John Markoff

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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

"He did nothing imaginative," Shimomura snaps, clearly irritated at the question. "Nothing interesting, nothing new that I can see." Shimomura tosses out John Markoff's name while answering a question, and John Johnson, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, quickly picks up on it. "What was John Markoff's role?" asks the reporter. "John wrote the book on Kevin," Shimomura informs the crowd of journalists and network TV scouts. "The third member of our team was John Markoff," volunteers Julia Menapace, the woman who accompanied Shimomura into the courtroom. She's casually dressed in jeans, taller than Shimomura, with long brown hair.

Kevin Poulsen, aka Dark Dante Henry Spiegel Ron Austin with his father Erica Videotape image of Justin Petersen, aka Eric Heinz or Agent Steal, working undercover for the FBI at a 1992 hacker conference. Shimomura in North Carolina Shimomura's equipment Shimomura in the Media Tsutomu Shimomura, John Markoff of the New York Times, former San Francisco Assistant U.S. Attorney Kent Walker, and Joe Orsak and Jim Murphy of Sprint Cellular. Kent Walker John Markoff Joe Orsak Jim Murphy Kevin Pazaski Todd Young Todd Young, a cellular fraud gumshoe, and Kevin Pazaski of CellularOne in Seattle, found Kevin Mitnick in a few hours and kept his basement apartment under surveillance for two weeks.

They're bringing up cellular involved in it. Who knows? "I know you can find out the inference here by calling your friend John Markoff because Markoff is friends with Shimomura. Why don't you just dial Markoff up and say, 'Hey, Markoff, what's the scoop?' " A couple of minutes later, as if on cue, my call waiting beeps again. "Could you hold on just one second? My beeper's going off again," I kid him. "Looks like they got half of the trace done," Mitnick jokes. It's John Markoff again. I apologize, and ask once again if I can call him back. He tells me not to worry about it, jokes we'll probably play telephone tag a couple more times, and asks me to call him back when I've got a chance.


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

John Couch: There was this incredible, quiet respect and a sense of mortality for all of us. Mike Slade: So anyway, we get escorted into the church: five hundred, seven hundred people? John Markoff: They don’t fill Memorial Chapel completely. Jon Rubinstein: It was a beautiful service. Clearly it had been stage-managed by Steve from beyond the grave. John Markoff: Yo-Yo Ma played first and wonderfully. Andy Hertzfeld: It was really deep, just heartbreakingly beautiful, one of the most emotional pieces of music I’ve ever heard. John Markoff: Afterward he briefly introduced the event and told a short, funny story about how Steve had wanted him to play at his funeral and how he had asked Steve to speak at his.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” John Markoff: I cried. Wayne Goodrich: The wave of emotion in the church was such that it was a conscious effort to even keep my perception about me, instead of just breaking down in a pool of my own tears. John Markoff: Mona Simpson spoke and told of how she met her brother and about their relationship. It was much closer than I realized. She, too, talked about Steve’s search for beauty. Mona Simpson: I remember when he phoned the day he met Laurene: “There’s this beautiful woman and she’s really smart and she has this dog and I’m going to marry her.” John Markoff: Joan Baez stood, and her guitar was brought out and she sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

John Markoff: Joan Baez stood, and her guitar was brought out and she sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Mike Slade: She sat down with the guitar and played it. She hit the high note and my spine shivered. I was just blown away. John Markoff: Her voice is all still there. Mike Slade: She was seventy and it just blew everybody’s doors off. John Markoff: Bono and Slash sang. First Dylan’s “Every Grain of Sand” and then a U2 song, “One.” Mike Slade: Dylan was supposed to play the first song and he blew them off. They asked him to play and he said no. John Markoff: To sing Dylan, Bono placed an iPad on a music stand to remember the words with. Bono (singing Bob Dylan’s song): “I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea / Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me / I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man / Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand.”


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

Hagerty, “A Roboticist’s Trip from Mines to the Moon,” Wall Street Journal, July 2, 2011, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304569504576405671616928518. 4.John Markoff, “The Creature That Lives in Pittsburgh,” New York Times, April 21, 1991, http://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/21/business/the-creature-that-lives-in-pittsburgh.html. 5.John Markoff, “Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic,” New York Times, October 9, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html?pagewanted=all. 6.“Electronic Stability Control Systems for Heavy Vehicles,” National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 2012, http://www.nhtsa.gov/Laws+&+Regulations/Electronic+Stability+Control+(ESC). 7.John Markoff, “Police, Pedestrians and the Social Ballet of Merging: The Real Challenges for Self-Driving Cars,” New York Times, May 29, 2014, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/29/police-bicyclists-and-pedestrians-the-real-challenges-for-self-driving-cars/?

Brock, “From Automation to Silicon Valley: The Automation Movement of the 1950s, Arnold Beckman, and William Shockley,” History and Technology 28, no. 4 (2012), http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07341512.2012.756236#.VQTPKCbHi_A. 3.Ibid. 4.John Markoff, “Robotic Vehicles Race, but Innovation Wins,” New York Times, September 14, 2005. 5.John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Viking, 2005). 6.Pamela McCorduck, Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence, 2nd ed.

, 259 Yale University, 180–181 Yaskawa (robot), 243 Zakos, John, 222, 223 Zuckerberg, Mark, 157 ABOUT THE AUTHOR JOHN MARKOFF has been a technology and science reporter at the New York Times since 1988. He was part of the team of Times reporters that won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting and is the author of What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. He lives in San Francisco, California. Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com. ALSO BY JOHN MARKOFF What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick, America’s Most Wanted Computer Outlaw—By the Man Who Did It (with Tsutomu Shimomura) Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier (with Katie Hafner) The High Cost of High Tech: The Dark Side of the Chip (with Lenny Siegel) CREDITS Cover design by Allison Saltzman COPYRIGHT Excerpt of “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” from All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace by Richard Brautigan.


The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

Heilemann, “The Making of the President 2000.” CHAPTER 20: SUITS IN THE VALLEY 1. John Doerr, “The Coach,” interview by John Brockman, 1996, Edge.org, https://www.edge.org/digerati/doerr/, archived at https://perma.cc/9KWX-GLWK. 2. John Markoff, interview with Kara Swisher, Recode: Decode podcast, February 17, 2017, https://www.recode.net/2017/2/17/14652832/full-transcript-tech-reporter-john-markoff-silicon-valley-recode-decode-podcast, archived at https://perma.cc/XE3U-FCPC. 3. Michael Schrage, “Nation’s High-Tech Engine Fueled by Venture Capital,” The Washington Post, May 20, 1984, G1; Udayan Gupta, Done Deals: Venture Capitalists Tell Their Stories (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press, 2000), 374–5; Regis McKenna, interview with the author, May 31, 2016. 4.

The distinctive business culture of Valley companies, which had been slowly percolating into the public consciousness since the early days of the microchip, went from object of curiosity to a model to emulate. Business innovation meant taking the ties off, beefing up the software engineering staff, and building a volleyball court out back. And it all happened mind-blowingly fast. The New York Times’ technology reporter John Markoff filed his very first story about the World Wide Web in early December 1993. “In the next four years,” he remembered, “I was run over by a Mack truck.” The Internet became the story of the decade, the world-changer to close out the twentieth century and open the twenty-first. Scribes like Markoff—a Palo Alto native who had been living in and writing about the Valley since the Homebrew era—saw their bylines move from the back of the business section to the front pages as they tried to simultaneously explain the technological underpinnings of this brave new world and document its astounding ascent.

And I could not have asked for a better reader on the semiconductor industry and the Valley of the 1970s than Leslie, Silicon Valley historian and biographer par excellence. Thanks to Bill Carr, Ryan Calo, Trish Millines Dziko, Bruce Hevly, Dan’l Lewin, Gary Morgenthaler, and Lissa Morgenthaler-Jones for critical vetting of key passages. Several very busy people generously agreed to read in full: Tom Alberg, Phil Deutch, Marne Levine, John Markoff, Brad Smith, Mark Vadon, and Ed Zschau. Their seasoned perspectives made this book better, and any remaining errors of fact or interpretation are mine alone. Geri Thoma has been an unflagging advocate for this book and its author, going above and beyond the call of literary-agent duty as a trusted guide, sounding board, and friend.


pages: 523 words: 154,042

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

3D printing, 4chan, active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, availability heuristic, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business logic, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, evil maid attack, facts on the ground, false flag, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, gig economy, Hacker News, independent contractor, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Linda problem, loss aversion, macro virus, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Morris worm, Multics, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pirate software, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, SQL injection, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological solutionism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the new new thing, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero day, éminence grise

disconnect the department computers: Krafft, Morris transcript, 134. Bell Labs: John Markoff, “How a Need for Challenge Seduced Computer Expert,” The New York Times, November 6, 1988. “under attack”: Email, The “Security Digest” Archives, https://web.archive.org/web/20041124203457/securitydigest.org/ tcp-ip/archive/1988/11. hostile foreign power: See, e.g., Testimony of Michael Muuss, Morris transcript, 873. “‘This is the catastrophe’”: Lawrence M. Fisher, “On the Front Lines in Battling Electronic Invader,” The New York Times, November 5, 1988. shy and awkward young man: See, e.g., John Markoff, “Author of Computer ‘Virus’ Is Son of N.S.A.

Douglas McIlroy, “A Research UNIX Reader: Annotated Excerpts from the Programmer’s Manual, 1971–1986,” https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/reader.pdf. long, graying beard: John Markoff, “Robert Morris, Pioneer in Computer Security, Dies at 78,” The New York Times, June 29, 2011. “For a cryptographer”: Michael Wines, “A Youth’s Passion for Computers, Gone Sour,” The New York Times, November 11, 1988. “not a career plus”: Wines, “A Youth’s Passion for Computers, Gone Sour.” “The case, with all its bizarre twists”: John Markoff, “How a Need for Challenge Seduced Computer Expert,” The New York Times, November 6, 1988. Through Finger, a now-defunct: It was Cliff Stoll’s idea to run the Finger request.

On the proliferation of CERTs, see Laura DeNardis, The Global War for Internet Governance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 90–92: “Although one of the original objectives of the first response team was to centrally coordinate responses to Internet-wide security breaches, what has materialized over time is a mosaic of hundreds of independently operating CERTs across the world,” 92. 2. How the Tortoise Hacked Achilles “That attitude is completely”: John Markoff, “Living with the Computer Whiz Kids,” The New York Times, November 8, 1988. See also “Hacker’s Fate Hangs in the Balance,” Syracuse Herald-Journal, February 1, 1989, A4. permitted to reapply: John Markoff, “Cornell Suspends Computer Student,” The New York Times, May 25, 1989. Some observed that Morris was using the very skills that made him attractive to Cornell in the first place. “We like to have a fairly well-rounded student body,” said Dexter Kozen, a Cornell computer-science professor.


pages: 484 words: 104,873

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, bond market vigilante , business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, data science, debt deflation, deep learning, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Freestyle chess, full employment, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, High speed trading, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large language model, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, McJob, moral hazard, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, optical character recognition, passive income, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, precision agriculture, price mechanism, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, reshoring, RFID, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological singularity, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

newsId=40920394–9e62–415d-b038–15fe2e72a677&pageTitle=Recent%20Headlines&crumbTitle=Man%20and%20%20machine:%20Better%20writers,%20better%20grades. 3. Ry Rivard, “Humans Fight over Robo-Readers,” Inside Higher Ed, March 15, 2013, http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/03/15/professors-odds-machine-graded-essays. 4. John Markoff, “Essay-Grading Software Offers Professors a Break,” New York Times, April 4, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/science/new-test-for-computers-grading-essays-at-college-level.html. 5. John Markoff, “Virtual and Artificial, but 58,000 Want Course,” New York Times, August 15, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/16/science/16stanford.html?_r=0. 6. The story of the Stanford AI course is drawn from Max Chafkin, “Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun, Godfather of Free Online Education, Changes Course,” Fast Company, December 2013/January 2014, http://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastian-thrun-uphill-climb; Jeffrey J.

A true programmable computer, it was financed by the US Army and intended primarily for calculating firing tables used to aim artillery. ** Due to a miscommunication, Wiener’s article was never published in 1949. A draft copy was discovered by a researcher working with documents in the MIT library archives in 2012, and substantial excerpts were finally published in a May 2013 article by New York Times science reporter John Markoff. * Labor productivity measures the value of the output (either goods or services) produced by workers per hour. It is a critically important gauge of the general efficiency of an economy; to a significant extent it determines the wealth of a nation. Advanced, industrialized countries have high productivity because their workers have access to more and better technology, enjoy better nutrition as well as safer and more healthful environments, and are generally better educated and trained.

Both of the course’s instructors were celebrities in their field with strong ties to Google; Thrun had led the effort to develop the company’s self-driving cars, while Norvig was the director of research and co-author of the leading AI textbook. Within days of the announcement, more than 10,000 people had signed up. When John Markoff of the New York Times wrote a front-page article5 about the course that August, enrollment rocketed to more than 160,000 people from over 190 countries. The number of online students from Lithuania alone exceeded the entire undergraduate and graduate student enrollment at Stanford. Students as young as ten and as old as seventy signed up to learn the basics of AI directly from two of the field’s preeminent researchers—an extraordinary opportunity previously available only to about 200 Stanford students.6 The ten-week course was divided into short segments lasting just a few minutes and modeled roughly on the enormously successful videos for middle and high school students created by the Khan Academy.


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

ALSO BY JOHN MARKOFF Machines of Loving Grace What the Dormouse Said Takedown (with Tsutomu Shimomura) Cyberpunk (with Katie Hafner) The High Cost of High Tech (with Lenny Siegel) PENGUIN PRESS An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC penguinrandomhouse.com Copyright © 2022 by John Markoff 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.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21 John Markoff, “Whole Earth State-of-the-Art Rapping,” New York Times, August 15, 1989, A14. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22 Ken Kelley, “The Interview: Whole Earthling and Software Savant Stewart Brand,” SF Focus, February 1985, 76. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23 Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984), 27–32. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 24 Fentress,“The Next to Last Book on Earth.” BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 25 John Markoff, “Up to Date,” BYTE, March 1985, 355.

“Will, lost in a sea of trouble” republished with permission of University of Michigan Press, Poems from the Greek Anthology: Expanded Edition, translation and foreword by Kenneth Rexroth, introduction by David Mulroy (1962, 1999), permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. Illustration credits appear on this page. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Names: Markoff, John, author. Title: Whole Earth : the many lives of Stewart Brand / John Markoff. Description: New York : Penguin Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021039442 (print) | LCCN 2021039443 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735223943 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735223950 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Brand, Stewart. | Technologists—United States—Biography. | Appropriate technology—United States—History. | Whole Earth catalog (Menlo Park, Calif.) | Counterculture—United States—History. | Technology—California, Northern—History. | Futurologists—United States—Biography. | Technological innovations—Social aspects—United States. | Journalism, Technical—United States—History. | California, Northern—Biography.


