library, post-work, side project, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand

How many excellent things can you allow to fall into your life in the next 24 hours? Start counting the delights. Carpe diem! Symptom #26: Plugged into the Wrong Connections Solution #26: Unfollow-Unsubscribe-Cancel-Delete-Donate-Discard It used to be you define yourself by what you use; now you define yourself by what you don’t use. —Kevin Kelly, editor What’s coming at you? As you shift your habits to spend more time on what is truly important to you, it will also be necessary to adjust how much of that important stuff you can actually take on without creating new stresses for yourself. Even though you’re doing the right things to reduce your load, it can seem as if you’re still only able to make so much progress before you get that drowning feeling again.


pages: 248 words: 72,174

The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future by Chris Guillebeau

Airbnb, big-box store, clean water, digital nomad, do what you love, fixed income, follow your passion, if you build it, they will come, index card, informal economy, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, late fees, messenger bag, Nelson Mandela, price anchoring, Ralph Waldo Emerson, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, web application

Suddenly you have the first part of success—something of value. I got all this from The $100 Startup, which is full of practical advice about inventing your own livelihood. I’ve done a handful of $100 startups myself, several of which I later sold. Chris Guillebeau knows what he is talking about. Listen to this book! —Kevin Kelly, author of What Technology Wants “This book is more than a ‘how to’ guide, it’s a ‘how they did it’ guide that should persuade anyone thinking about starting a business that they don’t need a fortune to make one.” —John Jantsch, author of Duct Tape Marketing and The Referral Engine “Is that giant knot in your stomach keeping you from starting your own business or pursuing the career of your dreams?


pages: 268 words: 75,850

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems-And Create More by Luke Dormehl

3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, computer age, death of newspapers, deferred acceptance, disruptive innovation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Google Glasses, High speed trading, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kodak vs Instagram, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine readable, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, speech recognition, stable marriage problem, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, upwardly mobile, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator

Not everyone is an expert in supercomputing and not everyone has the ability, nor the resources (his regimen costs between $5,000 and $10,000 each year) to capture huge amounts of personal data, or to make sense of it in the event that they do. But Smarr is not alone. As a data junkie, he is a valued member of the so-called Quantified Self movement: an ever-expanding group of similar individuals who enthusiastically take part in a form of self-tracking, somatic surveillance. Founded by Wired magazine editors Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly in the mid-2000s, the Quantified Self movement casts its aspirations in bold philosophical terms, promising devotees “self-knowledge through numbers.”4 Taking the Positivist view of verification and empiricism, and combining this with a liberal dose of technological determinism, the Quantified Self movement begs the existential question of what kind of self can possibly exist that is unable to be number-crunched using the right algorithms?


pages: 294 words: 80,084

Tomorrowland: Our Journey From Science Fiction to Science Fact by Steven Kotler

adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alexander Shulgin, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, Dennis Tito, epigenetics, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, interchangeable parts, Kevin Kelly, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, North Sea oil, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, private spaceflight, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, theory of mind, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

And so it is for all of us. These are exponential times. The far frontier is no longer a distant dream. It is there today and here tomorrow, and that’s the thing: Luddite revolutions don’t seem to hold for long. Resisting the lure of technology isn’t really in us. In What Technology Wants, Wired cofounder Kevin Kelly argues that this is because technology is actually another form of life — a living, natural system with ancient origins and deep desires. And while Kelly has a point, I also think there’s simpler truth at work. Life is tricky sport. It can be hard here, often harder than we want it to be, sometimes harder than we can take.


pages: 287 words: 86,919

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization by Alexander R. Galloway

Ada Lovelace, airport security, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bretton Woods, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computer Lib, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Dennis Ritchie, digital nomad, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, John Conway, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, macro virus, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, OSI model, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, post-industrial society, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, semantic web, SETI@home, stem cell, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, the market place, theory of mind, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Yochai Benkler

Media historians Randall Packer and Ken Jordan gleefully proclaim that “[m]ultimedia, by its very nature, is open, democratic, nonhierarchical, fluid, varied, inclusive.”5 Their claim is essentially true, but for completely opposite reasons than they might hope for. I aim here to answer the question: How is a technology able to establish real-world control when it lacks certain fundamental tools such as hierarchy, centralization, and violence? Why does technology seem, as Kevin Kelly likes to put it, so “out of control” yet still function so flawlessly? There must be some machine that, at the end of the day, sorts it all out. Protocol is that machine, that massive control apparatus that guides distributed networks, creates cultural objects, and engenders life forms. This book is not meant to be a history of protocol or protocols.


pages: 341 words: 84,752

All Tomorrow's Parties by William Gibson

dark pattern, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, telepresence

To Deb and Graeme and Claire, with love, for putting up with far more than the ordinary basement-dwelling. To Julia Witwer. for being this text's first reader and more. The following are special friends of this book: Gordon Begg, Judith Beale, Jessica Eastman, Karl Taro Greenfeld, Mark Halyk, Richard Kadrev, Kevin Kelly, Lueza Jean Lamb, Roger Trilling, Jack Womack. Thank you all. And to the post-cyberpunk contingent in Mexico City, who, though I declined their thoughtful offer of the definitive alternative tour, encouraged me, with their warm enthusiasm, through the writing of a crucial chapter in the Hotel Camino Real.


pages: 362 words: 83,464

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Paul Leinberger and Bruce Tucker, The New Individualists: The Generation After the Organization Man (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), pp. 400–1; Saxenian, Regional Advantage, pp. 59–60, 77, 107; Daisuke Wakabayashi, “How Japan Lost Its Electronics Crown,” Wall Street Journal, August 15, 2012. 46. Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Morrow, 1980), pp. 53, 171, 437. 47. Kevin Kelly, New Rules for a New Economy: Ten Radical Strategies for a Connected World (New York: Viking, 1998, pp. 118-119. 48. Geoffrey James, Business Wisdom of the Electronic Elite (New York: Random House, 1996), pp. 4–5, 222; Leo Marx, “Information Technology in Historical Perspective,” in David Schon, Bish Sanyal, and William Mitchell, High Technology and Low Income Communities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. 136: Thomas Mahon, Charged Bodies: People, Power and Paradox in Silicon Valley (New York: New American Library, 1985), p. 31. 49.


pages: 282 words: 81,873

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

Cynics assumed he resorted to hyperbole in order to grab headlines and sell books. And indeed, The Singularity Is Near became a New York Times bestseller, with a quarter of a million copies sold over ten years. The book received a particularly enthusiastic reception in Silicon Valley. Wired magazine founder Kevin Kelly called it “a seminal document” presaging “the beginning of utopia.” Bill Gates offered a blurb for this “intriguing” book: “Kurzweil is the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.” Others viewed Kurzweil’s transformation in a different light. “Ray Kurzweil is a genius.


pages: 252 words: 78,780

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

Twenty years ago, pundits believed the Internet was going to make the world better in all sorts of ways, from perfecting democracy to saving the planet. Best of all would be the financial impact. During the heady days of the first dotcom boom, when stocks were soaring and people were mooning over the magical powers of the web, Wired founding editor Kevin Kelly declared the Internet would usher in decades of “ultraprosperity,” with “full employment…and improving living standards.” We were entering “the roaring zeroes,” as he called it, while declaring, “The good news is, you’ll be a millionaire soon. The bad news is, so will everybody else.” Bill Gates would become a trillionaire, Kelly predicted, perhaps as soon as 2005.


pages: 309 words: 81,975

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, DevOps, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gender pay gap, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Goodhart's law, Google X / Alphabet X, hiring and firing, hive mind, holacracy, impact investing, income inequality, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loose coupling, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, mirror neurons, new economy, Paul Graham, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, remote working, Richard Thaler, Rochdale Principles, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, six sigma, smart contracts, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, source of truth, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The future is already here, the High Line, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, universal basic income, WeWork, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Edwards Deming, David Dewane, Peter Drucker, Amy Edmondson, Charles Eisenstein, Gerard Endenburg, Robin Fraser, Jason Fried, Isaac Getz, James Gleick, Seth Godin, Deborah Gordon, Paul Graham, Adam Grant, Dave Gray, Gary Hamel, David Heinemeier Hansson, Tim Harford, Frederick Herzberg, Jeremy Hope, Steven Johnson, Daniel Kahneman, Kevin Kelly, David Kidder, Doug Kirkpatrick, Henrik Kniberg, Lars Kolind, John Kotter, Frederic Laloux, Jason Little, David Marquet, John E. Mayfield, Douglas McGregor, Greg McKeown, Melanie Mitchell, Taiichi Ohno, Tom Peters, Niels Pflaeging, Daniel Pink, Adam Pisoni, Eric Ries, Brian Robertson, Ricardo Semler, Peter Senge, Simon Sinek, Dave Snowden, Nassim Taleb, Ben Thompson, Geoffrey West, Meg Wheatley, Keith Yamashita, Jean-Francois Zobrist, and the few I forgot.


pages: 313 words: 84,312

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production by Charles Leadbeater