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Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution by Fred Vogelstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, cloud computing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Dynabook, Firefox, General Magic , Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Googley, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Neil Armstrong, Palm Treo, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software patent, SpaceShipOne, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, web application, zero-sum game

Gundotra’s 2007 start date: Brad Stone, “Larry Page’s Google 3.0,” Bloomberg Businessweek, 1/26/2011; and my own reporting. But Gundotra thrived: Levy, In the Plex, 219. For example, the trio: Ibid., 218. The secrecy, leaks, and backbiting: John Markoff, “I, Robot: The Man Behind the Google Phone,” New York Times, 11/4/2007. It wasn’t just dull: Ryan Block, “Live coverage of Google’s Android Gphone mobile OS announcement,” Engadget.com, 11/5/2007; Danny Sullivan, “Gphone? The Google Phone Timeline,” SearchEngineLand.com, 4/18/2007; Miguel Helft and John Markoff, “Google Enters the Wireless World,” New York Times, 11/5/2007. Google got more attention: See the first Android introduction and demo by Sergey Brin and Steve Horowitz at www.youtube.com/watch?

Like many electronics whizzes in Silicon Valley, he had Tony Stark’s respect for authority too. At Apple in the late 1980s he got in trouble for reprogramming the corporate phone system to make it seem as if CEO John Sculley were leaving his colleagues messages about stock grants, according to John Markoff’s 2007 profile in The New York Times. At General Magic, an Apple spin-off that wrote some of the first software for handheld computers, he and some colleagues built lofts above their cubicles so they could more efficiently work around the clock. After Microsoft bought his next employer, WebTV, in the mid-1990s, he outfitted a mobile robot with a web camera and microphone and sent it wandering around the company, without mentioning to anyone that it was connected to the Internet.

Computers are things that run software from developers all over the world—outside Apple. He didn’t want the iPhone to become that at all. After the unveiling, when software developers began clamoring for permission to make programs for the iPhone, Jobs said no publicly and emphatically. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC,” he told John Markoff of The New York Times right after the announcement. “The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.” But the iPhone had so many other cool new features that consumers overlooked its flaws.


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Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace by Ronald J. Deibert

4chan, air gap, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Brian Krebs, call centre, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, connected car, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, digital divide, disinformation, end-to-end encryption, escalation ladder, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Hacker Ethic, Herman Kahn, informal economy, information security, invention of writing, Iridium satellite, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, South China Sea, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, Stuxnet, Ted Kaczynski, the medium is the message, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

The scope and importance of the victims, sophistication of the attack (given the negligible resources used to pull it off), detailed exposure of what was going on beneath the surface and, finally, the shock of such widespread infiltration made it so. We are used to our computers being windows onto the world. With GhostNet, we argued that “it is time to get used to them looking back at us.” • • • “It’ll be on the front page,” John Markoff of the New York Times told me hours before the GhostNet story appeared, and he was right. It was above the fold on Sunday, March 29, 2009, and soon thereafter became one of the top news stories in the world. The University of Toronto’s media relations office was overwhelmed. There were satellite trucks parked outside of the Munk School of Global Affairs, where we are based, cameras everywhere, and I experienced my first media scrum.

From that moment on, their chats were intercepted, as were those with whom they were communicating, and uploaded to a server in China, presumably to be shared with Chinese security services. The interception directly contravened Skype’s explicit terms of service, which promised state-of-the-art “end-to-end encryption,” allowing it to be widely promoted as a secure tool for dissidents and others at risk. The scandalous tale was covered by John Markoff in the New York Times, and Skype later apologized. A few years later, however, University of New Mexico researchers found the exact same content-filtering and interception system was still in place on TOM-Skype. Notably, Skype scores zero on the EFF scorecard, and its present owner, Microsoft, fares little better: neither tells users about data demands, is transparent about government requests, or fights for user privacy rights in court.

Nart Villeneuve was able (again) to get partial access to one of these stepping stones – an open file transfer protocol (FTP) used by the attackers on an improperly secured computer – and once he found this window into their subterranean lair, he engineered a script that automatically copied anything that passed through the FTP site. As I told John Markoff of the New York Times (which gave front-page coverage to Shadows in the Cloud), we were going “behind the backs of the attackers and picking their pockets.” As with the GhostNet investigation, we had privileged access to Tibetan computers, including those situated in the Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama in India, which we had wiretapped with permission.


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Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy by David A. Mindell

Air France Flight 447, air gap, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Beryl Markham, Boeing 747, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Chris Urmson, digital map, disruptive innovation, driverless car, drone strike, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fudge factor, Gene Kranz, human-factors engineering, index card, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, telepresence, telerobotics, trade route, US Airways Flight 1549, William Langewiesche, zero-sum game

“without traffic accidents or congestion”: Sebastian Thrun, “Self-Driving Cars Can Save Lives, and Parking Spaces,” New York Times, December 5, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/science/sebastian-thrun-self-driving-cars-can-save-lives-and-parking-spaces.html. Sebastian Thrun, “What We’re Driving At,” Google official blog, http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/what-were-driving-at.html, accessed July 10, 2014. John Markoff, “A Trip in a Self-Driving Car Now Seems Routine,” Bits Blog, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/13/a-trip-in-a-self-driving-car-now-seems-routine, accessed July 10, 2014. John Markoff, “Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic,” New York Times, October 9, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html. The Google car’s successful driving tests: Mark Harris, “How Google’s Autonomous Car Passed the First U.S.

It Depends On Whom You Work For,” IEEE Spectrum Cars That Think, February 24, 2015, http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/human-factors/how-much-training-do-you-need-to-be-a-robocar-test-driver-it-depends-on-whom-you-work-for. He put a video camera on the dashboard of his car: John Leonard, “Conversations on Autonomy,” presentation, MIT, March 13, 2014. John Markoff, “Police, Pedestrians and the Social Ballet of Merging: The Real Challenges for Self-Driving Cars,” Bits Blog, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/29/police-bicyclists-and-pedestrians-the-real-challenges-for-self-driving-cars/, accessed July 10, 2014. We know that driverless cars will be susceptible: John Markoff, “Collision in the Making Between Self-Driving Cars and How the World Works,” New York Times, January 23, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/24/technology/googles-autonomous-vehicles-draw-skepticism-at-legal-symposium.html.

The drives have included human safety drivers and software experts who can turn the autonomy on and off. “The idea was that the human drives onto the freeway, engages the system, [and] it takes them on the bulk of the trip—the boring part—and then they reengage,” said Google engineer Nathaniel Fairfield. A ride in one of these vehicles led the New York Times’s John Markoff to conclude that “computerized systems that replace human drivers are now largely workable and could greatly limit human error,” potentially supporting Google’s goal of cutting the number of U.S. highway deaths in half. Google’s rhetoric around the project has the kind of Silicon Valley optimism that typically surrounds software systems.


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The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, c2.com, call centre, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, commons-based peer production, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, desegregation, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, linear model of innovation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, PageRank, Paul Terrell, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yochai Benkler

In The Myth of the Machine, the sociologist Lewis Mumford warned that the rise of computers could mean that “man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal.”7 At peace protests and hippie communes, from Sproul Plaza at Berkeley to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, the injunction printed on punch cards, “Do not fold, spindle or mutilate,” became an ironic catchphrase. But by the early 1970s, when the possibility of personal computers arose, attitudes began to change. “Computing went from being dismissed as a tool of bureaucratic control to being embraced as a symbol of individual expression and liberation,” John Markoff wrote in his history of the period, What the Dormouse Said.8 In The Greening of America, which served as a manifesto for the new era, a Yale professor, Charles Reich, denounced the old corporate and social hierarchies and called for new structures that encouraged collaboration and personal empowerment.

The crowd gave him a standing ovation. Some even rushed up to the stage as if he were a rock star, which in some ways he was.41 Down the hall from Engelbart, a competing session was being presented by Les Earnest, who had cofounded, with the MIT refugee John McCarthy, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab. As reported by John Markoff in What the Dormouse Said, their session featured a film about a robot that acted as if it could hear and see things. The two demos presented a clear contrast between the goal of artificial intelligence and that of augmented intelligence. The latter mission had seemed rather quirky when Engelbart began working on it, but when he showed off all of its elements in his December 1968 demo—a personal computer that humans could easily interact with in real time, a network that allowed collaborative creativity—it overshadowed the robot.

Led by the growth of blogs and wikis, both of which emerged in the mid-1990s, a revitalized Web 2.0 arose that allowed users to collaborate, interact, form communities, and generate their own content. JUSTIN HALL AND HOW WEB LOGS BECAME BLOGS As a freshman at Swarthmore College in December 1993, Justin Hall picked up a stray copy of the New York Times in the student lounge and read a story by John Markoff about the Mosaic browser. “Think of it as a map to the buried treasures of the Information Age,” it began. “A new software program available free to companies and individuals is helping even novice computer users find their way around the global Internet, the network of networks that is rich in information but can be baffling to navigate.”54 A willowy computer geek with an impish smile and blond hair flowing over his shoulders, Hall seemed to be a cross between Huck Finn and a Tolkien elf.


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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

Full of interesting details about weird but not arbitrary connections, John Markoff’s book tells one of the oddest—because truest—of California tales and thereby helps illuminate the still unsettled legacy of the Sixties.” —Todd Gitlin, author of Media Unlimited and The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage “It is easy to see how the personal computer has shaped contemporary culture. But how did contemporary culture shape the emergence of the personal computer? In this innovative, lively narrative, veteran technology reporter and cultural critic John Markoff demonstrates how the values and obsessions of the 1960s, especially as centered in the San Francisco Bay Area, created the environment for the emergence of the personal computer as social tool and cultural catalyst.”

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 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), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, 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 Copyright © John Markoff, 2005 All rights reserved Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from “White Rabbit” by Grace Slick. © 1966, 1994 Irving Music, Inc./BMI. Used by permission. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS: Markoff, John. What the dormouse said—: how the sixties counterculture shaped the personal computer industry / John Markoff. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 978-1-1012-0108-4 1.

PENGUIN BOOKS WHAT THE DORMOUSE SAID John Markoff is a senior writer for The New York Times who has coauthored Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier and the bestselling Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick, America’s Most Wanted Computer Outlaw. He lives in San Francisco, California. Praise for What the Dormouse Said “At the core of Dormouse lies a valid and original historical point.” —The New York Times “A convincing case…. This makes entertaining reading.” —The New York Times “Evocative” —Newsweek “Fascinating” —Computerworld “Fascinating…Markoff is a wonderful writer and storyteller, and he effortlessly weaves together the stories of the main cast of characters.


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

For all of their help, I’d like to thank Bob Albrecht, Dennis Allison, John Perry Barlow, Reva Basch, Keith Britton, Lois Britton, John Brockman, Michael Callahan, John Coate, Doug Engelbart, Bill English, Lee Felsenstein, Cliff Figallo, David Frohman, Asha Greer (formerly Barbara Durkee), Katie Hafner, Paul Hawken, Alan Kay, Kevin Kelly, Art Kleiner, Butler Lampson, Liza Loop, John Markoff, Jane Metcalfe, David Millen, Nancy Murphy, Richard Raymond, Danica Remy, Howard Rheingold, Louis Rossetto, Peter Schwartz, Mark Stahlman, Gerd Stern, Shirley Streshinsky, Larry Tesler, Paul Tough, Jim Warren, and Gail Williams. Most of all, I thank Stewart Brand, whose openness to this project has been a lesson in itself.

Members of this group, they point out, built the Homebrew Computer Club and ultimately not only Apple Computer, but a number of other important personal computer companies as well.6 A close look at the computing world of the Bay area in the late 1960s and early 1970s reveals that both of these accounts are true but that neither is complete. As journalist John Markoff has shown, industry engineers and hobbyists lived and worked side-by-side in this period, and both were surrounded by countercultural activities and institutions.7 Two of the most influential of these groups in the region maintained offices within a few square blocks of each other and of the offices of the Whole Earth Catalog in Menlo Park.

In the Hackers’ Conference, Brand and company provided computer workers with a venue in which to develop and live a group identity around the idea of hacking and to make sense of emerging economic forms in terms of that identity. This work had the effect of rehabilitating hackers in the public eye, but it also explicitly and securely linked Whole Earth people and the Whole Earth ethos to the world of computing. Virtually all of the journalistic reports that came from the Conference echoed John Markoff ’s comments in Byte magazine: “Anyone attending would instantly have realized that the stereotype of computer hackers as isolated individuals is nowhere near accurate.”67 Some of [ 138 ] Chapter 4 those same reports picked up on another theme as well, however. Several either quoted or paraphrased Ted Nelson’s exclamation “This is the Woodstock of the computer elite!”


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This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

Suspects Russia in Hack of Pentagon Computer Network,” Washington Post, August 6, 2015, and Choe Sang-Hun and John Markoff, “Cyberattacks Jam Government and Commercial Web Sites in U.S. and South Korea,” New York Times, July 8, 2009. The text of Obama’s remarks on cybersecurity and the attacks on his 2008 campaign is available at “Text: Obama’s Remarks on Cyber-Security,” New York Times, May 29, 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/us/politics/29obama.text.html. I also relied on the contemporary accounts of Stuxnet written by my Times colleagues, including that of John Markoff, my predecessor at the Times: “A Silent Attack, but Not a Subtle One,” September 27, 2010, as well as Broad, Markoff, and Sanger’s 2011 account, “Israeli Test on Worm Called Crucial in Iran Nuclear Delay,” January 16, 2011.

The reporting, which was based in part by research from Mandiant, the security firm, later led to the indictment of several PLA hackers, who have yet to be extradited. Previously my colleagues and I had reported on the students at Chinese universities that were digitally linked to China’s hacks on foreign targets: John Markoff and David Barboza, “2 China Schools Said To Be Tied To Online Attacks,” New York Times, February 18, 2010; Barboza, “Inquiry Puts China’s Elite In New Light,” New York Times, February 22, 2010; James Glanz and John Markoff, “State’s Secrets: Day 7; Vast Hacking by a China Fearful of the Web,” New York Times, December 5, 2010; and Perlroth, “Case Based in China Puts a Face on Persistent Hacking,” New York Times, March 29, 2012.

—Nina Jankowicz, author of How to Lose the Information War “From one of the literati, a compelling tale of the digerati: Nicole Perlroth puts arresting faces on the clandestine government-sponsored elites using 1s and 0s to protect us or menace us—and profit.” —Glenn Kramon, former New York Times senior editor “Reads like a thriller. A masterful inside look at a highly profitable industry that was supposed to make us safer but has ended up bringing us to the brink of the next world war.” —John Markoff, former New York Times cybersecurity reporter “A whirlwind global tour that introduces us to the crazy characters and bizarre stories behind the struggle to control the internet. It would be unbelievable if it wasn’t all so very true.” —Alex Stamos, director, Stanford Internet Observatory and former head of security for Facebook and Yahoo “Lays bare the stark realities of disinformation, hacking, and software vulnerability that are the Achilles’ heel of modern democracy.


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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

“Larry and I [had] managed”: Gregory Fernstein, “How CEOs Do Burning Man,” Fast Company, August 27, 2013. 13. . . . New York Times’ John Markoff’s assessment”: John Markoff, “In Searching the Web, Google Finds Riches,” New York Times, April 13, 2003. 14. The company that set the bar: For a complete breakdown of Google’s involvement at Burning Man, see Fred Turner, “Burning Man at Google,” New Media & Society 11 (2009): 73–94. 15. Eric was the only one: Gregory Ferenstein, “How CEOs Do Burning Man,” Fast Company, August 27, 2013; John Markoff, “In Searching the Web, Google Finds Riches,” New York Times, April 13, 2003; and the original citation, Doc Searls, Harvard Berkman fellow, 2002, http://doc.weblogs.com/2002/12/10. 16.

The technical part was more or less a given—there were plenty of sharp guys in the Valley who could run a stable of code monkeys. But, in a town full of outsize personalities, they had to find someone who could set ego aside and get what Google was trying to do. Someone who could, in the New York Times’ John Markoff’s assessment,13 “discipline Google’s flamboyant, self-indulgent culture, without wringing out the genius.” Get it right, and they’d own the search engine space for a decade or more. Screw it up, and they could lose control of their company. Game over. Back to grad school. So, in a stroke of desperate inspiration, Page and Brin found themselves turning to an unusual selection process, a brutal filtration system both strikingly similar to BUD/S and as wildly different as it could get.

“Volunteer Kesey gave himself over to science”: Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968), p. 45. 22. Half the time”: Ibid., p. 46; Richard Strozzi-Heckler, In Search of the Warrior Spirit: Teaching Awareness Disciplines to the Green Berets (Berkeley: Blue Snake Books, 2007), p. 17. 23. Armed with speakers mounted in the redwoods: John Markoff, What the Doormouse Said (New York: Viking, 2005), p. 122. 24. A round of post-Vietnam soul-searching”: FrankRose, “A New Age for Business?,” Fortune, October 8, 1990. 25. “I just made it my weekend duty”: Jim Channon, interview, Goats Declassified: The Real Men of the First Earth Battalion (Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2009). 26.


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Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

a team at Stanford University: Rajat Raina, Anand Madhavan, and Andrew Y. Ng, “Large-Scale Deep Unsupervised Learning Using Graphics Processors,” Computer Science Department, Stanford University, 2009, http://robotics.stanford.edu/~ang/papers/icml09-LargeScaleUnsupervisedDeepLearningGPU.pdf. CHAPTER 5: TESTAMENT the Google self-driving car: John Markoff, “Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic,” New York Times, October 9, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html. He soon married another roboticist: Evan Ackerman and Erico Guizz, “Robots Bring Couple Together, Engagement Ensues,” IEEE Spectrum, March 31, 2014, https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/engaging-with-robots.

Jeff Dean walked into the same microkitchen: Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “The Great AI Awakening,” New York Times Magazine, December 14, 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html. he built a software tool: Ibid. he was among the top DEC researchers: Cade Metz, “If Xerox PARC Invented the PC, Google Invented the Internet,” Wired, August 8, 2012, https://www.wired.com/2012/08/google-as-xerox-parc/. They built a system: John Markoff, “How Many Computers to Identify a Cat? 16,000,” New York Times, June 25, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/technology/in-a-big-network-of-computers-evidence-of-machine-learning.html. Drawing on the power: Ibid. Ng, Dean, and Corrado published: Quoc V. Le, Marc’Aurelio Ranzato, Rajat Monga et al., “Building High-level Features Using Large Scale Unsupervised Learning,” 2012, https://arxiv.org/abs/1112.6209.

Alfred Wegener first proposed: Richard Conniff, “When Continental Drift Was Considered Pseudoscience,” Smithsonian, June 2012, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/when-continental-drift-was-considered-pseudoscience-90353214/. he developed a degenerative brain condition: Benedict Carey, “David Rumelhart Dies at 68; Created Computer Simulations of Perception,” New York Times, March 11, 2011. CHAPTER 6: AMBITION He would soon set a world record: John Markoff, “Parachutist’s Record Fall: Over 25 Miles in 15 Minutes,” New York Times, October 24, 2014. Two of them, Demis Hassabis and David Silver: Cade Metz, “What the AI Behind AlphaGo Can Teach Us About Being Human,” Wired, May 19, 2016, https://www.wired.com/2016/05/google-alpha-go-ai/. “Despite its rarefied image”: Archived “Diaries” from Elixir, https://archive.kontek.net/republic.strategyplanet.gamespy.com/d1.shtml.


pages: 615 words: 168,775

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age by Leslie Berlin

AltaVista, Apple II, Arthur D. Levinson, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, book value, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, Computer Lib, discovery of DNA, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Oklahoma City bombing, packet switching, Project Xanadu, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, union organizing, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, work culture

For more on Berkeley Computer Company, see “Preliminary Proposal for a Systems Group within the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center,” RWT. 22. Taylor, interview by author, April 22, 2013. 23. Taylor, interviews by author, March 18 and April 24, 2013. John Markoff cited several sources who said that Engelbart could not “let go of his creation so the world could use it.” An effort to license Engelbart’s system to PARC was “stillborn,” according to Markoff. John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Penguin Books, 2005): 204. 24. Doug Engelbart, Smithsonian oral history, at http://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/englebar.htm. 25.

A deep bow to these people who shared their expertise and assistance: the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences 2012–2013 fellows, Janet Abbate, Bob Andreatta, David Brock, Carolyn Caddes, Martin Campbell-Kelly, Catherine de Cuir, Beth Ebben, Benj Edwards, Bret Field, Terry Floyd, Daniel Hartwig, the HP Alumni Association, Paula Jabloner, Kathy Jarvis, Laurene Powell Jobs, Kris Kasianovitz, Mike Keller, Chigusa Kita, Greg Kovacs, Steven Levy, Sara Lott, Anna Mancini, Natalie-Jean Marine Street, John Markoff, Pam Moreland, Mary Munill, Tim Noakes, Bill O’Hanlan, Margaret O’Mara, Sue Pelosi, Nadine Pinell, Sarah Reis, Paul Reist, Nora Richardson, James Sabry, Larry Scott, Lenny Siegel, Lisa Slater, Kurt Taylor, Bill Terry, and Fred Turner. Two men who have no idea I exist have been an important part of writing this book.

Robert Taylor, “Plans for an Experimental, Interactive Computer Network,” paper to be presented at the 2nd Workshop on National Systems of the Task Group on National Systems for Scientific and Technical Information, Front Royal, VA, n.d., but probably 1968. 20. Banks and airline reservation systems also used a different type of remote computing. 21. Taylor, interview by John Markoff, Dec. 9, 2008, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqsTpNtziE8&list=PL653B57BD7DA5B890&index=1&feature=plpp_video. 22. Taylor, interview by author, April 22, 2013. Whether Licklider envisioned the Intergalactic Network as a centralized system (imagine a giant time-sharing system, with a single machine at the core and nodes taking the place of individual users) or a decentralized one (which is how the Arpanet worked and the Internet does now) is the subject of some debate.


pages: 568 words: 164,014

Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat by John P. Carlin, Garrett M. Graff

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, air gap, Andy Carvin, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business climate, cloud computing, cotton gin, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, eat what you kill, Edward Snowden, fake news, false flag, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Hacker Ethic, information security, Internet of things, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, The Hackers Conference, Tim Cook: Apple, trickle-down economics, Wargames Reagan, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, zero-sum game

Officials Say,” Washington Post, May 20, 2013, www.washington post.com/world/national-security/chinese-hackers-who-breached-google-gained-access-to-sensitive-data-us-officials-say/2013/05/20/51330428-be34-11e2-89c9-3be8095fe767_story.html. 18. John Markoff and David Barboza, “2 China Schools Said to Be Tied to Online Attacks,” New York Times, February 18, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/tech nology/19china.html. 19. James Glanz and John Markoff, “Vast Hacking by a China Fearful of Web,” New York Times, December 4, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/world/asia/05wikileaks-china.html?_r=1. 20. Andrew Jacobs and Miguel Helft, “Google, Citing Attack, Threatens to Exit China,” New York Times, January 12, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/world/asia/13beijing.html?

snl=1. 8. John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, n.d., www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence. 9. Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (O’Reilly Media, 2010), ix. 10. Ibid., 27. 11. Ibid., 91–92. 12. Ibid., 134. 13. John Markoff, “The Odyssey of a Hacker: From Outlaw to Consultant,” New York Times, January 29, 2001, www.nytimes.com/2001/01/29/business/the-odyssey-of-a-hacker-from-outlaw-to-consultant.html. 14. Ron Rosenbaum, “Secrets of the Little Blue Box,” Esquire, October 2017, 119–226, www.historyofphonephreaking.org/docs/rosenbaum1971.pdf. 15.

Craig Timberg, “Net of Insecurity: A Flaw in the Design,” Washington Post, May 30, 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/sf/business/2015/05/30/net-of-insecurity-part-1//?utm_term=.0126c73b6f8. 16. Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet (Simon & Schuster, 1998), 143. 17. Ibid., 182. 18. Ibid., 153. 19. Katie Hafner and John Markoff, CYBERPUNK: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier, Revised (Simon & Schuster, 1995), 279. 20. Timberg, “Net of Insecurity: A Flaw in the Design.” 21. Bob Metcalfe, “The Stockings Were Hung by the Chimney with Care,” IETF Tools, tools.ietf.org/html/rfc602. 22. Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet, 190. 23.


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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

Even after the local paper outed the benefactor as Google, the company still insisted that local people not make reference to that fact and had local officials sign a confidentiality agreement. When they talked about it, they used the code name Project 02. When visitors came asking, the locals clammed up like bay mussels; New York Times reporter John Markoff traveled to the site in 2006 and was stonewalled by the city manager. An official in a nearby town, free to make sour-grapes jokes at the lucky municipality across the river, said, “It’s a little bit like He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named in Harry Potter.” Indeed, as local reporters found out when Google finally allowed them a glimpse of the compound (only the cafeteria and the public area—not the vast area where the servers resided), outside the security fence was a sign that read voldemort industries.

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.

Kaplan, The Silicon Boys and Their Valley of Dreams (New York: William Morrow, 1999). 74 “zero percent possibility” Ince, “The Lost Google Tapes.” 75 Google’s first press release “Google Receives $25 Million in Equity Funding,” Google Press Center website, June 7, 1999. 77 “true story testimonials” “Google True Story Testimonials,” 2000–2001, Google Press Release. 80 “He was the only” John Markoff and G. Pascal Zachary, “In Searching the Web, Google Finds Riches,” The New York Times, April 13, 2003. 82 “Basically, we needed” Kevin Gray, “The Little Engine That Could,” Details, February 2002. 85 “long tail” The definitive article on this phenomenon is Chris Anderson, “The Long Tail,” Wired, October 2004.


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

RegBlog (blog), Penn Program on Regulation, http://www.regblog.org/2013/02/14-melekhina-social-media-antitrust.html; Bruce Baer Arnold, “Big Fine for a Broken Promise: Microsoft’s Antitrust Breach Puts Tech Firms on Notice,” The Conversation, March 8, 2013, http://theconversation.com/big-fine-for-a-broken-promise-microsofts-antitrust-breach-puts-tech-firms-on-notice-12683; Jeff Elder, “Silicon Valley Tech Giants Struck Deals on Hiring, Say Documents,” Wall Street Journal, April 20, 2014. 67. John Markoff, “Google Puts Money on Robots Using Man Behind Android,” New York Times, December 4, 2013; Eric Mack, “Google Launches Calico to Take on Illness and Aging,” CNET, September 18, 2013, http://www.cnet.com/news/google-launches-calico-to-take-on-illness-and-aging; John Markoff, “Google Adds to Its Menagerie of Robots,” New York Times, December 14, 2013; Neal E. Boudette and Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Google, Apple Forge Auto Ties,” All Things Digital, December 29, 2013, http://allthingsd.com/20131229/google-apple-forge-auto-ties. 68.

Tian Luo and Amar Mann, “Survival and Growth of Silicon Valley High-tech Businesses Born in 2000,” Monthly Labor Review, September 2011, pp. 16–31. 127. Timothy Noah, “Steve Jobs, Jobs-Creator,” New Republic (blog), October 6, 2011, http://www.newrepublic.com/blog/timothy-noah/95877/steve-jobs-job-creator. 128. John Markoff, “Silicon Valley Reacts to Economy With a New Approach,” New York Times, April 21, 2001; Robert D. Hof, “Venture Capital’s Liquidators,” Bloomberg Businessweek, December 03, 2008, http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2008-12-03/venture-capitals-liquidators. 129. Paul Abrahams, “End of Second California Gold Rush Leaves the Valley in Shock,” Financial Times, May 9, 2001. 130.

Alex Knapp, “Ray Kurzweil’s Predictions For 2009 Were Mostly Inaccurate,” Forbes, March 20, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/03/20/ray-kurzweils-predictions-for-2009-were-mostly-inaccurate; Robert Jonathan, “Google Exec Ray Kurzweil Takes 150 Vitamin Supplements Every Day,” Inquisitr, October 20, 2013, http://www.inquisitr.com/1000017/google-exec-ray-kurzweil-takes-150-vitamin-supplements-every-day; Eric Mack, “Google Launches Calico to Take on Illness and Aging,” CNET, September 18, 2013, http://www.cnet.com/news/google-launches-calico-to-take-on-illness-and-aging; Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., “Will Google’s Ray Kurzweil Live Forever?” Wall Street Journal, April 12, 2013. 86. John Markoff, “Brainlike Computers, Learning from Experience,” New York Times, December 29, 2013; Nick Bilton, “Computer-Brain Interfaces Making Big Leaps,” Bits (blog), New York Times, August 4, 2013, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/disruptions-rather-than-time-computers-might-become-panacea-to-hurt. 87.


pages: 915 words: 232,883

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, big-box store, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, death of newspapers, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, fixed income, game design, General Magic , Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, profit maximization, publish or perish, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, The Home Computer Revolution, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

An injunction on punch cards of the period—“Do not fold, spindle or mutilate”—became an ironic phrase of the antiwar Left. But by the early 1970s a shift was under way. “Computing went from being dismissed as a tool of bureaucratic control to being embraced as a symbol of individual expression and liberation,” John Markoff wrote in his study of the counterculture’s convergence with the computer industry, What the Dormouse Said. It was an ethos lyrically expressed in Richard Brautigan’s 1967 poem, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” and the cyberdelic fusion was certified when Timothy Leary declared that personal computers had become the new LSD and years later revised his famous mantra to proclaim, “Turn on, boot up, jack in.”

Earlier that year Jobs had been hoping to find a buyer for Pixar that would let him merely recoup the $50 million he had put in. By the end of the day the shares he had retained—80% of the company—were worth more than twenty times that, an astonishing $1.2 billion. That was about five times what he’d made when Apple went public in 1980. But Jobs told John Markoff of the New York Times that the money did not mean much to him. “There’s no yacht in my future,” he said. “I’ve never done this for the money.” The successful IPO meant that Pixar would no longer have to be dependent on Disney to finance its movies. That was just the leverage Jobs wanted. “Because we could now fund half the cost of our movies, I could demand half the profits,” he recalled.