1960s counterculture, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, c2.com, call centre, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, death of newspapers, Debian, digital divide, digital Maoism, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, folksonomy, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, game design, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, lone genius, M-Pesa, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, new economy, Nicholas Carr, online collectivism, Paradox of Choice, planetary scale, post scarcity, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social web, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Jaron Lanier, in a widely read online essay published in May 2006, alleged that ‘digital Maoism’ was promoting collective stupidity. People were taking their lead, Lanier argued, from the all-wise ‘collective’ rather than bothering to think for themselves. His case is only strengthened by web advocates, such as Kevin Kelly, the original editor of Wired, who claim that the web is creating a ‘hive mind’, that of an anonymous collective in which individuals are like bees or ants. The American sociologist Sherry Turkle has echoed these fears, questioning whether young people will form a sharp sense of individual identity if they are tethered to their phone and social relationships, unable to be alone and to reflect on what matters to them because they are acting up to the online audience that constantly accompanies them.


pages: 324 words: 80,217

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Apollo 13, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, charter city, crack epidemic, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Easter island, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, ghettoisation, gig economy, Golden age of television, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Islamic Golden Age, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, life extension, low interest rates, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oculus Rift, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, private spaceflight, QAnon, quantitative easing, radical life extension, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y2K

Despite the disappointments of the last few decades (or perhaps because they don’t fully acknowledge them), the default assumption of most futurists is that one or more of these scenarios are inevitable. When you go looking for people in our culture who still talk like Victorian-era utopians, you’ll often find visions that fold together all of these possible breakthroughs. In 2014 Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of Wired magazine, asked his Twitter followers to compose a “100-word description of a plausible technological future in 100 years” that they or he would want to live in. The responses he published had a certain commonality, envisioning a postscarcity, leisure-rich economy and a society trending toward some form or another of transhumanism.


pages: 308 words: 85,880

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

Logan and Robert M. Adams (Cambridge University Press, 1975), 48. Introduction 1. “Digital Transformation of Industries: Demystifying Digital and Securing $100 Trillion for Society and Industry by 2025,” World Economic Forum, January 2016. 2. “System Crash,” Economist, November 12, 2017. 3. Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future (Viking, 2016) Chapter One 1. For more on Wiener, Bush, and Licklider’s role in the creation of the internet, see Andrew Keen, The Internet Is Not the Answer (Grove Atlantic, 2015), 14–18. 2. For an excellent overview of the nineteenth-century origins of privacy, see: Jill Lepore, “The Prism: Privacy in an Age of Publicity,” New Yorker, June 24, 2013. 3.


pages: 296 words: 83,254

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back by Juliet Schor, William Attwood-Charles, Mehmet Cansoy

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, carbon footprint, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, future of work, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, global supply chain, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, mass incarceration, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer rental, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Stewart Brand, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, wage slave, walking around money, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

According to Turner, “there emerged the image of a new kind of person, one who moved from task to task pursuing information and using technical tools in an experimental manner for the advancement of himself or herself and society” (88). 12. Some believers often went even further, adopting a worldview in which systems such as markets are conceptualized as biological systems—that is, naturally occurring processes over which humans have little control. Kevin Kelly, cofounder and editor of the flagship publication of the cyberculture, Wired, explicitly embraced this bionomic ideology, as did others. See Turner (2006, chap. 7); and Frank (2000). 13. Joining “the free-wheeling spirit” of hippies with the “entrepreneurial zeal” of yuppies is from Barbrook and Cameron (1996, 1). 14.


pages: 295 words: 81,861

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

Barlow wrote that governments “have no sovereignty where we gather,” and declared cyberspace “to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us.”24 Notably, Barlow did not share the same disdain for the corporations that flocked to the internet and shaped it to serve their bottom lines. The EFF became influential in the debates about internet legislation through the 1990s, but even more important was Wired magazine. Kevin Kelly, its founding executive editor, previously served as editor of the Whole Earth Review and imbued the publication with a similar ethos. Louis Rossetto, one of the magazine’s founders, “saw the digital revolution as an extension of a long-standing, if not widely acknowledged, American libertarian tradition,” and under Kelly’s direction, writers “utilized the computational metaphors and universal rhetoric of cybernetics to depict New Right politicians, telecommunications CEOs, information pundits, and members of … Whole Earth–connected organizations as a single, leading edge of countercultural revolution.”25 As a result, Wired’s pages served as a meeting place for the tech industry and the socially conservative Republicans who shared their desire for an internet free of government control or regulation.


pages: 304 words: 93,494

Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton

4chan, Airbus A320, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, friendly fire, index card, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, messenger bag, PalmPilot, pets.com, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technology bubble, traveling salesman, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks

Marin, Ryan Block, Tom Bodkin, Danah Boyd, Matt Buchanan, David Carr, Brian Chen, Mathias Crawford, Tony and Mary Conrad, Tom Conrad, Paddy Cosgrave, Dennis Crowley, Damon Darlin, Anil Dash, Mike Driscoll, Aaron Durand, Josh Felser, Tim Ferris, Brady Forrest, David Gallhager, Michael Galpert, John Geddes, Shelly Gerrish, Ashley Khaleesi Granata, Mark Hansen, Quentin Hardy, Leland Hayward, Erica Hintergardt, Mat Honan, Arianna Huffington, Kate Imbach, Larry Ingrassia, Walter Isaccson, Mike Issac, Joel Johnson, Andrei Kallaur, Paul Kedrosky, Kevin Kelly, Jeff Koyen, Brian Lam, Jeremy LaTrasse, Steven Levy, Allen Loeb, Kati London, Om Malik, John Markoff, Hubert McCabe, Christopher Michel, Claire Cain Miller, Trudy Muller, Tim O’Reilly, Carolyn Penner, Nicole Perlroth, Megan Quinn, Narendra Rocherolle, Jennifer Rodriguez, Evelyn Rusli, Naveen Selvadurai, Ryan and Devon Sarver, Elliot Schrage, Mari Sheibley, MG Siegler, Courtney Skott, Robin Sloan, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Suzanne Spector, Brad Stone, David Streitfeld, Gabriel Stricker, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Kara Swisher, Clive Thompson, Deep Throat, Baratunde Thurston, Mark Trammell, Sara Morishige Williams, Nick Wingfield, Jenna Wortham, Aaron Zamost, Edith Zimmerman.


pages: 330 words: 88,445

The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance by Steven Kotler

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Clayton Christensen, data acquisition, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, do what you love, escalation ladder, fear of failure, Google Earth, haute couture, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, risk tolerance, rolodex, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, SpaceShipOne, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, time dilation, Virgin Galactic, Walter Mischel, X Prize

eISBN: 9781477850831 Cover design by Dave Stanton Author photograph © Ryan Heffernan Cover art © Scott Serfas Contents Start Reading Preface: The Why of Flow Introduction: Before the Flow PART ONE HE IS THIS FRENZY 1 The Way of Flow 2 The Wave of Flow 3 The Where of Flow 4 The What of Flow 5 The Flow Shortcut PART TWO FLOW HACKER NATION 6 Outer Flow 7 Inner Flow 8 The We of Flow 9 The Flow of Imagination PART THREE TIME TO RISE 10 The Dark Side of Flow 11 The Flow of Next 12 Flow to Abundance Afterword Author’s Note Notes About the Author Index The tools for managing paradox are still undeveloped. – KEVIN KELLY Preface: The Why of Flow This is a book about the impossible, but it starts with the invisible. Over the past three decades, an unlikely collection of men and women have pushed human performance farther and faster than at any other point in the 150,000-year history of our species. In this evolutionary eyeblink, they have completely redefined the limits of the possible.


pages: 329 words: 95,309

Digital Bank: Strategies for Launching or Becoming a Digital Bank by Chris Skinner

algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, bank run, Basel III, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, demand response, disintermediation, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial innovation, gamification, Google Glasses, high net worth, informal economy, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, margin call, mass affluent, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Pingit, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, pre–internet, QR code, quantitative easing, ransomware, reserve currency, RFID, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, software as a service, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, the long tail, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Do banks provide the core processing or are banks sitting on top of someone else’s core processing? The culture of the bank is actually more important than the technology and, at the core of the culture, is the question: do you understand the customer and their needs in this new digital age? The New Economics of Digital Banking Back in the 1990s, Kevin Kelly, senior maverick and launch editor of Wired Magazine, told me that everything would become free thanks to the internet. I thought he was nuts at the time, but how wrong was I? Kevin has 12 lessons about how to think about the internet, and they were difficult to absorb as, bearing in mind this was back in 1997, he was far too ahead of his time.


pages: 264 words: 90,379

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell

affirmative action, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, complexity theory, David Brooks, East Village, fake news, haute couture, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, Nelson Mandela, new economy, pattern recognition, Pepsi Challenge, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, theory of mind, young professional

Now they are looking upward instead of downward. You’re preventing them from resolving the situation.” Van Riper carried this lesson with him when he took over the helm of Red Team. “The first thing I told our staff is that we would be in command and out of control,” Van Riper says, echoing the words of the management guru Kevin Kelly. “By that, I mean that the overall guidance and the intent were provided by me and the senior leadership, but the forces in the field wouldn’t depend on intricate orders coming from the top. They were to use their own initiative and be innovative as they went forward. Almost every day, the commander of the Red air forces came up with different ideas of how he was going to pull this together, using these general techniques of trying to overwhelm Blue Team from different directions.