Jobs unveiled iTunes at the January 2001 Macworld as part of the digital hub strategy. It would be free to all Mac users, he announced. “Join the music revolution with iTunes, and make your music devices ten times more valuable,” he concluded to great applause. As his advertising slogan would later put it: Rip. Mix. Burn. That afternoon Jobs happened to be meeting with John Markoff of the New York Times. The interview was going badly, but at the end Jobs sat down at his Mac and showed off iTunes. “It reminds me of my youth,” he said as the psychedelic patterns danced on the screen. That led him to reminisce about dropping acid. Taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he’d done in his life, Jobs told Markoff.


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

monitors physical spaces: Calum MacLeod (3 Jan 2013), “China surveillance targets crime—and dissent,” USA Today, http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/01/03/china-security/1802177. Messages containing words: Vernon Silver (8 Mar 2013), “Cracking China’s Skype surveillance software,” Bloomberg Business Week, http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-08/skypes-been-hijacked-in-china-and-microsoft-is-o-dot-k-dot-with-it. 30,000 Internet police: John Markoff (1 Oct 2008), “Surveillance of Skype messages found in China,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/02/technology/internet/02skype.html. India: John Ribeiro (13 Jan 2011), “RIM allows India access to consumer BlackBerry messaging,” CIO, http://www.cio.com/article/654438/RIM_Allows_India_Access_to_Consumer_BlackBerry_Messaging.

Craig Timberg (12 Feb 2014), “Foreign regimes use spyware against journalists, even in U.S.,” Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/foreign-regimes-use-spyware-against-journalists-even-in-us/2014/02/12/9501a20e-9043-11e3-84e1-27626c5ef5fb_story.html. We labeled the Chinese actions: Andrew Jacobs, Miguel Helft, and John Markoff (13 Jan 2010), “Google, citing attack, threatens to exit China,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/world/asia/13beijing.html. David E. Sanger (6 May 2013), “U.S. blames China’s military directly for cyberattacks,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/07/world/asia/us-accuses-chinas-military-in-cyberattacks.html.

George Mason University School of Public Policy (Feb 2014), “Cyber security export markets 2014,” Virginia Economic Development Partnership, http://exportvirginia.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Report-on-Cyber-Security-Preface.pdf Estonia was the victim: Joshua Davis (21 Aug 2007), “Hackers take down the most wired country in Europe,” Wired, https://web.archive.org/web/20071019223411/http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/15-09/ff_estonia. ex-Soviet republic of Georgia: John Markoff (13 Aug 2008), “Before the gunfire, cyberattacks,” New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/13/technology/13cyber.html. South Korea was the victim: Matthew Weaver (8 Jul 2009), “Cyberattackers target South Korea and US,” Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jul/08/south-korea-cyber-attack.


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@War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex by Shane Harris

air gap, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Brian Krebs, centralized clearinghouse, Citizen Lab, clean water, computer age, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, don't be evil, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, Firefox, information security, John Markoff, Julian Assange, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, peer-to-peer, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Stuxnet, systems thinking, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

The Corporate Counterstrike [>] “a highly sophisticated”: David Drummond, “A New Approach to China,” Google blog, January 12, 2010, http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html. [>] “crown jewels”: John Markoff, “Cyberattack on Google Said to Hit Password System,” New York Times, April 19, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/technology/20google.html?_r=0. [>] “Google broke in”: Author conversation with said official, February 2013. [>] Google uncovered evidence: For more on Google’s investigation, see David E. Sanger and John Markoff, “After Google’s Stand on China, US Treads Lightly,” New York Times, January 14, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/world/asia/15diplo.html?

Thanks also to Ben Pauker, Peter Scoblic, Mindy Kay Bricker, and David Rothkopf for all they’ve done guiding this fast-moving and fast-growing ship. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to the voluminous and insightful reporting of several journalist colleagues whose work informed my own research, including Siobhan Gorman and Danny Yadron at the Wall Street Journal; David Sanger, Nicole Perlroth, and John Markoff at the New York Times; Ellen Nakashima at the Washington Post; Tony Romm at Politico; Spencer Ackerman at the Guardian and formerly of Wired’s Danger Room blog; Kim Zetter, also of Wired and author of its Threat Level blog; Joseph Menn at Reuters; and Michael Riley at Bloomberg Businessweek. Each of them has done groundbreaking work on this terrain.

. [>] In 2013 the NSA had a budget: Barton Gellman and Ellen Nakashima, “US Spy Agencies Mounted 231 Offensive Cyber-Operations in 2011, Documents Show,” Washington Post, August 30, 2013, http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-08-30/world/41620705_1_computer-worm-former-u-s-officials-obama-administration. [>] “Graduates of the program become”: “About the Program,” Systems and Network Interdisciplinary Program, http://www.nsa.gov/careers/_files/SNIP.pdf. [>] The company itself has been the target: John Markoff, “Cyber Attack on Google Said to Hit Password System,” New York Times, April 19, 2010. 6. The Mercenaries [>] “Bonesaw is the ability to map”: Aram Roston, “Nathaniel Fick, Former CNAS Chief, to Head Cyber Targeting Firm,” C4ISR Journal, January–February 2013, http://www.defensenews.com/article/20130115/C4ISR01/301150007/Nathaniel-Fick-Former-CNAS-Chief-Heads-Cyber-Targeting-Firm. [>] Internal documents show: Michael Riley and Ashlee Vance, “Cyber Weapons: The New Arms Race,” Bloomberg Businessweek, July 20, 2011, http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/cyber-weapons-the-new-arms-race-07212011.html#p4. [>] “Eventually we need to enable”: Andy Greenberg, “Founder of Stealthy Security Firm Endgame to Lawmakers: Let US Companies ‘Hack Back,’” Forbes, September 20, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/09/20/founder-of-stealthy-security-firm-endgame-to-lawmakers-let-u-s-companies-hack-back/. [>] “If you believe that wars”: Joseph Menn, “US Cyberwar Strategy Stokes Fear of Blowback,” Reuters, May 10, 2013, http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/10/us-usa-cyberweapons-specialreport-idUSBRE9490EL20130510. [>] One prominent player: Information about CrowdStrike’s techniques is based on author interviews with Steve Chabinksy, the company’s general counsel and a former senior FBI official, conducted in July and August 2013.


pages: 677 words: 206,548

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

Weapons System Designs Compromised by Chinese Cyberspies,” Washington Post, May 27, 2013. 56 According to an FBI report: Marcus Ranum, “Cyberwar Rhetoric Is Scarier Than Threat of Foreign Attack,” U.S. News and World Report, March 29, 2010. 57 Of course it is not just the American military’s: Craig Timberg and Ellen Nakashima, “Chinese Cyberspies Have Hacked Most Washington Institutions, Experts Say,” Washington Post, Feb. 20, 2013. 58 Moreover, a 2009 report: John Markoff, “Vast Spy System Loots Computers in 103 Countries,” New York Times, March 28, 2009; Omar El Akkad, “Meet the Canadians Who Busted GhostNet,” Daily Globe and Mail, March 30, 2009; Tom Ashbrook et al., “Unmasking GhostNet,” On Point with Tom Ashbrook, WBUR, April 2, 2009, http://​onpoint.​wbur.​org/​2009/​04/​02/​unmasking-​ghostnet. 59 China has also been accused: David E.

,” 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.

Healey, “Toyota Deaths Reported to Safety Database Rise to 37,” USA Today, Feb. 17, 2010. 24 A jury found: Phil Baker, “Software Bugs Found to Be Cause of Toyota Acceleration Death,” Daily Transcript, Nov. 4, 2013; Junko Yoshida, “Acceleration Case: Jury Finds Toyota Liable,” EETimes, Oct. 24, 2013. 25 Toyota was accused: Jerry Hirsch, “Toyota Admits Misleading Regulators, Pays $1.2-Billion Federal Fine,” Los Angeles Times, March 19, 2014. 26 According to the London Metropolitan Police: Victoria Woollaston, “Forget Carjacking, the Next Big Threat Is Car-HACKING,” Mail Online, May 8, 2014. 27 The operation takes less: William Pentland, “Car-Hacking Goes Viral in London,” Forbes, May 20, 2014; Thomas Cheshire, “Thousands of Cars Stolen Using Hi-Tech Gadgets,” Sky News, May 8, 2014. 28 Using nothing more than a laptop: Sebastian Anthony, “Hackers Can Unlock Cars via SMS,” ExtremeTech, July 28, 2011; Robert McMillan, “ ‘War Texting’ Lets Hackers Unlock Car Doors Via SMS,” CSO Online, July 27, 2011. 29 Your musical tastes: Rebecca Boyle, “Trojan-Horse MP3s Could Let Hackers Break into Your Car Remotely, Researchers Find,” Popular Science, March 14, 2011. 30 For just under $30: Victoria Woollaston, “The $20 Handheld Device That Hacks a CAR—and Can Control the Brakes,” Mail Online, Feb. 6, 2014. 31 Entirely possible: John Markoff, “Researchers Hack into Cars’ Electronics,” New York Times, March 9, 2011; Chris Philpot, “Can Your Car Be Hacked?,” Car and Driver, Aug. 2011; Andy Greenberg, “Hackers Reveal Nasty New Car Attacks—with Me Behind the Wheel,” Forbes, July 24, 2013; Dan Goodin, “Tampering with a Car’s Brakes and Speed by Hacking Its Computers: A New How-To,” Ars Technica, July 29, 2013. 32 Renault Nissan’s CEO: Paul A.


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

Jacobsen, Pentagon’s Brain, chap. 13, “In America, antiwar protests raged on…” Student protests against the ILLIAC-IV quickly devolved into violence: a campus armory and a US Air Force recruiting station were firebombed, and thousands of students protested on campus, smashing windows and breaking into the chancellor’s office. The protests put the supercomputer in physical danger, and the university was forced to relocate it across the country to the NASA Ames Research Center, which is today located next door to Google in Mountain View, California. 90. John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer (New York: Viking Adult, 2005). 91. The protests against the Stanford Research Institute were persistent and violent enough that the university regents decided to spin off the Stanford Research Institute as a private entity, hoping to mollify students by officially distancing the university from classified military research. 92.

Indeed, in that sense, Internet culture is not so different from the rest of American contemporary culture. 12. Quoted in Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 41. 13. John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer (New York: Viking Adult, 2005). 14. Bruce Shlain and Martin A. Lee, Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond, rev. ed. (New York: Grove Press, 1994), 155–156. 15. Ibid., 109. 16.

This occurred without public discussion or disclosure, and was effectively hidden for a year” (“Management of NSFNET,” Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Science of the Comm. on Science, Space, and Technology, US House of Representatives, 102nd Cong., 2nd sess. [March 12, 1992]). From then on, the NSFNET backbone ran as part of a larger private network owned by MCI and IBM. 56. John Markoff, “Data Network Raises Monopoly Fear,” New York Times, December 19, 1991. 57. Kesan and Shah, “Fool Us Once Shame on You,” 122–123. 58. Ibid. “ANS took advantage of the public in several ways. First, it relied heavily on support from the government. Second, ANS did not find new customers, instead it attempted mainly to convert customers from the government-subsidized regional networks.


pages: 281 words: 95,852

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

Farhad Manjoo, “How the Internet Helps Iran Silence Activists,” Slate, June 25, 2009; Miguel Helft and John Markoff, “Google, Citing Cyber Attack, Threatens to Exit China,” New York Times, January 13, 2010. 5. John Ribeiro, “Google Placates India, China with Different Map Versions,” PC World, October 23, 2009. 6. Miguel Helft and David Barboza, “Google Shuts China Site in Dispute over Censorship,” New York Times, March 22, 2010. 7. Miguel Helft and David Barboza, “Google’s Plan to Turn Its Back on China Has Risks,” New York Times, March 23, 2010; John Markoff, “Cyberattack on Google Said to Hit Password System,” New York Times, April 19, 2010; John Markoff and Ashlee Vance, “Software Firms Fear Hackers Who Leave No Trace,” New York Times, January 20, 2010. 8.

Stross, Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know (New York: Free Press, 2008), 109–28. 11. Cecillia Kang, “AT&T Accuses Google of Violating Telecom Laws; Google Rejects Claims,” Post I.T., blog, September 25, 2009; Amy Schatz, “AT&T Asks for Curbs on Google,” WSJ.com, September 26, 2009; John Markoff and Matt Richtel, “F.C.C. Hands Google a Partial Victory,” New York Times, August 1, 2007. 12. “GOOG: Google Inc Company Profile,” CNNMoney.com, August 12, 2010. 13. Ken Auletta, “Annals of Communications: The Search Party,” New Yorker, January 14, 2008; Rob Hof, “Maybe Google Isn’t Losing Big Bucks on YouTube After All,” BusinessWeek, June 17, 2009; Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein, “The Plot to Kill Google,” Wired, January 19, 2009; Eli Edwards, “Stepping Up to the Plate: The Google-Doubleclick Merger and the Role of the Federal Trade Commission in Protecting Online Data Privacy,” SSRN eLibrary, April 25, 2008, http://papers.ssrn.com; Michael Liedtke, “Guessing Game: How Much Money Is YouTube Losing?”


pages: 390 words: 96,624

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom by Rebecca MacKinnon

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business cycle, business intelligence, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital Maoism, don't be evil, Eben Moglen, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Global Witness, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, online collectivism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pre–internet, race to the bottom, real-name policy, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

For a detailed technical analysis of the shutdown, see James Cowie, “Egypt Leaves the Internet,” Renesys Blog, January 28, 2011, www.renesys.com/blog/2011/01/egypt-leaves-the-internet.shtml; and Earl Zmijewski, “Egypt’s Net on Life Support,” Renesys Blog, January 31, 2011, www.renesys.com/blog/2011/01/egypts-net-on-life-support.shtml. Also see James Glanz and John Markoff, “Egypt Leaders Found ‘Off’ Switch for Internet,” New York Times, February 15, 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/technology/16internet.html (accessed June 27, 2011). 52 After Muammar Gaddafi cut off phone and Internet service to rebel-held areas in eastern Libya: Margaret Corker and Charles Levinson, “Rebels Hijack Gadhafi’s Phone Network,” Wall Street Journal, April 13, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703841904576256512991215284.html (accessed June 27, 2011). 53 In a comprehensive book about technology and politics in the Islamic world: Philip N.

Satter, “Vodafone: Egypt Forced Us to Send Text Messages,” Associated Press, February 3, 2011, www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9L5ANI80.htm (all accessed August 13, 2011). 185 in June 2011 the UN Human Rights Council approved the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: “Report of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on the Issue of Human Rights and Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises, John Ruggie; Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: Implementing the United Nations ‘Protect, Respect and Remedy’ Framework,” UN Human Rights Council A/HRC/17/31, March 21, 2011, www.business-humanrights.org/media/documents/ruggie/ruggie-guiding-principles-21-mar-2011.pdf. CHAPTER 12: IN SEARCH OF “INTERNET FREEDOM” POLICY 189 Global Internet Freedom Consortium (GIFC): www.internetfreedom.org. 189 The GIFC found powerful allies in Mark Palmer . . . and Michael Horowitz: See John Markoff, “Iranians and Others Outwit Net Censors,” New York Times, April 30, 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/05/01/technology/01filter.html; James O’Toole, “Internet Censorship Fight Goes Global,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 4, 2009, www.post-gazette.com/pg/09155/974993-82.stm; Brad Stone, “Aid Urged for Groups Fighting Internet Censors,” New York Times, January 20, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/technology/21censor.html; Caylan Ford, “What Hillary Clinton, Google Can Do About Censorship in China,” Washington Post, January 20, 2010, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/20/AR2010012002805.html; Genevieve Long, “Internet Freedom Software Should Get Federal Funding, Group Says,” Epoch Times, March 5, 2010; Gordon Crovitz, “Mrs.

Deficit—China and America—Public Diplomacy in the Age of the Internet: A Minority Staff Report Prepared for the Use of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate,” February 15, 2011, http://lugar.senate.gov/issues/foreign/diplomacy/ChinaInternet.pdf. 191 “Internet-in-a-suitcase”: James Glanz and John Markoff, “US Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors,” New York Times, June 12, 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/world/12internet.html. Also see Josh Smith, “State Allocates Final $28 Million for Internet Freedom Programs,” National Journal, May 3, 2011, www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20110503_8059.php. 191 Clay Shirky critiqued Washington’s obsession with circumvention: Clay Shirky, “The Political Power of Social Media,” Foreign Affairs 90, no. 1 (January–February 2011): 28–41. 193 as Ethan Zuckerman of Harvard’s Berkman Center warns: See Ethan Zuckerman, “Internet Freedom: Beyond Circumvention,” My Heart’s in Accra blog, February 22, 2010, www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2010/02/22/internet-freedom-beyond-circumvention. 193 Evgeny Morozov has been even more critical: Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011). 193 US Internet freedom policy also has critics among its intended beneficiaries: Sami Ben Gharbia, “The Internet Freedom Fallacy and the Arab Digital Activism,” September 17, 2010, http://samibengharbia.com/2010/09/17/the-internet-freedom-fallacy-and-the-arab-digital-activism. 195 While the Bahraini government was arresting bloggers and suppressing dissent, the United States was planning to sell $70 million in arms to Bahrain: See Ivan Sigal, “Going Local,” Index on Censorship 40, no. 1 (2011): 93–99. 195 When Clinton visited Cairo a month after the revolution, Egypt’s January 25 Revolution Youth Coalition refused to meet with her: Kirit Radia and Alex Marquardt, “Young Leaders of Egypt’s Revolt Snub Clinton in Cairo,” ABC News Political Punch, March 15, 2011, http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2011/03/young-leaders-of-egypts-revolt-snub-clinton-in-cairo.html. 195 “International Strategy for Cyberspace”: www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/internationalstrategy_cyberspace.pdf. 196 Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt called for a “new transatlantic partnership for protecting and promoting the freedoms of cyberspace”: Carl Bildt, “Tear Down These Walls Against Internet Freedom,” Washington Post, January 25, 2010, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/24/AR2010012402297.html. 196 In July 2010 the French and Dutch foreign ministers convened an international conference on the Internet and freedom of expression: “Ministers to Meet in the Netherlands to Champion Internet Freedom,” Permanent Mission of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to the United Nations, www.netherlandsmission.org/article.asp?


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Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella, Greg Shaw, Jill Tracie Nichols

3D printing, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, anti-globalists, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bretton Woods, business process, cashless society, charter city, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fault tolerance, fulfillment center, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Mars Rover, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, place-making, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Soul of a New Machine, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, two-sided market, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, young professional, zero-sum game

Chapter 8 The Future of Humans and Machines Toward an Ethical Framework for AI Design If you’d like to glimpse the state of computer-human relations and to understand its future, a good way to start is to observe some of the conversations we are having with our digital counterparts. Already millions of people around the world are working and talking with digital productivity assistants like Cortana; millions more spend part of everyday interacting with social companions—chatbots—like Xiaoice in China and Zo in the United States. John Markoff of The New York Times wrote about the phenomenon in his reporting on Xiaoice. The personalities of Cortana, Zo, and Xiaoice were developed by our AI team, whose work is now core to our AI aspirations. Users of social companions like Zo and Xiaoice say that when they are lonely, in a bad mood, or just aching for dialogue, they find these digital friends on their smartphones to be intelligent and sensitive.

We can’t seem to get beyond this utopia/dystopia dichotomy. I would argue that the most productive debate we can have about AI isn’t one that pits good vs. evil, but rather one that examines the values instilled in the people and institutions creating this technology. In his book Machines of Loving Grace, John Markoff writes, “The best way to answer the hard questions about control in a world full of smart machines is by understanding the values of those who are actually building these systems.” It’s an intriguing observation, and one that our industry must address. At our developer conferences, I explain Microsoft’s approach to AI as based on three core principles.


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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

The earliest networks—like the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (WELL), organized by Stewart Brand, the founder of The Whole Earth Catalog—grew directly out of 1960s counterculture. Brand had helped novelist Ken Kesey organize the Acid Tests—epic be-ins where thousands of hippies ingested LSD and danced to the music of a new band, the Grateful Dead. Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computer, Inc., dropped acid as well. “Jobs explained,” wrote John Markoff in his book What the Dormouse Said, “that he still believed that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life, and he said he felt that because people he knew well had not tried psychedelics, there were things about him they couldn’t understand.” Brand, Kesey, and Jobs envisioned a new kind of network that was truly “bottom-up.”

Engelbart had built a working prototype of what we today would easily recognize as a contemporary Internet device—fifteen years before the introduction of the Apple Macintosh. The next year Engelbart took a team from the Stanford Research Institute to the Lama Foundation commune, north of Taos, New Mexico. It was Stewart Brand who suggested that Lama might provide an atmosphere, as John Markoff wrote, “to create a meeting of the minds between the NLS researchers and the counterculture community animated by the Whole Earth Catalog.” The land outside Taos was full of alternative communities—Morningstar East, Reality Construction Company, the Hog Farm, New Buffalo, and the Family, to name a few.

Chapter Three: Tech’s Counterculture Roots Although I never got to meet Doug Engelbart, I was fortunate enough to have spent time with some of the founders of the Internet, including Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, and most especially John Seely Brown, who has been a mentor to me for the past seven years. Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2000). Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), and John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said (New York: Viking, 2005), are both wonderful resources around the story of the early Internet. Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell, “Hail the Maintainers,” Aeon, April 7, 2016, aeon.co/essays/innovation-is-overvalued-maintenance-often-matters-more. Chapter Four: The Libertarian Counterinsurgency Peter A.


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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

John McCarthy, the godfather of AI, once said that he wanted to live to 102, so that he could laugh at Kurzweil when the singularity fails to arrive at its appointed hour. Still, Kurzweil’s devotees include members of the tech A-list. Bill Gates, for one, calls him “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.” The New York Times’s John Markoff, our most important chronicler of the technologists, says that Kurzweil “represents a community of many of Silicon Valley’s best and brightest,” ranks that include the finest minds at Google. • • • LARRY PAGE LIKES TO IMAGINE that he never escaped academia. Google, after all, began as a doctoral dissertation—and the inspiration for the search engine came from his connoisseurship of academic papers.

Notes CHAPTER ONE: THE VALLEY IS WHOLE, THE WORLD IS ONE as an “Indian freak”: Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968), 2, 11. child of an advertising executive: For biographical details about Brand, I leaned heavily on three excellent books: Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (University of Chicago Press, 2006); John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said (Viking Penguin, 2005); Walter Isaacson, The Innovators (Simon & Schuster, 2014). “cosmic consciousness”: Turner, 59. “tend to be extra-planetary”: Sherry L. Smith, Hippies, Indians, and the Fight for Red Power (Oxford University Press, 2012), 52. “a peyote meeting without peyote”: Charles Perry, The Haight-Ashbury (Random House, 1984), 19.

once said that he wanted to live to 102 so that he could laugh: Wendy M. Grossman, “Artificial Intelligence Is Still the Future,” The Inquirer, April 7, 2008. “the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence”: Kurzweil, Singularity, back cover. “represents a community of many of Silicon Valley’s best and brightest”: John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace (HarperCollins, 2015), 85. Google invests vast sums: Alphabet Inc., Research & Development Expenses, 2015, Google Finance. “Google is not a conventional company”: Larry Page and Sergey Brin, “Letter from the Founders: ‘An Owner’s Manual’ for Google’s Shareholders,” August 2004.


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Underground by Suelette Dreyfus

airport security, Free Software Foundation, invisible hand, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Loma Prieta earthquake, military-industrial complex, packet switching, PalmPilot, pirate software, profit motive, publish or perish, RFC: Request For Comment, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, uranium enrichment, urban decay, WikiLeaks, zero day

See: http://articles.cnn.com/2010-07-25/tech/wikileaks.afghanistan_1_julian-assange-whistle-blower-website-afghan-war?_s=PM:TECH 7. William J. Broad, John Markoff and David E Sanger, ‘Israeli Test on Worm Called Crucial in Iran Nuclear Delay, New York Times online, 15 January, 2011. See: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/world/middleeast/16stuxnet.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1 8. Ibid. 9. CBS News, ‘Iran Confirms Stuxnet Worm Halted Centrifuges’, 29 November, 2010. See: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/11/29/world/main7100197.shtml 10. William J. Broad, John Markoff and David E. Sanger, ‘Israeli Test on Worm Called Crucial in Iran Nuclear Delay’, New York Times online, 15 January, 2011.

It wasn’t an automated program, it was the Australians! It was the Realm hackers! God, this was funny. ‘Wait – there’s more! It says, “Another rogue program shows a widespread vulnerability”. I laughed my ass off,’ Erik said, struggling to get the words out. ‘A rogue program! Who wrote the article?’ ‘A John Markoff,’ Erik answered, wiping his eyes. ‘I called him up.’ ‘You did? What did you say?’ Phoenix tried to gather himself together. ‘ “John,” I said, “You know that article you wrote on page 12 of the Times? It’s wrong! There’s no rogue program attacking the Internet.” He goes, “What is it then?” “It’s not a virus or a worm,” I said.

‘Yeah,’ Erik continued, ‘And then Markoff said, “Can you get me to talk to them?” And I said I’d see what I could do.’ ‘Yeah,’ Phoenix said. ‘Go tell him, yes. Yeah, I gotta talk to this idiot. I’ll set him straight.’ Page one, the New York Times, 21 March 1990: ‘Caller Says he Broke Computers’ Barriers to Taunt the Experts’, by John Markoff. True, the article was below the crease – on the bottom half of the page – but at least it was in column 1, the place a reader turns to first. Phoenix was chuffed. He’d made the front page of the New York Times. ‘The man identified himself only as an Australian named Dave,’ the article said.


Hacking Capitalism by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Abraham Maslow, air gap, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Debian, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, Donald Davies, Eben Moglen, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mitch Kapor, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, patent troll, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, profit motive, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, safety bicycle, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

For the Underground may be increasingly aware of the technical and aesthetic possibilities of the disc, of videotape, of the electronic camera, and so on, and is systematically exploring the terrain, but it has no political viewpoint of its own and therefore mostly falls a helpless victim to commercialism.” Hans Enzensberger “Constituents of a Theory of the Media” in ed. John Hanhardt, Video Culture—A Critical Investigation (New York: Virtual Studies Workshop Press: 1986), 103; hereafter cited in text. 17. For an exhaustive account of the social perils with computers, see Lenny Siegel’s and John Markoff’s The High Cost of High Tech—The Dark Side of the Chip (New York: Harper & Row, 1985). On the global exploitation of workers in East-Asian and Mexican sweatshops where computers are built, see ed. Gerald Sussman and John Lent, Global Productions—Labor in the Making of the Information Society (Cresskill: Hampton Press, 1998).

John Naughton, A Brief History of the Future: the Origins of the Internet (London: Phoenix, 2000), 176, italics in original. 9. Cudos is an acronym used to denote principles that should guide good scientific research. It was introduced by the sociologist Robert King Merton. One of the principles of Cudos is that scientific results ought to be freely shared among colleagues. 10. John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Viking, 2005). 11. Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor—A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986). 12. Steven Levy, Hackers—Heroes of the Computer Revolution (New York: Delta, 1994), 214. 13.

The Two Marxism: Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Theory, London: Macmillan, 1980. Gorz, André. Reclaiming Work—Beyond the Wage Based Society, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999. Grant, Gail. Understanding Digital Signatures—Establishing Trust over the Internet and Other Networks, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998. Hafner, Katie, and John Markoff. Cyberpunk—Outlaws and Hackers in the Computer Frontier, London: Forth Estate, 1991. Hagen, Ingunn, and Janet Wasko, Consuming Audiences?—Production and Reception in Media Research, Cresskill NJ: Hampton Press, 2000. Hakken, David. Cyborgs @ Cyberspace?—An Ethnographer Looks to the Future, New York: Routledge, 1999.


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The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect: World Trade Organization International Trade Statistics, 2013, World Trade Organization, http://www.wto.org/english/res_e/statis_e/its2013_e/its2013_e.pdf. The highest-skilled labor markets: Richard Rahn, “RAHN: Estonia, the Little Country That Could,” Washington Times, June 20, 2011, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jun/20/the-little-country-that-could/. A computer that can speed up analysis: John Markoff, “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software,” New York Times, March 4, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html?pagewanted=all. Social networks can open doors: Larry Rosen, iDisorder: Understanding Our Obsession with Technology and Overcoming Its Hold on Us (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

Run by the National Science Foundation: “National Robotics Initiative Invests $38 Million in Next-Generation Robotics,” R&D Magazine, October 25, 2013, http://www.rdmag.com/news/2013/10/national-robotics-initiative-invests-38-million-next-generation-robotics. The private sector is also investing: John Markoff, “Google Adds to Its Menagerie of Robots,” New York Times, December 14, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/14/technology/google-adds-to-its-menagerie-of-robots.html?_r=1&. As a kid, Hassabis was: Samuel Gibbs, “Demis Hassabis: 15 Facts about the DeepMind Technologies Founder,” Guardian, January 28, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2014/jan/28/demis-hassabis-15-facts-deepmind-technologies-founder-google; “Breakthrough of the Year: The Runners-Up,” Science 318, no. 5858 (2007): 1844–49, doi:10.1126/science.318.5858.1844a.

By the end of 2012: Jackson, “Foxconn Will Replace Workers.” Gou hopes to have the first: Robert Skidelsky, “Rise of the Robots: What Will the Future of Work Look Like?” Guardian, February 19, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/feb/19/rise-of-robots-future-of-work. As he explained in a 2012 New York Times article: John Markoff, “Skilled Work, without the Worker,” New York Times, August 19, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/business/new-wave-of-adept-robots-is-changing-global-industry.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. But wages in China: Keith Bradsher, “Even as Wages Rise, China Exports Grow,” New York Times, January 10, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/10/business/international/chinese-exports-withstand-rising-labor-costs.html?