pages: 366 words: 87,916

Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It by Gabriel Wyner

card file, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, index card, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, language acquisition, machine translation, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Skype, spaced repetition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Yogi Berra

—Melanie Pinola, contributor writer for Lifehacker.com and author of LinkedIn in 30 Minutes “This is the book I’d use next time I want to learn a new language. It employs an intelligent mix of the latest methods for learning a language on your own using the Web, apps, and voice-training tips in an accelerated time frame.” —Kevin Kelly, senior maverick at Wired and author of What Technology Wants “I know what you’re thinking: But learning a new language is soooo hard! The solution? Stop being a whiner and start reading Wyner. This book is a winner! Guaranteed to rewire your brain in as many languages as you’d like.” —Joel Saltzman, author of Shake That Brain!


pages: 299 words: 91,839

What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, business process, call centre, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, clean water, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, different worldview, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, don't be evil, Dunbar number, fake news, fear of failure, Firefox, future of journalism, G4S, Golden age of television, Google Earth, Googley, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, old-boy network, PageRank, peer-to-peer lending, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, web of trust, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Conversations can grow around ideas in books, exposing them to new readers. Writing in Library Journal, Ben Vershbow of the Institute for the Future of the Book envisioned a digital ecology in which “parts of books will reference parts of other books. Books will be woven together out of components in remote databases and servers.” Kevin Kelly wrote in The New York Times Magazine: “In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.” When an idea is spread among people, it can grow and adapt and live on past the page. Before a convention of booksellers in 2006, author John Updike called Kelly’s vision of “relationships, links, connection and sharing” Marxist and “a pretty grisly scenario.”


pages: 378 words: 94,468

Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That's Changing How the World Gets High by Mike Power

air freight, Alexander Shulgin, banking crisis, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, drug harm reduction, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, frictionless, fulfillment center, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, John Bercow, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Network effects, nuclear paranoia, packet switching, pattern recognition, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, pre–internet, QR code, RAND corporation, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, trade route, Whole Earth Catalog, Zimmermann PGP

Its esoteric and wide-ranging content, from poetry to construction plans for geodesic domes by physicist Buckminster Fuller, from car repair tips to trout-fishing guides and the fundamentals of yoga and the I-ching, was hacked together using Polaroid cameras, Letraset and the highest of low-tech. It now reads much like a printed blog; it was a paper website, in the words of blogger and author Kevin Kelly, that was sprinting before the web even took its first shaky steps.3 Its statement of intent in its launch issue reads like a manifesto that has been realized by today’s web users: ‘A realm of intimate personal power is developing – the power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.


pages: 339 words: 94,769

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI by John Brockman

AI winter, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, finite state, friendly AI, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, information retrieval, invention of writing, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, Loebner Prize, machine translation, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Picturephone, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, telerobotics, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, you are the product, zero-sum game

* Rodney Brooks, for example, asserts that it’s impossible for a program to be “smart enough that it would be able to invent ways to subvert human society to achieve goals set for it by humans, without understanding the ways in which it was causing problems for those same humans,” http://rodneybrooks.com/the-seven-deadly-sins-of-predicting-the-future-of-ai. * Kevin Kelly, “The Myth of a Superhuman AI,” Wired, April 25, 2017. * See Hadfield-Menell et al., “The Off-Switch Game,” https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.08219.pdf. * The Human Use of Human Beings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954), 96. * Joseph Levine, “Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64 (1983): 354–61


Microserfs by Douglas Coupland

Apple Newton, Big Tech, Biosphere 2, car-free, computer age, El Camino Real, Future Shock, game design, General Magic , guns versus butter model, hive mind, Kevin Kelly, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, postindustrial economy, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence

microserfs By Douglas Coupland thanks: John Batelle Elizabeth Dunn Ian Ferrell James Glave James Joaquin Kevin Kelly Jane Metcalfe Judith Regan Louis Rossetto Nathan Shedroff Michael Tchao Ian Verchere Contents: 1 Microserfs 2 Oop 3 Interiority 4 FaceTime 5 TrekPolitiks 6 Chyx 7 Transhumanity 1 Microserfs FRIDAY Early Fall, 1993 This morning, just after 11:00, Michael locked himself in his office and he won't come out. Bill (Bill!) sent Michael this totally wicked flame-mail from hell on the e-mail system - and he just wailed on a chunk of code Michael had written. Using the Bloom County-cartoons-taped-on-the-door index, Michael is certainly the most sensitive coder in Building Seven - not the type to take criticism easily.


pages: 384 words: 93,754

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

Instead of simply pursuing incremental goals, we also need to set and deliver against goals that will have 10X (i.e., tenfold) or 100X the impact on anywhere between one million and one billion people. Looking back now, I had been exploring the edges of exponential thinking for quite a while. In 2005, for example, I visited Wired magazine’s founding editor Kevin Kelly at his home in California. His books Out of Control and New Rules for the New Economy had helped shift my vision of the future from a future of scarcity to one increasingly characterized, at least in some areas, by abundance. In a world increasingly marked by decreasing returns and limits to growth, he argued that new digital technology offered increasing—indeed exponentially accelerating—returns.


pages: 316 words: 94,886

Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

behavioural economics, billion-dollar mistake, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Great Leap Forward, hindsight bias, index fund, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, job satisfaction, Kevin Kelly, loss aversion, Max Levchin, medical residency, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, young professional

To see how this principle produces the biases we cover in Decisive, see his analysis of narrow framing (p. 87), overconfidence (pp. 199–201, 209–12, and 259–63), confirmation bias (pp. 80–84), and emotion and indecision (pp. 401–6). 2 Career choices. The 40% failure rate is described in Brooke Masters, “Rise of a Headhunter,” Financial Times, March 30, 2009, http://​www.​ft.​com/​cms/​s/​0/​19975256-​1af2-​11de-​8aa3-​0000779fd2ac.​html#axzz24O1​DwtbW. Describing the costs of these decisions, Kevin Kelly, the CEO of the prominent executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles, says, “It’s expensive in terms of lost revenue. It’s expensive in terms of the individual’s hiring. It’s damaging to morale.” The teaching study is National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, “Policy Brief: The High Cost of Teacher Turnover,” http://​nctaf.​org/​wp-​content/​uploads/​NCTAF​Cost​of​Teacher​Turn​over​policy​brief.​pdf.


pages: 360 words: 101,038

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sax

Airbnb, barriers to entry, big-box store, call centre, cloud computing, creative destruction, death of newspapers, declining real wages, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, gentrification, hype cycle, hypertext link, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

Analog is always the source, always the truth. Reality is analog. Digital is the best we can do with the tools of the day,” he said. “It’s funny how often people forget that.” On the morning I was booked to fly home from San Francisco, I took a detour on the way to the airport to speak with Kevin Kelly, best known as one of the founding editors of Wired magazine. Kelly belongs to a core group of techno-idealists who see digital technology as a force for ultimate good, and he pioneered some of the earliest online communities and social networks. In 2010, Kelly published What Technology Wants, a book on how technology shapes us as human beings, which a young computer programmer named Mike Murchison strongly suggested I read, specifically for Kelly’s thoughts on how our use of technology evolved, and how that related to the Revenge of Analog.


pages: 352 words: 96,532

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon

air freight, Bill Duvall, Charles Babbage, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, conceptual framework, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, fault tolerance, Hush-A-Phone, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, natural language processing, OSI model, packet switching, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, The Soul of a New Machine

Helen Samuels and the folks at MIT archives were immensely helpful, as was Kevin Corbitt, assistant archivist at the Charles Babbage Institute, Center for the History of Information Processing, at the University of Minnesota. We are grateful to John Day, Larry Roberts, Al Vezza, and John Shoch for digging around in old boxes for us. Deborah Melone and Bob Menk sent photographs and archives from BBN. Kevin Kelly and Martha Baer at Wired magazine got us focused on the history of e-mail. Noel Chiappa, good-natured tutor, spent hours on the telephone explaining, among other technical points, how routing tables and RFNMs work. The following people allowed us to interview them at length: Wes Clark, Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, Severo Ornstein, Bob Taylor, Larry Roberts, Jon Postel, Frank Heart, Alex McKenzie, Dave Walden, Ben Barker, Donald Davies, Paul Baran, Len Kleinrock, Steve Lukasik, Steve Crocker, and Bob Metcalfe.


pages: 297 words: 103,910

Free culture: how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity by Lawrence Lessig

Brewster Kahle, Cass Sunstein, content marketing, creative destruction, digital divide, Free Software Foundation, future of journalism, George Akerlof, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, Joi Ito, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Louis Daguerre, machine readable, new economy, prediction markets, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, software patent, synthetic biology, transaction costs

But when the copyright owners oppose a proposal such as the Eldred Act, then, finally, there is an example that lays bare the naked selfinterest driving this war. This act would free an extraordinary range of content that is otherwise unused. It wouldn't interfere with any copyright owner's desire to exercise continued control over his content. It would simply liberate what Kevin Kelly calls the "Dark Content" that fills archives around the world. So when the warriors oppose a change like this, we should ask one simple question: What does this industry really want? With very little effort, the warriors could protect their content. So the effort to block something like the Eldred Act is not really about protecting their content.


Free Money for All: A Basic Income Guarantee Solution for the Twenty-First Century by Mark Walker

3D printing, 8-hour work day, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, commoditize, confounding variable, driverless car, financial independence, full employment, guns versus butter model, happiness index / gross national happiness, industrial robot, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, longitudinal study, market clearing, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, plutocrats, precariat, printed gun, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Rosa Parks, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, working poor

Patrick Lin, Keith Abney, and George A Bekey (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 223–232. 13. Raja Roy, “Exploring the Boundary Conditions of Disruption: Large Firms and New Product Introduction with a Potentially Disruptive Technology in the Industrial Robotics Industry,” 2014, http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6578147. 14. Kevin Kelly, “Better Than Human: Why Robots Will—And Must—Take Our Jobs,” Wired, 2012, http://www.wired.com/ gadgetlab/2012/12/ff-robots-will-take-our-jobs/all/. 15. Ibid. 16. I do not want to brag, but I was once “crew member of the month” at my local McDonald’s. 17. Peter Murray, “Robot Serves Up 360 Hamburgers Per Hour,” Singularity Hub, 2013, http://singularityhub.com/2013/01/22/ robot-serves-up-340-hamburgers-per-hour/. 18.


pages: 420 words: 100,811

We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves by John Cheney-Lippold

algorithmic bias, bioinformatics, business logic, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer vision, critical race theory, dark matter, data science, digital capitalism, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, informal economy, iterative process, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, lifelogging, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, price discrimination, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software studies, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological singularity, technoutopianism, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Turing machine, uber lyft, web application, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

Evgeny Dantsin, Thomas Eiter, Georg Gottlob, and Andrei Voronkov, “Complexity and Expressive Power of Logic Programming,” ACM Computing Surveys 33, no. 3 (2001): 374–425; Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). 92. Kevin Kelly and Derrick de Kerckhove, “4.10: What Would McLuhan Say?,” Wired, October 1, 1996, http://archive.wired.com. 93. Melvin Kranzberg, “Technology and History: ‘Kranzberg’s Laws,’” Technology and Culture 27, no. 3 (1986): 544–560. 94. David Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life (Berkshire, UK: Open University Press, 2001); Daniel Solove, The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age (Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, 2004). 95.


pages: 411 words: 98,128

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It by Brian Dumaine

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AI winter, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, money market fund, natural language processing, no-fly zone, Ocado, pets.com, plutocrats, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

The company has also said: Eric M. Johnson, “Exclusive: Jeff Bezos Plans to Charge at Least $200,000 for Space Rides—Sources,” Reuters, July 12, 2018, In the spring of 2019: Kenneth Chang, “Jeff Bezos Unveils Blue Origin’s Vision for Space, and a Moon Lander,” New York Times, May 9, 2019. The clock rests: Kevin Kelly, “Clock in the Mountain,” blog, The Long Now Foundation, n.d., http://longnow.org/clock/. Near the top of the five-hundred-foot-tall tunnel: Ibid. Chapter 5: Cranking the AI Flywheel Then he came up with Amazon.com: Stone, The Everything Store, 35. to make life a little easier: Ibid., 50. In 2002, he instituted: Ibid., 169.


pages: 350 words: 98,077

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boston Dynamics, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, folksonomy, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, ImageNet competition, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, ought to be enough for anybody, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, tail risk, TED Talk, the long tail, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers

All of the largest technology companies have poured billions of dollars into AI research and development, either hiring AI experts directly or acquiring smaller start-up companies for the sole purpose of grabbing (“acqui-hiring”) their talented employees. The potential of being acquired, with its promise of instant millionaire status, has fueled a proliferation of start-ups, often founded and run by former university professors, each with his or her own twist on AI. As the technology journalist Kevin Kelly observed, “The business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI.”5 And, crucially, for nearly all of these companies, AI has meant “deep learning.” AI spring is once again in full bloom. AI: Narrow and General, Weak and Strong Like every AI spring before it, our current one features experts predicting that “general AI”—AI that equals or surpasses humans in most ways—will be here soon.


Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 183. The meetings Brand convened eventually led to the formation of the Global Business Network (GBN). In addition to AI practitioners and biologists, GBN’s orbit included social scientists such as Sherry Turkle and Mary Catherine Bateson and the writer Kevin Kelly (who later became editor of Wired magazine). Turner writes that Brand’s gatherings “offered participants a chance to imagine themselves as members of a mobile elite, able to glimpse in the natural and economic systems around them the invisible laws according to which all things functioned.” The concept of networks played multiple roles here: as a metaphor for the biological world, for the synthetic world (electronic circuits and interacting computing devices), as well as for the social activities of the participants.   44.   


Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig

Aaron Swartz, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Benjamin Mako Hill, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, collaborative editing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, Erik Brynjolfsson, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Larry Wall, late fees, Mark Shuttleworth, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, optical character recognition, PageRank, peer-to-peer, recommendation engine, revision control, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Saturday Night Live, search costs, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, transaction costs, VA Linux, Wayback Machine, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

It did so by adding not a taxonomy but, as Thomas Vander Wal puts it, a “folksonomy to this RW culture.”11 Tags and ranking systems, such as del.icio.us, Reddit, and Digg, enabled readers of a blog or news article to mark it for others to find or ignore. These marks added meaning to the post or story. They would help it get organized among the millions of others that were out there. Together these tools added a metalayer to the blogosphere, by providing, as Wired cofounder Kevin Kelly puts it, “a public annotation—like a keyword or category name that you hang on a file, Web page or picture.”12 And as readers explore the Web, users leave marks that help others understand or find the same stuff. 80706 i-xxiv 001-328 r4nk.indd 59 8/12/08 1:54:50 AM 60 REMI X So, for example, if you read an article about Barack Obama, you can tag it with a short description: “Obama” or “Obama_environment.”


pages: 394 words: 108,215

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, California gold rush, card file, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, different worldview, digital divide, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, punch-card reader, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, union organizing, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Also, I have to give special thanks to friends who were willing to listen to me chatter endlessly about what my reporting had dug up. Paul Saffo has been one of the sharpest thinkers in Silicon Valley for more than two decades, with a wonderful critical eye. Michael Schrage was once upon a time a competitor at The Washington Post but was one of the first people to give me encouragement. Kevin Kelly helped me explore the idea of what was special about a certain time and place. Gregg Zachary has taught journalism with me at the University of California at Berkeley, and at Stanford, and when he covered Silicon Valley for The Wall Street Journal during the 1990s he was the competitor I dreaded most.


pages: 385 words: 103,561

Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Our World by Greg Milner

Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boeing 747, British Empire, creative destruction, data acquisition, data science, Dava Sobel, different worldview, digital map, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, Eyjafjallajökull, Flash crash, friendly fire, GPS: selective availability, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Ian Bogost, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Kwajalein Atoll, land tenure, lone genius, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mercator projection, place-making, polynesian navigation, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, skunkworks, smart grid, systems thinking, the map is not the territory, vertical integration

Many thanks to everyone else who unhesitatingly extended a helping hand for this book, taking the time to tell me their stories, explaining the history and technological intricacies of GPS: Claudio Aporta, Michael Barclay, Beth Bartel, Ben Bartolome, Ron Beard, Eric Beaton, Michael Bevis, Steve Bradford, Justin Brookman, Nolan Bushnell, Robert Cheetham, Ann Ciganer, Hervé Clauss, Steve Coast, Dan Cole, Peggy Conway, Chuck Counselman, Jim Davis, Loren De Groot, Jim Dempsey, Deborah Dennard, George Drake, Ryan Driscoll, Per Enge, Ralph Eschenbach, John Fischer, Sean Fitzpatrick, Julia Frankenstein, Gary Freeland, Robert Gable, Nunzio Gambale, Amy Gilroy, Buster Glosson, Allen Goldstein, Gaylord Green, Liz Groff, Anurag Gupta, Tim Hall, Rick Hamilton, Debbie Henderson, Jim Higgins, Kirk Holub, Chuck Horner, Joseph Hoshen, Jiung-Yao Huang, Ken Hudnut, Aaron Huff, Eric Hunsader, Michael E. Jackson, Kevin Kelly, Josh Khani, Jay Dee Krull, Gilly Leshed, Judah Levine, Sam Liang, Rich Maher, Mani Mahjouri, Steve Malys, Hans Mark, Susan Marshall, Tom McHugh, Jules McNeff, Donald Mitchell, Richard Nimer, Scott Pace, Dave Paddock, Ganesh Pattabiraman, Stig Pedersen, Bruce Peetz, Arun Phadke, Sam Pullen, Logan Scott, Edwin Stear, Sam Stein, Ron Stewart, Mike Swiek, Dave Van Dusseldorp, John Warburton, Jim White, Pete Wilhelm, Ronald Yates.