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The Best Business Writing 2013 by Dean Starkman

Alvin Toffler, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, computer vision, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fixed income, fulfillment center, full employment, Future Shock, gamification, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, late fees, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Parag Khanna, Pareto efficiency, price stability, proprietary trading, Ray Kurzweil, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, tail risk, technological determinism, the payments system, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, wage slave, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y2K, zero-sum game

Eventually, Willow will ship out on huge spools, like movie reels, each holding up to 500 feet of glass. That is, once someone places an order. For now, rolls of glass sit on the Harrodsburg factory floor, a solution waiting for the right problem to arise. John Markoff 26. Skilled Work, Without the Worker New York Times The robots are coming for the last of the manufacturing jobs, as John Markoff writes in this fascinating look at the future of building things. This isn’t science fiction or futurism. It’s already happening, and it raises critical questions for society as a whole. At Tesla, the assembly-line workers have “a slightly menacing ‘Terminator’ quality” as the ten-foot-tall robots weld, rivet, and install parts.

Death Takes a Policy: How a Lawyer Exploited the Fine Print and Found Himself Facing Federal Charges Jake Bernstein ProPublica Part VIII. Brave New World 24. How Companies Learn Your Secrets Charles Duhigg New York Times Magazine 25. Glass Works: How Corning Created the Ultrathin, Ultrastrong Material of the Future Bryan Gardiner Wired 26. Skilled Work, Without the Worker John Markoff New York Times 27.I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave Mac McClelland Mother Jones 28. In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad Charles Duhigg and David Barboza New York Times 29. How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking Mat Honan Wired Permissions List of Contributors Introduction Dean Starkman Compiling the Best Business Writing series each year reliably brings the pleasures of the eclectic and unexpected.

The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited. www.nytimes.com. “Glass Works: How Corning Created the Ultrathin, Ultrastrong Material of the Future.” Copyright © 2012 Condé Nast. All Rights Reserved. Article by Bryan Gardiner originally published in Wired. Reprinted by permission “Skilled Work, Without the Worker,” by John Markoff, from the New York Times, August 19, 2012. © 2012 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited. www.nytimes.com.


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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

Breaking Defense, March 11, 2016, http://breakingdefense.com/2016/03/navy-hits-gas-on-flying-gas-truck-cbars-will-it-be-armed/. 62 a range of only 67 nautical miles: 67 nautical miles equals 124 kilometers. 62 can fly up to 500 nautical miles: 500 nautical miles equals 930 kilometers. 63 three New York Times articles: John Markoff, “Fearing Bombs That Can Pick Whom to Kill,” New York Times, November 11, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/12/science/weapons-directed-by-robots-not-humans-raise-ethical-questions.html?_r=0. John Markoff, “Report Cites Dangers of Autonomous Weapons,” New York Times, February 26, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/29/technology/report-cites-dangers-of-autonomous-weapons.html. John Markoff, “Arms Control Groups Urge Human Control of Robot Weaponry,” New York Times, April 11, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/12/technology/arms-control-groups-urge-human-control-of-robot-weaponry.html. 63 “artificial intelligence outside human control”: Markoff, “Fearing Bombs That Can Pick Whom to Kill.” 63 “an autonomous weapons arms race”: Ibid. 63 “LRASM employed precision routing and guidance”: Lockheed Martin, “Long Range Anti-Ship Missile,” http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/LRASM/overview.html (accessed on May 15, 2017). 63 Lockheed’s description of LRASM: Lockheed Martin, “Long Range Anti-Ship Missile,” as of October 20, 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/20141020231650/http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/LRASM.html. 64 “The semi-autonomous guidance capability gets LRASM”: Lockheed Martin, “Long Range Anti-Ship Missile,” as of December 16, 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/20141216100706/http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/LRASM.html. 64 video online that explains LRASM’s functionality: The video is no longer available on the Lockheed Martin website.

Kushner, imeopro.com/s42012/Stuxnet.t 214 Nearly 60 percent of Stuxnet infections: Falliere et al., “W32.Stuxnet Dossier,” 5–7. Kim Zetter, “An Unprecedented Look at Stuxnet, the World’s First Digital Weapon,” WIRED, November 3, 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/11/countdown-to-zero-day-stuxnet/. 214 sharp decline in the number of centrifuges: John Markoff and David E. Sanger, “In a Computer Worm, a Possible Biblical Clue,” New York Times, September 24, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/world/middleeast/30worm.html. 214 Security specialists have further speculated: Ibid. Gross, “A Declaration of Cyber War.” 215 “While attackers could control Stuxnet”: Falliere et al., “W32.Stuxnet Dossier,” 3. 215 “collateral damage”: Ibid, 7. 215 spread via USB to only three other machines: Ibid, 10. 215 self-terminate date: Ibid, 18. 215 Some experts saw these features as further evidence: Gross, “A Declaration of Cyber War.” 215 “open-source weapon”: Patrick Clair, “Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus,” video, 2011, https://vimeo.com/25118844. 215 blueprint for cyber-weapons to come: Josh Homan, Sean McBride, and Rob Caldwell, “IRONGATE ICS Malware: Nothing to See Here . . .

Horvitz, “Viewpoint Rise of Concerns about AI: Reflections and Directions,” Communications of the ACM 58, no. 10 (October 2015): 38–40, http://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~tgd/publications/dietterich-horvitz-rise-of-concerns-about-ai-reflections-and-directions-CACM_Oct_2015-VP.pdf. 243 “The increasing abilities of AI”: Tom Dietterich, interview, April 27, 2016. 244 “robust to adversarial attack”: Ibid. 244 “The human should be taking the actions”: Ibid. 244 “The whole goal in military doctrine”: Ibid. 245 AGI as “dangerous”: Bob Work, interview, June 22, 2016. 245 more Iron Man than Terminator: Sydney J. Freedburg Jr., “Iron Man, Not Terminator: The Pentagon’s Sci-Fi Inspirations,” Breaking Defense, May 3, 2016, http://breakingdefense.com/2016/05/iron-man-not-terminator-the-pentagons-sci-fi-inspirations/. Matthew Rosenberg and John Markoff, “The Pentagon’s ‘Terminator Conundrum’: Robots That Could Kill on Their Own,” New York Times, October 25, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/us/pentagon-artificial-intelligence-terminator.html. 245 “impose obligations on persons”: Office of General Counsel, Department of Defense, “Department of Defense Law of War Manual,” June 2015, https://www.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/law_war_manual15.pdf, 330. 245 ”the ultimate goal of AI”: “The ultimate goal of AI (which we are very far from achieving) is to build a person, or, more humbly, an animal.”


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Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

or a missile: Dan Froomkin, “Deciphering Encryption,” Washington Post, May 8, 1998, accessed August 19, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/encryption/encryption.htm. First Amendment rights: John Markoff, “Judge Rules against U.S. in Encryption Case,” New York Times, December 19, 1996, https://www.nytimes.com/1996/12/19/business/judge-rules-against-us-in-encryption-case.html; “Bernstein v. US Department of Justice,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, accessed August 19, 2018, https://www.eff.org/cases/bernstein-v-us-dept-justice. without explaining why: John Markoff, “Data-Secrecy Export Case Dropped by U.S.,” New York Times, January 12, 1996, accessed October 3, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/12/business/data-secrecy-export-case-dropped-by-us.html.

Light, “When Computers Were Women,” Technology and Culture 40, no. 3 (July 1999): 455–83. hired back both times: Charles E. Molnar and Wesley A. Clark, “Development of the LINC,” in A History of Medical Informatics, eds. Bruce I. Blum and Karen A. Duncan (New York: ACM Press, 1990), 119–38. or laboratory room: John Markoff, “Wesley A. Clark, Who Designed First Personal Computer, Dies at 88,” New York Times, February 27, 2016, accessed August 16, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/business/wesley-a-clark-made-computing-personal-dies-at-88.html. “conversational access” to the LINC: Mary Allen Wilkes, “Conversational Access to a 2048-Word Machine,” Communications of the ACM 13, no. 7 (July 1970): 407–14.

when the NSA itself was hacked: Lily Hay Newman, “The Leaked NSA Spy Tool That Hacked the World,” Wired, May 7, 2018, accessed August 19, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/eternalblue-leaked-nsa-spy-tool-hacked-world. CHAPTER 9: CUCUMBERS, SKYNET, AND RISE OF THE AI AlphaGo dominated, 4 to 1: John Markoff, “Alphabet Program Beats the European Human Go Champion,” New York Times, January 27, 2016, accessed August 19, 2018, https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/01/27/alphabet-program-beats-the-european-human-go-champion; Bloomberg News, “How You Beat One of the Best Go Players in the World? Use Google,” Washington Post, March 14, 2016, accessed August 19, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/how-you-beat-one-of-the-best-go-players-in-the-world-use-google/2016/03/14/1efd1176-e6fc-11e5-b0fd-073d5930a7b7_story.html.


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The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Kessler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, c2.com, call centre, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Firefox, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, illegal immigration, index card, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, license plate recognition, loose coupling, mail merge, Morris worm, national security letter, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, post-materialism, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert X Cringely, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Times Bits Blog, Saul Hansell, Steve Jobs Girds for the Long iPhone War, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/steve-jobs-girds-for-the-long-iphone-war/ (Sept. 27, 2007, 19:01); Jane Wake-field, Apple iPhone Warning Proves True, BBC NEWS, Sept. 28, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7017660.stm. 6. See John Markoff, Steve Jobs Walks the Tightrope Again, N.Y. TIMES, Jan. 12, 2007, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/12/technology/12apple.html. 7. Posting of Ryan Block to Engadget, A Lunchtime Chat with Bill Gates, http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/08/a-lunchtime-chat-with-bill-gates-at-ces/ (Jan. 8, 2007, 14:01).

., James Bone, Computer Virus at Pentagon, THE TIMES (LONDON), NOV. 5, 1989; Philip J. Hilts, ‘Virus’ Hits Vast Computer Network; Thousands of Terminals Shut Down to Halt Malicious Program, WASH. POST, NOV. 4, 1988, at A1; Tom Hundley, Computer Virus Attack Called More Persistent Than Brilliant, CHI. TRIE.., Nov. 7, 1988, at C4; John Markoff, Author of Computer ‘Virus’ is Son of N.S.A. Expert on Data Security, N.Y. TIMES, NOV. 5, 1988, § 1, at 1. 12. Ted Eisenberg et al., The Cornell Commission: On Morris and the Worm, 32 COMM. OF the ACM 706, 707 (1989), available at http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=63526.63530 (publishing findings and dispelling myths about Morris and the worm). 13.

This all-in-one approach does carry some legal risks: for example, in a recent antitrust case, Microsoft was accused of putting a thumb on the scale for its own browser, not by designing its system to exclude new code, but by exploiting the power of system default options. See United States v. Microsoft Corp., 159 F.R.D. 318, 321 (D.D.C. 1995) (discussing the antitrust investigation against Microsoft and subsequent charges). 5. See John Markoff, Apple Earnings Bolstered by iPod and Notebook Sales, NY. TIMES, July 20, 2006, at C3 (reporting Apple’s 4.6 percent share of the U.S. PC market). 6. See DONALD A. NORMAN, THE INVISIBLE COMPUTER 52 (1998) (arguing that the usefulness of a tool for a particular task is the key virtue of “information appliances”).


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Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon by Kim Zetter

air gap, Ayatollah Khomeini, Brian Krebs, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Doomsday Clock, drone strike, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, false flag, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Earth, information retrieval, information security, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, pre–internet, RAND corporation, rolling blackouts, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, Stuxnet, Timothy McVeigh, two and twenty, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day

But the June 2009 version of Stuxnet was unleashed June 22, and once it found itself on the right PLC, it took thirteen days for the sabotage to begin. So unless an earlier version of Stuxnet or something else caused an accident at Natanz, the timing didn’t match Aghazadeh’s resignation. 14 Author interview, September 2010. 15 John Markoff, “A Silent Attack, but Not a Subtle One,” New York Times, September 26, 2010. 16 Laurent Maillard, “Iran Denies Nuclear Plant Computers Hit by Worm,” Agence France-Presse, September 26, 2010, available at iranfocus.com/en/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=21820. 17 David E. Sanger, “Iran Fights Malware Attacking Computers,” New York Times, September 25, 2010. 18 Six months later, a report from the Iranian Passive Defense Organization, a military organization chaired by Revolutionary Guard General Gholam-Reza Jalali, which is responsible for defending Iran’s nuclear facilities, contradicted these statements.

A Washington Post story says the plan never came to fruition. “We went through the drill of figuring out how we would do some of these cyber things if we were to do them,” one senior military officer told the paper. “But we never went ahead with any.” Graham, “Military Grappling with Rules for Cyber.” 26 John Markoff and H. Sanker, “Halted ’03 Iraq Plan Illustrates US Fear of Cyberwar Risk,” New York Times, August 1, 2009. According to Richard Clarke, it was the secretary of treasury who vetoed it. See Richard Clarke and Robert Knake, Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It (New York: Ecco, 2010), 202–3.

See “How West Infiltrated Iran’s Nuclear Program, Ex-Top Nuclear Official Explains,” Iran’s View, March 28, 2014, www.iransview.com/west-infiltrated-irans-nuclear-program-ex-top-nuclear-official-explains/1451. 15 Yong and Worth, “Bombings Hit Atomic Experts in Iran Streets.” 16 Dagan was reportedly pushed out by Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak because he opposed an air strike against Iran. 17 Yong and Worth, “Bombings Hit Atomic Experts in Iran Streets.” 18 William J. Broad, John Markoff, and David E. Sanger, “Israeli Test on Worm Called Crucial in Iran Nuclear Delay,” New York Times, January 15, 2011. 19 Ibid. CHAPTER 14 SON OF STUXNET As spring arrived in 2011, the story of Stuxnet seemed to be winding down. Symantec had resolved the mystery of the devices the digital weapon attacked, Albright had made the final connection between Stuxnet and the centrifuges at Natanz, and although the US government still hadn’t made a formal admission of responsibility for the attack, the New York Times had confirmed what everyone suspected—that the United States and Israel were behind it.


pages: 397 words: 110,222

Habeas Data: Privacy vs. The Rise of Surveillance Tech by Cyrus Farivar

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, call centre, citizen journalism, cloud computing, computer age, connected car, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Golden Gate Park, information security, John Markoff, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lock screen, Lyft, national security letter, Occupy movement, operational security, optical character recognition, Port of Oakland, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech worker, The Hackers Conference, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, you are the product, Zimmermann PGP

Available at: https://books.google.com/​books?id=-_HA2pUErI8C&pg=PT94&dq=%22rsa+mailsafe%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjDr​PHLhMPUAhWV8oMKHdVwBhoQ6AEIMTAC#v=onepage&q=%22rsa%20mailsafe%22&f=false. Around that same time, Phil Zimmerman: Steven Levy, Crypto (Penguin Books, 2002), p. 191. Pretty Good Privacy: John Markoff, “Move on Unscrambling Of Messages Is Assailed,” The New York Times, April 17, 1991. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/​1991/​04/​17/​business/​move-on-unscrambling-of-messages-is-assailed.html. “to obtain the plaintext contents”: Joseph Biden, “All Information (Except Text) for S.266 - Comprehensive Counter-Terrorism Act of 1991,” January 24, 1991. https://www.congress.gov/​bill/​102nd-congress/​senate-bill/​266/​all-info.