pages: 335 words: 107,779

Some Remarks by Neal Stephenson

airport security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cable laying ship, call centre, cellular automata, edge city, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Hacker Ethic, high-speed rail, impulse control, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, megaproject, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, packet switching, pirate software, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social web, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, trade route, Turing machine, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, X Prize

Finally, the book contains two original, previously unpublished pieces: an essay about sitting entitled “Arsebestos,” and a one-sentence work of fiction, unfinished, and, for very sound artistic and legal reasons, never to be finished, which I will allow the reader to discover in due course. It only remains for me to thank the people who helped these pieces come into being: as always, my supernaturally patient and understanding wife, and my agent, Liz Darhansoff, who has been a fount of infallible advice for thirty years; Kevin Kelly at WIRED, who talked me past my initial skepticism that an article about cables could ever be any good and turned a blind eye to some rather odd expense reports; the readers/members of Slashdot; the Royal Society and Gresham College for inviting me to take part in forums where I would never have expected to find myself in any capacity above the level of bootblack; and the editorial page staff of the New York Times for randomly entering my life every few years and asking me to write short pieces on odd topics.


pages: 379 words: 108,129

An Optimist's Tour of the Future by Mark Stevenson

23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, augmented reality, bank run, Boston Dynamics, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, clean water, computer age, decarbonisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nick Bostrom, off grid, packet switching, peak oil, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, X Prize

‘But I don’t think you could stop the whole thing very easily.’ The reason for this is that the Internet isn’t a machine, it’s billions of machines. There is no ‘off’ switch. Its very architecture, its decentralised, nonzero-sum collaborative fabric means that the Internet is a bit like the planet’s population. Or as Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired magazine, calls it: ‘the largest, most complex and most dependable machine we have ever built’. Short of an apocalypse you couldn’t kill all of it, any more than you could wipe out everyone on Earth. ‘Is there anything that could shut down the Internet?’ I ask. Vint considers.


pages: 918 words: 257,605

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, book scanning, Broken windows theory, California gold rush, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, connected car, context collapse, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, fake news, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Ian Bogost, impulse control, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, linked data, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, precision agriculture, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, smart cities, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, union organizing, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

For example, Google has been described as developing and deploying “artificial intelligence” since at least 2003, but the term itself is a moving target, as capabilities have evolved from primitive programs that can play tic-tac-toe to systems that can operate whole fleets of driverless cars. Google’s machine intelligence capabilities feed on behavioral surplus, and the more surplus they consume, the more accurate the prediction products that result. Wired magazine’s founding editor, Kevin Kelly, once suggested that although it seems like Google is committed to developing its artificial intelligence capabilities to improve Search, it’s more likely that Google develops Search as a means of continuously training its evolving AI capabilities.95 This is the essence of the machine intelligence project.

Jean-Charles Rochet and Jean Tirole, “Two-Sided Markets: A Progress Report,” RAND Journal of Economics 37, no. 3 (2006): 645–67. 94. For a discussion on this point and its relation to online target advertising, see Katherine J. Strandburg, “Free Fall: The Online Market’s Consumer Preference Disconnect” (working paper, New York University Law and Economics, October 1, 2013). 95. Kevin Kelly, “The Three Breakthroughs That Have Finally Unleashed AI on the World,” Wired, October 27, 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/10/future-of-artificial-intelligence. 96. Xiaoliang Ling et al., “Model Ensemble for Click Prediction in Bing Search Ads,” in Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion, 689–98, https://doi.org/10.1145/3041021.3054192. 97.


pages: 396 words: 117,149

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World by Pedro Domingos

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Arthur Eddington, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, Black Swan, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, constrained optimization, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, incognito mode, information retrieval, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, large language model, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, off grid, P = NP, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, planetary scale, power law, pre–internet, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, scientific worldview, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, yottabyte, zero-sum game

(Before Computers. Just kidding.) The Singularity Is Near, by Ray Kurzweil (Penguin, 2005), is your guide to the transhuman future. Joel Garreau considers three different scenarios for how human-directed evolution will unfold in Radical Evolution (Broadway Books, 2005). In What Technology Wants (Penguin, 2010), Kevin Kelly argues that technology is the continuation of evolution by other means. Darwin Among the Machines, by George Dyson (Basic Books, 1997), chronicles the evolution of technology and speculates on where it will lead. Craig Venter explains how his team synthesized a living cell in Life at the Speed of Light (Viking, 2013).


pages: 380 words: 118,675

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, buy and hold, call centre, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, deal flow, Douglas Hofstadter, drop ship, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, fulfillment center, game design, housing crisis, invention of movable type, inventory management, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Larry Ellison, late fees, loose coupling, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Rodney Brooks, search inside the book, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Skype, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, zero-sum game

He carefully monitored efforts to filter the kinds of messages that could be sent to customers and he tried to think about the challenge of e-mail outreach in fresh ways. Then, in late 2011, he had what he considered to be a significant new idea. Bezos is a fan of e-mail newsletters such as VSL.com, a daily assortment of cultural tidbits from the Web, and Cool Tools, a compendium of technology tips and product reviews written by Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of Wired. Both e-mails are short, well written, and informative. Perhaps, Bezos reasoned, Amazon should be sending a single well-crafted e-mail every week—a short digital magazine—instead of a succession of bland, algorithm-generated marketing pitches. He asked marketing vice president Steve Shure to explore the idea.


The Fugitive Game: Online With Kevin Mitnick by Jonathan Littman

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, centre right, computer age, disinformation, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, information security, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mitch Kapor, power law, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Steven Levy, telemarketer

Markoff acknowledged trading information with Shimomura, but denied being a member of the team. "I wasn't involved. I am a reporter. Tsutomu and Julia call me a member of their team, and that's fine if they want to call me that. But I was a reporter," Markoff said. By Sunday afternoon, Markoff's new Times story is what's raising eyebrows on the Well. Kevin Kelly, executive editor of red-hot Wired magazine, a respected author, friend of John Markoff, and Well board member, begins posting some intriguing questions about Shimomura and the image created by the New York Times. #621 Having had "inside" knowledge about this event for the past two weeks (as a member of the Well board and as a friend of Markoff) the thing that I still don't get is: How did the ultimate Genuine Smart Guy, the real hacker, let himself get hacked by the challenger Mitnick?


Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

Gaia Vince believes that interplays and levels of culture, biology and altered environment render humanity into a new kind of superorganism.104 She calls this Homo omnis or Homni – a shared resource stitching us into one closely interrelated world network, a mash-up of gene and machine, human minds and outsourced technological and institutional systems. Homni is the emergent property of all this activity, working like a scaled-up brain. A century ago H.G. Wells called it the world brain; Pierre Teilhard de Chardin the noosphere. Kevin Kelly calls it the holos, a new planetary layer composed of billions of human minds, chips and artificial intelligences. We are linked into a single, singular entity and should expect further phase transitions to result, transitions that could unlock, like the most elaborate tools, a set of big ideas that changes everything: This convergence will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet up until this time.


pages: 350 words: 115,802

Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy by Laurent Richard, Sandrine Rigaud

activist lawyer, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, corporate governance, COVID-19, David Vincenzetti, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, food desert, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, lockdown, Mohammed Bouazizi, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, operational security, Stuxnet, Tim Cook: Apple, unit 8200, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero day

Claudio was a rare bird in a community whose members took pride in being outside politics. Even before he was thirty, he had developed a distinct worldview that defined his work. He would sometimes sum it up with a quote by an early computer technologist and founding executive editor of Wired, Kevin Kelly: “There is no powerfully constructive technology that is not also powerfully destructive in another direction. Just as there is no great idea that cannot be greatly perverted for great harm. The greater the promise of a new technology, the greater its potential for harm as well.” For Claudio, this was just stating the obvious.


pages: 410 words: 119,823

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

It may be the long-awaited breakthrough in wearables: both the enabler and the visible symbol of a lifestyle in which performance is continuously monitored and plumbed for its insights into further improvements. Nobody has embraced this conception of instrumented living more fervently than a loose global network of enthusiasts called the Quantified Self, whose slogan is “self-knowledge through numbers.”2 Founded by Wired editor Gary Wolf and Whole Earth Review veteran Kevin Kelly in 2007, the Quantified Self currently boasts a hundred or so local chapters, and an online forum where members discuss and rate the devices mobilized in their self-measurement efforts. (It can be difficult to disentangle this broader movement from a California company of the same name also founded by Wolf and Kelly, which mounts conferences dedicated to proselytizing for the practice of self-measurement.)


pages: 504 words: 126,835

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

While this is an old fantasy of the utopian left – and a staple perception of the socialism that guided turn-of-the-century writers like H.G. Wells and the leading American socialist Edward Bellamy – capitalism didn’t perish, but rather anchored itself more deeply in society as individuals and business prospered riding the new waves of technology. However, this time it’s different – or so we are told. Tech thinker Kevin Kelly has prophesied the rise of a new form of socialism as a consequence of unobstructed source technology and community-generated content.20 Capitalism is a highly adaptive creature, argues the contrarian economic reporter Paul Mason, but it is not going to survive the current revolution in information technology.21 Information, he argues, will destroy the price mechanism and new forms of collaborative production will do away with what is left of market capitalism.