“to obtain the plaintext contents”: Joseph Biden, “All Information (Except Text) for S.266 - Comprehensive Counter-Terrorism Act of 1991,” January 24, 1991. https://www.congress.gov/​bill/​102nd-congress/​senate-bill/​266/​all-info. This notion ended up becoming: Office of the Press Secretary, “Statement by the Press Secretary,” April 16, 1993. Available at: http://cd.textfiles.com/​hackersencyc/​PC/​CRYPTO/​CLIPPER.TXT. Clipper chip would not: John Markoff, “Big Brother and the Computer Age,” The New York Times, May 6, 1993. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/​1993/​05/​06/​business/​big-brother-and-the-computer-age.html. Many of them—notably FBI: Levy, p. 245. In 1995, Kallstrom: James C. McKinley, Jr., “Wiretap Expert Named to Head New York City Office of F.B.I.,” The New York Times, February 17, 1995.

Berman, Executive Director Electronic Frontier Foundation before the Committee on Science, Space and Technology Subcommittee on Technology, Environment and Aviation U.S. House of Representatives Hearing on Communications and Computer Surveillance, Privacy and Security, May 3, 1993. Available at: https://totseans.com/​totse/​en/​zines/​cud_a/​cud644.html. Not a month later, a young AT&T: John Markoff, “Flaw Discovered in Plan for Federal Wiretapping,” The New York Times, June 2, 1994. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/​1994/​06/​02/​us/​flaw-discovered-in-federal-plan-for-wiretapping.html. one of Clipper chip’s critical flaws: Matt Blaze’s Clipper attack—details, sci. crypt, May 3, 1994.


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The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics by Ben Buchanan

active measures, air gap, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nate Silver, operational security, post-truth, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, technoutopianism, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, zero day

For a much more detailed technical discussion of Fanny and related pieces of malicious code, see Kaspersky Lab, “A Fanny Equation”; Kaspersky Lab, “Equation: The Death Star of Malware Galaxy,” February 16, 2015; Kaspersky Lab, “Equation Group: Questions and Answers,” February 2015. 9. For the first reporting of this test, see William Broad, John Markoff, and David Sanger, “Israeli Test on Worm Called Crucial in Iran Nuclear Delay,” New York Times, January 15, 2011. 10. Sanger, Confront and Conceal, 197. 11. For the first reporting of this order, see Sanger, Confront and Conceal, ch. 8. 12. For a good discussion of this propagation, see Zetter, Countdown to Zero Day, 91.

As part of his response, that analyst referenced a conversation with the State Department’s special envoy for North Korean human rights issues, saying the envoy was not particularly worried about the threat because it sounded like “typical North Korean bullying.” Seal, “An Exclusive Look at Sony’s Hacking Saga.” 5. Seth Rogen (@Sethrogen), tweet, June 25, 2014, 10:48 AM. 6. Sanger, The Perfect Weapon, 129. 7. For contemporaneous coverage of two previous North Korean cyber operations, see Choe Sang-Hun and John Markoff, “Cyberattacks Jam Government and Commercial Web Sites in U.S. And South Korea,” New York Times, July 8, 2009; and Choe Sang-Hun, “Computer Networks in South Korea Are Paralyzed in Cyberattacks,” New York Times, March 20, 2013. For technical analysis, see Sergei Shevchenko, “Two Bytes to $951m,” BAE Systems Threat Research Blog, April 25, 2016; Kate Kochetkova, “What Is Known About the Lazarus Group: Sony Hack, Military Espionage, Attacks on Korean Banks and Other Crimes,” Kaspersky Daily, February 24, 2016; “Operation Blockbuster,” Novetta, 2016. 8.

“The World Factbook: Korea, North,” Central Intelligence Agency, continually updated at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/kn.html, accessed September 15, 2017. See also Michelle Nichols, “North Korea Took $2 Billion in Cyberattacks to Fund Weapons Program: U.N. Report,” Reuters, August 5, 2019. 8. John Markoff and Thom Shanker, “Halted ’03 Iraq Plan Illustrates U.S. Fear of Cyberwar Risk,” New York Times, August 1, 2009. 9. Richard A. Clarke, Michael J. Morell, Geoffrey R. Stone, Cass R. Sunstein, and Peter Swire, “Liberty and Security in a Changing World,” President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, report, December 12, 2013, 221. 10.


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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

His dream was a future where workers would sit at personal computers connecting and collaborating. At the same time as many social hierarchies were being challenged, the technical architectures and hardware that would become the internet were taking shape. The links between the 1960s Californian freak scene and the pioneering days of early personal computing are chronicled in John Markoff’s 2005 book What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (even the book’s title is taken from a hoary old Jefferson Airplane track). In it, Markoff revealed that the world’s first online transaction was a drug deal: ‘In 1971 or 1972, Stanford students using Arpanet accounts at SAIL engaged in a commercial transaction with their counterparts at MIT.

Shulgin’s influence and experience bridges the gaps between the early 1950s intellectual explorers and psychiatric treatment pioneers, the 1960s hippy counterculture, 1970s and 1980s underground psychiatry, the 1980s explosion of Ecstasy as a recreational drug, the early internet drug scene of the 1990s and early 2000s – right into the chaotic twenty-first-century situation. What was to complicate the picture was a development that, on reflection, was entirely predictable. As the twentieth century ended, the web wasn’t just a place where you could talk about drugs – it was about to become a place where you could buy them. Notes 1. John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (Penguin, 2005), p. 109 2. Mylon Stolaroff, Thanatos to Eros: 35 Years of Psychedelic Exploration: Ethnomedicine and the Study of Consciousness (Thaneros Pr, 1994) 3. http://kk.org/ct2/2008/09/the-whole-earth-blogalog.php 4.

The Face, August 1990; http://testpressing.org/2010/07/the-face-europe-a-ravers-guide-august-1990/ 18. www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/subnational-health3/deaths-related-to-drug-poisoning/2010/stb-deaths-related-to-drug-poisoning-2010.html 19. Simon Reynolds, Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984 (Faber and Faber, 2006), p. xvi Notes 1. John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (Penguin, 2005), p. 109 2. Mylon Stolaroff, Thanatos to Eros: 35 Years of Psychedelic Exploration: Ethnomedicine and the Study of Consciousness (Thaneros Pr, 1994) 3. http://kk.org/ct2/2008/09/the-whole-earth-blogalog.php 4.


pages: 431 words: 129,071

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us by Will Storr

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, bitcoin, classic study, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gamification, gig economy, greed is good, intentional community, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Mother of all demos, Nixon shock, Peter Thiel, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QWERTY keyboard, Rainbow Mansion, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech bro, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, twin studies, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

A video of Engelbart’s presentation is widely available online. The account I’ve given in the text has been lightly edited for sense and concision. audience considered Engelbart a ‘crackpot’: ‘The Mother of All Demos – 150 years ahead of its time’, Cade Metz, Register, 11 December 2008. John Markoff has called ‘a complete vision of the information age’: What the Dormouse Said, John Markoff (Penguin, 2005), p. 9. In 1968, the year of the demo, the Institute’s co-founder Michael Murphy had written: ‘Esalen: Where Man Confronts Himself’, Michael Murphy, Stanford Alumni Almanac, May 1968. with one 1985 Esquire story reporting ‘scientists’: ‘Encounters at the Mind’s Edge’, George Leonard, Esquire, June 1985.

He spent that night preoccupied with finding a new project to aim his life at. He knew he wanted to change the world. But how? Could he invent something that would help humans cope better with the dizzying complexity of the future? It all came to him, then, in a torrent of fabulous insight that Silicon Valley historian John Markoff has called ‘a complete vision of the information age’. In his vision, he saw a man sitting at a screen that was attached to a computer and there were characters on the screen and the computer would be a kind of portal to all the information you’d need to do your work, and it would be wired to other computers, so you could communicate with each other, and your computer would work for you, organizing and aiding your working life.

It doesn’t necessarily follow that because she’s influential, she’d automatically agree with the ideas and works of all the people she’s influenced. In fact, as we’re talking about Rand, this seems staggeringly unlikely. Book Six: The Digital Self A man, Doug Engelbart, appearing in a headset: My account of the story of Doug Engelbart, ARC, EST and Stewart Brand was mostly sourced from: What the Dormouse Said, John Markoff (Penguin, 2005); From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner (University of Chicago Press, 2006); The Network Revolution, Jacques Vallee (Penguin, 1982); Bootstrapping, Thierry Bardini (Stanford University Press, 2000); ‘Chronicle of the Death of a Laboratory: Douglas Engelbart and the Failure of the Knowledge Workshop’, Thierry Bardini and Michael Friedewald, History of Technology (2003), 23, pp. 191–212; ‘Douglas Engelbart’s lasting legacy’, Tia O’Brien, Mercury News, 3 March 2013.


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

Now all Blaze had to do was get an okay from his employer—who had millions of dollars riding on its Clipper phones. Though there were some who wanted to bury the paper, eventually Blaze managed to convince his bosses that it would be impossible to keep his findings secret, so they shouldn’t even try. In any case, John Markoff of the New York Times had already gotten wind of the work. Blaze got permission to send him a draft, so that whatever story ran would be accurate. Markoff called back for some clarification and a few hours later called back again and asked Blaze a strange question: how newsworthy did he consider the story?

Blakley are generally granted shared credit for the innovation. 166 Mafia-owned store A. Shamir, lecture at Securicom ’89, quoted in Schneier’s Applied Cryptography, p. 92. 166 Landau “Zero Knowledge and the Department of Defense,” Notices of the American Mathematical Society (Special Article Series), Vol. 35, No. 1 (1988), pp. 5–12. 166 Merkle John Markoff, “Paper on Codes Is Sent Despite U.S. Objections,” New York Times, August 9, 1989. 177 NIST, “A Proposed Federal Information Processing Standard for the Digital Signature Standard (DSS),” Federal Register, Vo. 56, August 1991, p. 169. 178 white flag NIST memo, “Twenty-third Meeting of the NIST/NSA Technical Working Group,” March 18, 1991. 179 the wrong agency Diffie, Privacy on the Line, p. 74. 181 “What crypto policy” Rivest’s remarks were made at the 1992 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference. 182 National Security Decision Directive Background on NSDD 145 can be found in Diffie’s Privacy on the Line, Schneier and Banisar’s The Electronic Privacy Papers, and Tom Athanasiou, “Encryption: Technology, Privacy, and National Security,” Technology Review, August–September 1986. 183 orchestrated Clinton Brooks, Memo, April 28, 1992. 183 Memorandum of Understanding The MOU between the directors of NIST and the NSA “concerning the implementation of Public Law 100-235” is reprinted in Schneier and Banisar’s The Electronic Privacy Papers, pp. 401–4. 183 General Accounting Office “Communications Privacy: Federal Policy and Actions,” GAO/OSI-92-2-3 (November 1993). 184 hearings U.S.

Davis, “Use of Clipper Chip in AT&T TSD 3600 During Phase of Production,” memo to Sessions, December 23, 1992. 240 Encryption, Law Enforcement Briefing document sent to Tenet, February 19, 1993. 244 slide show “Telecommunications Overview” prepared by the FBI’s Advanced Telephony Unit. 248 Barlow “Jackboots on the Infobahn,” reprinted in Ludlow’s High Noon on the Electronic Frontier, pp. 207–13. 249 Denning See Steven Levy, “Clipper Chick,” Wired, September 1996. 249 Pilgrim maiden Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown, p. 299. 249 important step “Statement by the Press Secretary,” The White House, April 16, 1993. 250 Times article John Markoff, “New Communication System Stirs Talk of Privacy vs. Eavesdropping,” April 16, 1993. 252 It’s not America Steven Levy, “Uncle Sam.” 252 Safire “Sink the Clipper,” New York Times, February 4, 1994. 253 lion’s den Baker’s speech was adapted as “Don’t Worry Be Happy: Why Clipper Is Good for You,” in Wired, June 1994. 253 Skipjack E.


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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

The essay was republished, in an abridged form, a month after the atom bomb dropped. It is widely interpreted as sketching a path for new collaborations of scientists from different disciplines in peacetime. But it is most notable for the general-purpose information storage and retrieval machine it proposes, the “memex”. According to John Markoff, author of What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counter-culture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, at around about the time America’s atom bomb destroyed the city of Hiroshima – killing 80,000 of its residents, maiming tens of thousands more, and ending Japan’s involvement in World War II – Doug Engelbart was sailing out of San Francisco harbour on his way to do his military service in the Philippines.

But outside of Chaos, your average 21st-century computer user will be more familiar with the computer components that Doug Engelbart troubled himself over than with anything Vannevar Bush wrote about. Ask a child to draw a computer and he will draw a keyboard, screen, mouse and – possibly – a box sitting next to it. Yet the box is the computer – the rest of it is just input and output devices. Engelbart was not an acid head, but according to John Markoff he, like Brand, had taken part in the IFAS experiments, with mixed results. His first dose of LSD left the reclusive engineer catatonic. In a later experiment, a weaker, second dose was administered before participants, including Engelbart, were asked to work on a selection of engineering problems.


pages: 288 words: 86,995

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything by Martin Ford

AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, call centre, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Googley, GPT-3, high-speed rail, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Ocado, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, post scarcity, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

This “scaling” strategy has been explicit since the 2012 ImageNet competition that set off the deep learning revolution. In November of that year, a front-page New York Times article was instrumental in bringing awareness of deep learning technology to the broader public sphere. The article, written by reporter John Markoff, ends with a quote from Geoff Hinton: “The point about this approach is that it scales beautifully. Basically you just need to keep making it bigger and faster, and it will get better. There’s no looking back now.”9 There is increasing evidence, however, that this primary engine of progress is beginning to sputter out.

Ford, Interview with Geoffrey Hinton, in Architects of Intelligence, p. 77. 14. Email from Jürgen Schmidhuber to Martin Ford, January 28, 2019. 15. Jürgen Schmidhuber, “Critique of paper by ‘Deep Learning Conspiracy’ (Nature 521 p 436),” June 2015, people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning-conspiracy.html. 16. John Markoff, “When A.I. matures, it may call Jürgen Schmidhuber ‘Dad,’” New York Times, November 27, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/11/27/technology/artificial-intelligence-pioneer-jurgen-schmidhuber-overlooked.html. 17. Robert Triggs, “What being an ‘AI first’ company means for Google,” Android Authority, November 8, 2017, www.androidauthority.com/google-ai-first-812335/. 18.