pages: 437 words: 126,860

Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, gravity well, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, planetary scale, seminal paper, skunkworks, spice trade, telerobotics, three-masted sailing ship, uranium enrichment

Bush’s lack of involvement, combined with the NASA leadership’s opposition, left SEI an orphan to be advocated by some Space Council staffrs allied to a few friendly congressmen. Without any real clout, they were forced to try to fund SEI by sneaking a few small appropriations through Congress. When the administration’s political opponents saw this weakness, they pounced upon it as a way to humiliate Bush and his Space Council chief, Dan Quayle. Kevin Kelly, an aide to Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), led the massacre to seek out and systematically eliminate any NASA appropriation, no matter how small, that could be linked to SEI. By the time Dan Goldin became NASA administrator in 1992, the best way left to save those technology programs needed for a Mars program that still survived was to break the damning link by abolishing SEI, and, after a year or so of attempts to salvage SEI, that is what he did.


pages: 510 words: 120,048

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, augmented reality, automated trading system, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book scanning, book value, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, computer age, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, delayed gratification, digital capitalism, digital Maoism, digital rights, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, off-the-grid, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Complaint Is Not Enough 1. http://www.usnews.com/opinion/mzuckerman/articles/2012/04/06/mort-zuckerman-no-easy-solutions-for-big-money-in-politics. 2. http://sloanreview.mit.edu/improvisations/2012/06/20/big-data-and-the-u-s-presidential-campaign/ Sixth Interlude: The Pocket Protector in the Saffron Robe 1. “The Trickster Guru,” in The Essential Alan Watts (Berkeley, CA: Celestial Arts, 1977). 2. http://cafegratitude.com/menu. 3. http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/i-am-annoyed-and-disappointed/Content?oid=1370662. Chapter 18. First Thought, Best Thought 1. Kevin Kelly in his Technium blog, January 31, 2008. Chapter 20. We Need to Do Better than Ad Hoc Levees 1. http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-team/rethinking-information-diversity-in-networks/10150503499618859. Chapter 22. Who Will Do What? 1. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/05/facebook_ipo_has_social_networking_supplanted_real_innovation_in_silicon_valley_.html.


pages: 320 words: 87,853

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information by Frank Pasquale

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bonus culture, Brian Krebs, business cycle, business logic, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized markets, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, digital rights, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, folksonomy, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Ian Bogost, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Bogle, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, kremlinology, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, new economy, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Philip Mirowski, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, search engine result page, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological solutionism, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Danny Sullivan, “Google Now Personalizes Everyone’s Search Results” (Dec. 2009). Search Engine Land. Available at http://searchengineland.com /google-now-personalizes-everyones-search-results-31195. 120. We should also entertain reconceptualizing our participation in digital platforms as work, since it is often unavoidable, laborious, and value generating. Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Viking, 2010), 331 (“each time we click a link we strengthen a node somewhere in the supercomputer’s mind, thereby programming . . . it”); Trebor Scholz, ed., Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory (New York: Routledge, 2013); Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?


pages: 624 words: 127,987

The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume by Josh Kaufman

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business process, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, discounted cash flows, Donald Knuth, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Santayana, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high net worth, hindsight bias, index card, inventory management, iterative process, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, loose coupling, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Network effects, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, place-making, premature optimization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, scientific management, side project, statistical model, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, systems thinking, telemarketer, the scientific method, time value of money, Toyota Production System, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra

This book was written only once, but via the wonder of large-scale printing equipment, it can be reproduced quickly, reliably, and inexpensively. As a result, tens of millions of copies can be made and distributed all over the world and can be purchased for a few dollars. That’s the magic of Duplication. The Internet has made Duplication of some forms of value even easier. As Kevin Kelly remarked in his essay “Better Than Free,”3 the Internet is essentially an enormous, inexpensive copy machine. When I write a post for my Web site, it can be Duplicated by my Web server for next to nothing, and delivered to a reader on the other side of the world almost instantly. Duplication of information—text, images, music, video—is essentially free.


City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age by P. D. Smith

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, Anthropocene, augmented reality, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, cosmological principle, crack epidemic, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, en.wikipedia.org, Enrique Peñalosa, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kowloon Walled City, Lewis Mumford, Masdar, megacity, megastructure, multicultural london english, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, peak oil, pneumatic tube, RFID, smart cities, starchitect, telepresence, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, the High Line, Thomas Malthus, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

Jerry White, London in the Nineteenth Century: ‘A Human Awful Wonder of God’ (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), 31–2; cf. Engels’ 1845 description of the St Giles Rookery in Jon E. Lewis, ed., London: The Autobiography (London: Constable & Robinson, 2008), 263–5. 72. Robert Neuwirth, Shadow Cities (2004), cited from Kevin Kelly, ‘The Choice of Cities’, 2 July 2009: <http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2009/07/the_choice_of_c.php> 73. Cited from Fogelson (2001), 322. See also New York’s Tenement Museum at 97 Orchard Street: http://www.tenement.org 74. See Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (1988; repr.


pages: 496 words: 131,938

The Future Is Asian by Parag Khanna

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Basel III, bike sharing, birth tourism , blockchain, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, factory automation, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flex fuel, gig economy, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green transition, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, light touch regulation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, Malacca Straits, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Parag Khanna, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

A great many experts on the history, philosophy, politics, and economics of Asia and global thinking about Asia have provided very useful information and insights: Graham Allison, Arjun Appadurai, Zubaid Ahmad, Richard Allen, Ali Aslan, Genevieve Bell, Karan Bhatia, Penny Burtt, Cliff Coonan, Patrick Cordes, Jack DeGioia, Prasenjit Duara, Jack Dwyer, Casper Ellerbaek, Andrew Field, Gordon Flake, Spencer Fung, Mishaal Gergawi, Alison Gilmore, Brad Glosserman, Martin Gray, Michael Green, Steve Grubb, Guoliang Wu, Blair Hall, Nat Hansen, Jonathan Hausman, Rupert Hoogewerf, Ann Julian, Kosmo Kalliarekos, Robert Kaplan, Gerry Keefe, Kevin Kelly, Claudio Lilienfeld, Peggy Liu, Manish Kayshap, Suat Kiniklioglu, Udai Kunzru, Wolfgang Lehmacher, Scott Malcomson, Anna Marrs, Avinash Mehrotra, Simon Milner, Pankaj Mishra, Siddharth Mohandas, Yascha Mounk, Alexandre Parilusyan, Safdar Parvez, Chris Patten, Joseph Phi, Kai Poetschke, Noah Raford, Julia Raiskin, Laurent Ramsey, Sean Randolph, Rahul Reddy, Gideon Rose, Dan Rosen, Jim Rowan, Manuel Rybach, Richard Samans, Rana Sarkar, Jonas Schorr, Elliot Schrage, Chris Schroeder, John Seely Brown, Reva Seth, Clara Shen, Philip Shetler-Jones, Lutfey Siddiqui, Ben Simpfendorfer, Sarita Singh, Lauren Sorkin, Shantanu Surpure, Didi Kirsten Tatlow, Richard Threfall, Vijay Vaitheeswaran, Hal Varian, Andy Ventris, Steve Walt, Wang Gungwu, and Justin Wood.


pages: 436 words: 76

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor by John Kay

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, business cycle, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, computer age, constrained optimization, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, electricity market, equity premium, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Phillips curve, popular electronics, price discrimination, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, second-price auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , yield curve, yield management

The central message-that economics provides at best little support for conventional political wisdom about market efficiency and the simplifications of the American business model-was lost. Stiglitz was cheered by anti globalization protesters with little appreciation of what the argument was really about. The stock market bubble confronted economists with different challenges. The public debate was dominated by pundits: George Gilder of Forbes ASAP, Kevin Kelly of Wired and New Rules for the New Economy) James Glassman and Kevin Hassett of Dow 36)000. These people were not credentialed economists, but they announced the irrelevance of traditional principles of business economics and market valuation in the face of new technology and a changed political environment.


pages: 422 words: 131,666

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back by Douglas Rushkoff

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, AOL-Time Warner, banks create money, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, big-box store, Bretton Woods, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Google Earth, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, market bubble, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, peak oil, peer-to-peer, place-making, placebo effect, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social software, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

The myth was enough to fuel the speculative dot-com bubble, which Alan Greenspan belatedly called “irrational exuberance,” but which went on long enough to convince investors to lift high-tech issues on the NASDAQ_ stock exchange beyond even the most optimistically speculative valuations. This was a “new economy,” according to Wired’s editor Kevin Kelly. A “tsunami,” echoed its publisher, Louis Rossetto—one that would rage over culture and markets like a tidal wave. More than simply costing millions of investors their savings, the movement of the Internet from the newspaper’s technology section to the business pages changed the way the public perceived what had once been a public space—a commons.


pages: 468 words: 137,055

Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age by Steven Levy

Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, disinformation, Donald Knuth, Eratosthenes, Extropian, Fairchild Semiconductor, information security, invention of the telegraph, Jim Simons, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knapsack problem, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mondo 2000, Network effects, new economy, NP-complete, quantum cryptography, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web of trust, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

During the past eight years, I wrote a number of magazine articles on crypto, and some of these are reflected in this book, particularly those I wrote for Wired, beginning with the cover story on cypherpunks in its second issue and winding up with the first detailed account of nonsecret encryption in 1999. Thanks to all my editors there, especially Kevin Kelly. I also wrote crypto-related stories for The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Macworld, and Newsweek. The latter has been my professional home for the past five years, and I am grateful to everyone there for providing an inveterate freelance writer with a reason to actually hold a job. Thanks to Mark Whitaker, Jon Meacham, and the editor who suffers most with me, George Hackett.


pages: 504 words: 129,087

The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America by Charlotte Alter

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate personhood, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, ending welfare as we know it, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job-hopping, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microaggression, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, TaskRabbit, tech bro, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, white picket fence, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Jacqui Rossi helped me with research in the early stages, lending her extraordinary brain to some of the main themes of this project, and Alex Lipton spent hours of his weekends helping me get organized. When I spilled water on my computer just as I was about to turn in my first draft, Meredith tech nerds Rodney Mayers and Kevin Kelly saved my work (and taught me how to do automatic backups). Soraya Shockley provided a valuable cultural read, and Mike Blumenthal and Natan Last gave me crucial feedback on key chapters. Madeleine Levinsohn transcribed hours of Facebook Lives and Rohan Naik helped me with research and endnotes.


pages: 479 words: 144,453

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

23andMe, Aaron Swartz, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, call centre, Chekhov's gun, Chris Urmson, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, computer age, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, European colonialism, experimental subject, falling living standards, Flash crash, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, lifelogging, low interest rates, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, stem cell, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, ultimatum game, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Turnbull and Solms, The Brain and the Inner World, 136–59; Kelly Bulkeley, Visions of the Night: Dreams, Religion and Psychology (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999); Andreas Mavrematis, Hypnogogia: The Unique State of Consciousness Between Wakefulness and Sleep (London: Routledge, 1987); Brigitte Holzinger, Stephen LaBerge and Lynn Levitan, ‘Psychophysiological Correlates of Lucid Dreaming’, American Psychological Association 16:2 (2006), 88–95; Watanabe Tsuneo, ‘Lucid Dreaming: Its Experimental Proof and Psychological Conditions’, Journal of International Society of Life Information Science 21:1 (2003), 159–62; Victor I. Spoormaker and Jan van den Bout, ‘Lucid Dreaming Treatment for Nightmares: A Pilot Study’, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics 75:6 (2006), 389–94. 11 The Data Religion 1. See, for example, Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Viking Press, 2010); César Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies (New York: Basic Books, 2015); Howard Bloom, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (Hoboken: Wiley, 2001); DuBravac, Digital Destiny. 2.


pages: 497 words: 144,283

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

—Dominic Barton, global managing director, McKinsey & Company “This is probably the most global book ever written. It is intensely specific while remaining broad and wide. Its takeaway is that infrastructure is destiny: Follow the supply lines outlined in this book to see where the future flows.” —Kevin Kelly, co-founder, Wired “Parag Khanna takes our knowledge of connectivity into virgin territory, providing an entire atlas on how old and new connections are reshaping our physical, social, and mental worlds. This is a deep and highly informative reflection on the meaning of a rapidly developing borderless world.


pages: 547 words: 148,732

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Day of the Dead, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, experimental subject, Exxon Valdez, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Mother of all demos, off-the-grid, overview effect, placebo effect, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, satellite internet, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Whole Earth Catalog

Stewart Brand received his own baptism in Hubbard LSD at IFAS in 1962, with James Fadiman presiding as his guide. His first experience with LSD “was kind of a bum trip,” he recalls, but it led to a series of other journeys that reshaped his worldview and, indirectly, all of ours. The Whole Earth Network Brand would subsequently gather together (which included Peter Schwartz, Esther Dyson, Kevin Kelly, Howard Rheingold, and John Perry Barlow) and play a key role in redefining what computers meant and did, helping to transform them from a top-down tool of the military-industrial complex—with the computer punch card a handy symbol of Organization Man—into a tool of personal liberation and virtual community, with a distinctly countercultural vibe.


pages: 655 words: 156,367

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

See Jill Leovy, “Alvin Toffler, Author of 1970 Bestseller ‘Future Shock,’ Dies at 87,” Los Angeles Times, June 29, 2016, https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-alvin-toffler-20160629-snap-story.html, accessed July 29, 2021; Kenneth Schneider, “Alvin Toffler, Author of ‘Future Shock,’ Dies at 87,” New York Times, June 29, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/30/books/alvin-toffler-author-of-future-shock-dies-at-87.html, accessed July 29, 2021; David Henry, “Alvin Toffler, Author of BestSelling ‘Future Shock’ and ‘The Third Wave,’ Dies at 87,” Washington Post, June 29, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/alvin-toffler-author-of-bestselling-future-shock-and-the-third-wave-dies-at-87/2016/06/29/0d63748c-3e09-11e6-80bc-d06711fd2125_story.html, accessed August 10, 2021. See also Toffler’s interview with Kevin Kelly, “Anticipatory Democracy,” Wired, July 1, 1996, https://kk.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Alvin-Toffier.pdf, accessed August 10, 2021. 50.Dyson et al., “Cyberspace and the American Dream.” See also Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), Part IV. 51.Dyson et al., “Cyberspace and the American Dream.” 52.George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1981).


pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Bill Janeway, Hal Varian, and Peter Norvig—your willingness to read multiple drafts and to take the time to educate me about areas where my knowledge wasn’t up to par has made this book so much stronger than it would have been otherwise. Hal and Bill, you’ve given me a master class in economics. If the student was not up to the level of his teachers, that is no fault of yours. Benedict Evans, Margaret Levi, Laura Tyson, James Manyika, and Kevin Kelly—you also saved me from some egregious errors and omissions, and your challenges to my thinking clarified it. Jay Schaefer, Mike Loukides, and Laurent Haug, your close reading and comments strengthened both my ideas and my writing. Sunil Paul, Logan Green, Kim Rachmeler, Matt Cutts, Danny Sullivan, and Dave Guarino, you filled in critical details and context for key moments in this history.


pages: 552 words: 168,518

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, buy and hold, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collaborative editing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, demographic transition, digital capitalism, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fault tolerance, financial innovation, Galaxy Zoo, game design, global village, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, hive mind, Home mortgage interest deduction, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, medical bankruptcy, megacity, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, oil shock, old-boy network, online collectivism, open borders, open economy, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, scientific mainstream, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social web, software patent, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, value at risk, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, young professional, Zipcar

The average number of authors per scientific paper is up too, increasing steadily over the past sixty years from an average of slightly over 1 to averages of 2.22 in computer science, 2.66 for condensed-matter physics, 3.35 for astrophysics, 3.75 for biomedicine, and 8.96 authors for high-energy physics. See: M.E.J. Newman. “Who is the best connected scientist? A study of scientific co-authorship networks,” Working Paper, Santa Fe Institute (2000). 5. Kevin Kelly, “Speculation on the Future of Science,” Edge, vol. 179 (April 7, 2006). 6. Fred Pearce, “Climate Wars,” The Guardian (February 9, 2010). 7. As data sets continue to grow, scientists will need to hand off more and more of the routine tasks to machines. The problem in the interim is that machines won’t necessarily spot the unusual or the unexpected, the kind of one-offs that can lead to game-changing breakthroughs.


pages: 836 words: 158,284

The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman by Timothy Ferriss

23andMe, airport security, Albert Einstein, Black Swan, Buckminster Fuller, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, Dean Kamen, game design, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, index card, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, language acquisition, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, messenger bag, microbiome, microdosing, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, placebo effect, Productivity paradox, publish or perish, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, William of Occam

TOOLS AND TRICKS Seth Roberts, “Self-Experimentation as a Source of New Ideas: Ten Examples Involving Sleep, Mood, Health, and Weight,” Behavioral and Brain Science 27 (2004): 227–88 (www.fourhourbody.com/new-ideas) This 61-page document about self-experimentation provides an overview of some of Seth’s findings, including actionable sleep examples. The Quantified Self (www.quantifiedself.com) Curated by Wired cofounding editor Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf, a managing editor of Wired, this is the perfect home for all self-experimenters. The resources section alone is worth a trip to this site, which provides the most comprehensive list of data-tracking tools and services on the web (www.fourhourbody.com/quantified). Alexandra Carmichael, “How to Run a Successful Self-Experiment” (www.fourhourbody.com/self-experiment) Most people have never systematically done a self-experiment.


pages: 666 words: 181,495

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business process, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discounted cash flows, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, El Camino Real, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, high-speed rail, HyperCard, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, large language model, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, one-China policy, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Potemkin village, prediction markets, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, search inside the book, second-price auction, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, the long tail, trade route, traveling salesman, turn-by-turn navigation, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, web application, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

The actual writing of the book accelerated because of a fantastic uncluttering of my office by Erin Rooney Doland. My fact-checking team included Deborah Branscum, Victoria Wright, Stacy Horn, Teresa Carpenter, and Andrew Levy. (Though, as always, the buck stops with the author.) I got wisdom and advice along the way from John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, and Brad Stone. My first and most enthusiastic reader, of course, was my wife, Teresa Carpenter. (Having a Pulitzer Prize winner in the house is pretty useful.) As always, my agent Flip Brophy was invaluable at every stage of the perilous publishing process. At Simon & Schuster, Bob Bender was again my sharp-eyed editor, with Johanna Li assisting.


pages: 692 words: 189,065

The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall by Mark W. Moffett

affirmative action, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, California gold rush, classic study, cognitive load, delayed gratification, demographic transition, Easter island, eurozone crisis, George Santayana, glass ceiling, Howard Rheingold, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, Kevin Kelly, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, World Values Survey

—Mahzarin Banaji, author of Blindspot “This is a book of amazing ideas, many of them counterintuitive. Mark Moffett’s astounding stories of animal societies persuaded me that the future of human cities have been foretold by the ants. Read this manifesto if you like to have your mind changed.” —Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired Magazine and author of The Inevitable “In the past quarter century, there has emerged a genre of Big History that includes such epic books as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. Mark Moffett’s The Human Swarm is destined to be included in future lists of such books that not only add to our understanding of who we are, how we got here, and where we’re going, but change our perspective of how we fit in the larger picture of life on Earth.


pages: 1,007 words: 181,911

The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life by Timothy Ferriss

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Blue Bottle Coffee, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deliberate practice, digital nomad, en.wikipedia.org, Golden Gate Park, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Loma Prieta earthquake, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, microbiome, off-the-grid, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Pepsi Challenge, Pepto Bismol, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Skype, spaced repetition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the High Line, Y Combinator

To gain 10–30 lbs of lean tissue in one month, MED = 90–120 seconds of tension for most muscles. Slow-cadence lifting (five seconds up, five seconds down) with these parameters helped me add 34 lbs of lean mass in 28 days.23 Master conversational fluency in any language, MED = learn 1,200 words, focusing on highest frequency. The marketing MED = Read Kevin Kelly’s article “1,000 True Fans.” To reiterate what we’ve already covered: material beats method. The 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use. If we include colloquial and derivative terms, the word count easily tops 250,000. Crikey.


pages: 654 words: 204,260

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Brownian motion, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, clean water, Copley Medal, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Attenborough, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Gregor Mendel, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, out of africa, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, Thomas Malthus, Wilhelm Olbers

Many, according to Godfray, “spend most of their career trying to interpret the work of nineteenth-century systematicists: deconstructing their often inadequate published descriptions or scouring the world's museums for type material that is often in very poor condition.” Godfray particularly stresses the absence of attention being paid to the systematizing possibilities of the Internet. The fact is that taxonomy by and large is still quaintly wedded to paper. In an attempt to haul things into the modern age, in 2001 Kevin Kelly, cofounder of Wired magazine, launched an enterprise called the All Species Foundation with the aim of finding every living organism and recording it on a database. The cost of such an exercise has been estimated at anywhere from $2 billion to as much as $50 billion. As of the spring of 2002, the foundation had just $1.2 million in funds and four full-time employees.


pages: 706 words: 202,591

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

active measures, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Burning Man, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, company town, computer vision, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, East Village, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, growth hacking, imposter syndrome, indoor plumbing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, Oculus Rift, operational security, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, social contagion, social graph, social software, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, techlash, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, you are the product

Lynnea Johnson and Caroline Rose’s bungalow was my bivouac for much of the time, until I imposed on John Markoff and Leslie Terizan. Katie Hafner and Bob Wachter were splendid hosts in San Francisco. Leslie Berlin generously lent me her son’s car before he rightfully claimed it for his campus use. Thanks also to friends on two coasts: Bradley Horowitz, Irene Au, Brad Stone, Kevin Kelly, Megan Quinn, M. G. Siegler, and Steve and Michelle Stoneburn. Back on the East Coast, I had two other writing homes. The Writers Room in Manhattan is a wonderful retreat. And the Otis Library in Massachusetts provided precious connectivity—and convivial hospitality—in broadband-starved western Mass.


pages: 761 words: 231,902

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

additive manufacturing, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Brewster Kahle, Brownian motion, business cycle, business intelligence, c2.com, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, coronavirus, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, factory automation, friendly AI, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hype cycle, informal economy, information retrieval, information security, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, linked data, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, phenotype, power law, precautionary principle, premature optimization, punch-card reader, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, semantic web, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, two and twenty, Vernor Vinge, Y2K, Yogi Berra

Ray Kurzweil has taken all the strands of the Singularity meme circulating in the last decades and has united them into a single tome which he has nailed on our front door. I suspect this will be one of the most cited books of the decade. Like Paul Ehrlich's upsetting 1972 book Population Bomb, fan or foe, it's the wave at the epicenter you have to start with." —KEVIN KELLY, founder of Wired "Really, really out there. Delightfully so." —Businessweek.com "Stunning, utopian vision of the near future when machine intelligence outpaces the biological brain and what things may look like when that happens....Approachable and engaging." —The Unofficial Microsoft Blog "One of the most important thinkers of our time, Kurzweil has followed up his earlier works ... with a work of startling breadth and audacious scope."


pages: 798 words: 240,182

The Transhumanist Reader by Max More, Natasha Vita-More

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, data acquisition, discovery of DNA, Douglas Engelbart, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Extropian, fault tolerance, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, friendly AI, Future Shock, game design, germ theory of disease, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, impulse control, index fund, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, phenotype, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, presumed consent, Project Xanadu, public intellectual, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, RFID, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, silicon-based life, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, stem cell, stochastic process, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, the built environment, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, VTOL, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

In conclusion, I find the Singularity idea appealing and a wonderful plot device, but I doubt it describes our likely future. I expect a Surge, not a Singularity. But in case I’m wrong, I’ll tighten my seatbelt, keeping taking the smart drugs, and treat all computers with the greatest of respect. I’m their friend! Comment by Michael Nielsen What is the Singularity? The following excerpts from Kevin Kelly’s Wired interview with Vinge sum it up succinctly: if we ever succeed in making machines as smart as humans, then it’s only a small leap to imagine that we would soon thereafter make – or cause to be made – machines that are even smarter than any human. And that’s it. That’s the end of the human era … The reason for calling this a “singularity” is that things are completely unknowable beyond that point.


Global Catastrophic Risks by Nick Bostrom, Milan M. Cirkovic

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, availability heuristic, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black Swan, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charles Babbage, classic study, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, death of newspapers, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, Doomsday Clock, Drosophila, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, false flag, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, means of production, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, P = NP, peak oil, phenotype, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, South China Sea, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, The Turner Diaries, Tunguska event, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Y2K

Other historians of technology (Lanier, 2000; Seidensticker, 2006; Wilson, 2007) argue that Kurzweil ignores techno-trends which did stall, due to design challenges and failures, and to human factors that slowed the diffusion of new technologies, factors which might also slow or avert greater-than-human machine intelligence. Noting that most predictions of electronic transcendence fall within the predictor's expected lifespan, technology writer Kevin Kelly (2007) suggests that people who make such predictions have a cognitive bias towards optimism. Millennia! tendencies in responses to apocalyptic threats 81 The point of this essay i s not t o parse the accuracy or empirical evidence for exponential change or catastrophic risks, but to examine how the millennialism that accompanies their consideration biases assessment of their risks and benefits, and the best courses of action to reduce the former and ensure the latter.


pages: 1,396 words: 245,647

The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom by Graham Farmelo

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, cuban missile crisis, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, gravity well, Henri Poincaré, invention of radio, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, period drama, Richard Feynman, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, University of East Anglia

The library facilities at the institute are peerless, and I should like to thank all the staff there who were unstinting in their support: Karen Downing, Momota Ganguli, Gabriella Hoskin, Erica Mosner, Marcia Tucker, Kirstie Venanzi and Judy Wilson-Smith. Among the other colleagues who made my stays there so rewarding: Linda Arntzenius, Alan Cheng, Karen Cuozzo, Jennifer Hansen, Beatrice Jessen, Kevin Kelly, Camille Merger, Nadine Thompson, Sharon Tozzi-Goff and Sarah Zantua. Also in Princeton, I should like to thank Gillett Griffin, Lily Harish-Chandra, Louise Morse (mère et soeur) and Terri Nelson. I should like to give my special thanks to Peter Goddard, formerly Master of St John’s, now Director of the Institute for Advanced Study.


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

It’s a big picture-book, with out-of-context quotes from futurists like Alvin Toffler and Marshall McLuhan over post-psychedelic visuals. The form is indistinguishable from financial services advertising. One two-page spread reads MONEY IS JUST A TYPE OF INFORMATION, attributed to magazine editor Kevin Kelly. Section V 2000–2020 An Anduril autonomous surveillance camera on the Southern California border United States Customs and Border Protection photo Chapter 5.1 B2K Palo Alto for Bush—The Internet After 9/11—Scrapers Eat the World—Amazon Thrives—The iPod For many years, American cultural and political commentators have advanced theories about why Republicans so strongly disliked Bill Clinton, what made him appear as an existential threat to conservatives.