David Silver and Demis Hassabis, “AlphaGo: Mastering the ancient game of Go with machine learning,” Google AI Blog, January 27, 2016, ai.googleblog.com/2016/01/alphago-mastering-ancient-game-of-go.html. 8. Matt Schiavenza, “China’s ‘Sputnik Moment’ and the Sino-American battle for AI supremacy,” Asia Society Blog, September 25, 2018, asiasociety.org/blog/asia/chinas-sputnik-moment-and-sino-american-battle-ai-supremacy. 9. John Markoff, “Scientists see promise in deep-learning programs,” New York Times, November 23, 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/11/24/science/scientists-see-advances-in-deep-learning-a-part-of-artificial-intelligence.html. 10. Dario Amodei and Danny Hernandez, “AI and Compute,” OpenAI Blog, May 16, 2018, openai.com/blog/ai-and-compute/. 11.


pages: 525 words: 116,295

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives by Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen

access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Andy Rubin, anti-communist, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, borderless world, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, false flag, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, hive mind, income inequality, information security, information trail, invention of the printing press, job automation, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Bork, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Susan Wojcicki, The Wisdom of Crowds, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, young professional, zero day

NATO and European Commission experts were unable to find evidence: “Estonia Has No Evidence of Kremlin Involvement in Cyber Attacks,” RIA Novosti (Moscow), June 9, 2007, http://en.rian.ru/world/20070906/76959190.html. websites for the Georgian military and government were brought down: John Markoff, “Georgia Takes a Beating in the Cyberwar with Russia,” Bits (blog), New York Times, August 11, 2008, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/11/georgia-takes-a-beating-in-the-cyberwar-with-russia/; John Markoff, “Before the Gunfire, Cyberattacks,” New York Times, August 12, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/13/technology/13cyber.html. Russian hackers targeted the Internet providers in Kyrgyzstan: Gregg Keizer, “Russian ‘Cybermilitia’ Knocks Kyrgyzstan Offline,” Computerworld, January 28, 2009, http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9126947/Russian_cybermilitia_knocks_Kyrgyzstan_offline.

DDoS attacks crippled major government websites: Kim Zetter, “Lawmaker Wants ‘Show of Force’ Against North Korea for Website Attacks,” Wired, July 10, 2009, http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/07/show-of-force/. suggested that the network of attacking computers, or botnet, began in North Korea: Choe Sang-Hun and John Markoff, “Cyberattacks Jam Government and Commercial Web Sites in U.S. and South Korea,” New York Times, July 9, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/technology/10cyber.html?_r=1; Associated Press (AP), “U.S. Officials Eye N. Korea in Cyberattack,” USA Today, July 9, 2009, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2009-07-08-hacking-washington-nkorea_N.htm.

mobile-phone service was also suspended: Associated Press (AP), “Vodafone: Egypt Ordered Cell Phone Service Stopped,” Huffington Post, January 28, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/28/vodafone-egypt-service-dropped_n_815493.html. Vodafone Egypt, issued a statement that morning: “Statements—Vodafone Egypt,” Vodafone, see January 28, 2011, http://www.vodafone.com/content/index/media/press_statements/statement_on_egypt.html. fiber-optic cables housed in one building in Cairo: James Glanz and John Markoff, “Egypt Leaders Found ‘Off’ Switch for Internet,” New York Times, February 15, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/technology/16internet.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. through its state-owned company Telecom Egypt, physically cut their service: Ibid. It was a move unprecedented in recent history: Parmy Olson, “Egypt Goes Dark, Cuts Off Internet and Mobile Networks,” Forbes, January 28, 2011, http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2011/01/28/egypt-goes-dark/.


pages: 368 words: 96,825

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Boston Dynamics, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, gravity well, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Jono Bacon, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, microbiome, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, rolodex, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart grid, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, superconnector, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Turing test, urban renewal, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, web application, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

., “ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks,” http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~fritz/absps/imagenet.pdf. 34 John Markoff, “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced By Cheaper Software,” New York Times, March 4, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html?pagewanted=all. 35 David Schatsky and Vikram Mahidhar, “Intelligent automation: A new era of innovation,” Deloitte University Press, January 22, 2014, http://dupress.com/articles/intelligent-automation-a-new-era-of-innovation/. 36 John Markoff, “Computer Wins on ‘Jeopardy!’: Trivial, It’s Not,” New York Times, February 16, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/science/17jeopardy-watson.html?

For again the algorithms outperformed people.33 Similar progress is showing up in reading. Today, there are AIs that can accurately and consistently decipher everything from high school student essays to complicated tax forms far faster than humans. Take legal documents, a linguistic quagmire if ever there was one. Yet, as John Markoff wrote in a 2011 article for the New York Times:34 “Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, ‘e-discovery’ software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. . . . Some programs go beyond just finding documents with relevant terms at computer speeds. They can extract relevant concepts—like documents relevant to social protest in the Middle East—even in the absence of specific terms, and deduce patterns of behavior that would have eluded lawyers examining millions of documents.”


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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

An addendum by Bill Kincaid (www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/ popup-sjstory.html) describes the origin of Soundjam. 54 Anthony Michael Fadell: Tony Fadell's now-dark Web site provided background, as did Pamela Kruger and Katherine Miezknowski, "Stop the Fight," Fast Company, September 1998; Stephen Roskoff, "U-M Students: They're Bullish on Business," Michigan Alumnus, November-December 1989; and John Markoff, "Oh, Yeah, He Also Sells Computers," The New York Times, April 25,2004. 64 PortalPlayer, Pixo: Besides personal interviews, my account of the iPod's outside suppliers drew on Erik Sherman, "Inside the Apple iPod Design Triumph," Electronics Design Chain, Summer 2002; Mathew Yi, Notes "Little Known Startup Was Behind iPod's Easy-to-use Interface," San Francisco Chronicle, August 16,2004; and John H.

Notes 201 Mac team: I addressed the dynamics of Jobs and the Mac team in Insanely Great: The Story of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything (New York: Viking, 1994). 214 "Style is nice": Colleen Ryan was interviewed by my Newsweek colleague Brad Stone. 216 Sony: In addition to several personal interviews with Howard Stringer and other Sony executives, my discussion of Sony was informed by Phred Dvorak, "At Sony, Rivalries Were Encouraged; Then Came iPod," The Wall Street Journal, June 29, 2005; and Frank Rose, "The Civil War Inside Sony," Wired, February 2003. 218 Neistat: My researcher Jodi Mardesch interviewed the Neistat brothers. You can view the movie on the Neistat Web site http://www.ipods dirtysecret.com. 221 The iPod Economy: Damon Darlin, "Add-ons Have Become a Billion-Dollar Bonanza," The New York Times, February 3,2006. 226 "Michael Dell wasn't perfect at predicting the future": John Markoff, "Michael Dell Should Eat His Words, Apple Chief Suggests," The New York Times, January 16,2006. Podcast 230 iPod-based tour commentaries: Hannah Karp, "Hearing the Sights," The Wall Street Journal, April 21,2006. 231 ShasPod: My researcher Jodi Mardesch interviewed Shmidman. I also consulted Alex Mindlin, "2000 Talmud Tapes, or One Loaded iPod," The New York Times, March 17,2005. 238 Think Secret: Tom McNichol, "Think Belligerent," Wired, May 2005. 240 "Podcasting will shift": Doc Searls, "DIY Radio with Podcasting," Doc Searls'IT Garage, September 28,2004.

Victoria Wright did her usual terrific job of transcribing tapes (and this time, MP3 files). Kevin McCarthy and J. Gabriel Boylan painstakingly fact-checked the manuscript. Brooke Hammerling and Julie Panebianco helped with music industry connections. Thanks also to J. J. Jacobi, Carl Malamud, Bruce Schneier, and John MarkofF. My agent. Flip Brophy, not only supplied the usual good advice but the perfect place to work during crunch time. (Thanks also to everyone at Sterling Lord Literistic.) I'm happy that David Rosenthal of Simon & Schuster finally bought one of my books, and happier still to be edited by Bob Bender, who even kept his cool when I told him my idea about shuffling the book.


pages: 339 words: 88,732

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

Joseph Hooper, “DARPA’s Debacle in the Desert,” Popular Science, June 4, 2004, http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2004-06/darpa-grand-challenge-2004darpas-debacle-desert. 4. Mary Beth Griggs, “4 Questions About Google’s Self-Driving Car Crash,” Popular Mechanics, August 11, 2011, http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/news/indus try/4-questions-about-googles-self-driving-car-crash; John Markoff, “Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic,” New York Times, October 9, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html. 5. Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), p. 72. 6. Levy and Murnane, The New Division of Labor, p. 29. 7. “Siri Is Actually Incredibly Useful Now,” Gizmodo, accessed August 4, 2013, http://gizmodo.com/5917461/siri-is-better-now. 8.

Ning Xiang and Rendell Torres, “Architectural Acoustics and Signal Processing in Acoustics: Topical Meeting on Spatial and Binaural Evaluation of Performing Arts Spaces I: Measurement Techniques and Binaural and Interaural Modeling,” 2004, http://scita tion.aip.org/getpdf/servlet/GetPDFServlet?filetype=pdf&id=JASMAN000116000004. 11. As quoted in John Markoff, “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software,” New York Times, March 4, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. 12. “Spring Cleaning for Some of Our APIs,” The Official Google Code Blog, June 3, 2011, http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/05/spring-cleaning-for-some-of-our-apis.html. 13.

“Predicting Liability for Injury from Car Accidents,” Kaggle, 2013, http://www.kaggle.com/solutions/casestudies/allstate. 25. “Carlsberg Brewery Harnesses Design Innovation Using Affinnova,” Affinnova, http://www.affinnova.com/success-story/carlsberg-breweries/ (accessed August 6, 2013). Chapter 6 ARTIFICIAL AND HUMAN INTELLIGENCE IN THE SECOND MACHINE AGE 1. John Markoff, “Israeli Start-Up Gives Visually Impaired a Way to Read,” New York Times, June 3, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/04/science/israeli-start-up-gives-visually-impaired-a-way-to-read.html. 2. “Press Announcements – FDA Approves First Retinal Implant for Adults with Rare Genetic Eye Disease,” WebContent, February 14, 2013, http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm339824.htm. 3.


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The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement by David Graeber

Bretton Woods, British Empire, company town, corporate personhood, David Graeber, deindustrialization, dumpster diving, East Village, feminist movement, financial innovation, George Gilder, John Markoff, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, Lao Tzu, late fees, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, Occupy movement, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, planetary scale, plutocrats, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, working poor

If we want to explore the origins of those democratic sensibilities that caused ordinary New Yorkers to feel sympathetic to the idea of democratic rule in the first place, or even to find where people actually had direct, hands-on experience in collective decision making that might have influenced their sense of what democracy might actually be like, we not only have to look beyond the sitting rooms of the educated gentry. In fact, we soon find ourselves in places that might seem, at first, genuinely startling. In 1999, one of the leading contemporary historians of European democracy, John Markoff, published an essay called “Where and When Was Democracy Invented?” In it there appears the following passage: That leadership could derive from the consent of the led, rather than be bestowed by higher authority, would have been a likely experience of the crews of pirate vessels in the early modern Atlantic world.

Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 38. In ancient Greece, for instance, democracies tended to choose holders of executive positions by lot, from among a pool of volunteers, while election was considered the oligarchic approach. 8. See John Markoff, “Where and When Was Democracy Invented?,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no.4 (1991): 663–65. 9. Gouverneur Morris to [John] Penn, May 20, 1774, in Jared Sparks, The Life of Gouverneur Morris: With Selections from His Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers: Detailing Events in the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and in the Political History of the United States (Boston: Grey & Bowen, 1830), p. 25. 10.

Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, Athens on Trial (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 183. 14. Benjamin Rush, Medical Inquiries and Observations, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: J. Conrad, 1805), pp. 292–93. 15. Francis Dupuis-Déri, “History of the Word ‘Democracy’ in Canada and Québec: A Political Analysis of Rhetorical Strategies,” World Political Science Review, 6, no. 1 (2010): 3–4. 16. John Markoff, “Where and When Was Democracy Invented?,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, no. 41 (1999): 673. 17. As reconstructed by Marcus Rediker in Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004). 18. Ibid., p. 53. 19. Colin Calloway, New Worlds for All (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).


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AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, bike sharing, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Chrome, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, ImageNet competition, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, pattern recognition, pirate software, profit maximization, QR code, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, Solyndra, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

first software program: Kai-Fu Lee and Sanjoy Mahajan, “The Development of a World Class Othello Program,” Artificial Intelligence 43, no. 1 (April 1990): 21–36. to create Sphinx: Kai-Fu Lee, “On Large-Vocabulary Speaker-Independent Continuous Speech Recognition,” Speech Communication 7, no. 4 (December 1988): 375–379. profile in the New York Times: John Markoff, “Talking to Machines: Progress Is Speeded,” New York Times, July 6, 1988, https://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/06/business/business-technology-talking-to-machines-progress-is-speeded.html?mcubz=1. demolished the competition: ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2012, Full Results, http://image-net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2012/results.html.

“free is not a business model”: “Ebay Lectures Taobao That Free Is Not a Business Model,” South China Morning Post, October 21, 2005, http://www.scmp.com/node/521384. his autobiography, Disruptor: 周鸿祎, “颠覆者” (北京: 北京联合出版公司, 2017). Sinovation event in Menlo Park: Dr. Andrew Ng, Dr. Sebastian Thrun, and Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, “The Future of AI,” moderated by John Markoff, Sinovation Ventures, Menlo Park, CA, June 10, 2017, http://us.sinovationventures.com/blog/the-future-of-ai. book The Lean Startup: Eric Ries, The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses (New York: Crown Business, 2011). 3.

“historic achievement”: Allison Linn, “Historic Achievement: Microsoft Researchers Reach Human Parity in Conversational Speech Recognition,” The AI Blog, Microsoft, October 18, 2016, https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/historic-achievement-microsoft-researchers-reach-human-parity-conversational-speech-recognition/. Ng left Baidu: Andrew Ng, “Opening a New Chapter of My Work in AI,” Medium, March 21, 2017, https://medium.com/@andrewng/opening-a-new-chapter-of-my-work-in-ai-c6a4d1595d7b. proposed cutting funding: Paul Mozur and John Markoff, “Is China Outsmarting America in A.I.?” New York Times, May 27, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/27/technology/china-us-ai-artificial-intelligence.html?_r=0. “venture socialism”: “Capitalizing on ‘Venture Socialism,’” Washington Post, September 18, 2011, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/capitalizing-on-venture-socialism/2011/09/16/gIQAQ7sYdK_story.html?


The Deep Learning Revolution (The MIT Press) by Terrence J. Sejnowski

AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Conway's Game of Life, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, Henri Poincaré, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PageRank, pattern recognition, pneumatic tube, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Socratic dialogue, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

Deng, G. E. Dahl, A. Mohamed, N. Jaitly, A. Senior, et al., “Deep Neural Networks for Acoustic Modeling in Speech Recognition,” IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, 29, no. 6 (2012): 82–97. 18. S. Hochreiter and J. Schmidhuber, “Long Short-Term Memory,” Neural Computation 9, no. 8 (1997): 1735–1780. 19. John Markoff, “When A.I. Matures, It May Call Jürgen Schmidhuber ‘Dad.’” New York Times, November 27, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/27/ technology/artificial-intelligence-pioneer-jurgen-schmidhuber-overlooked.html. 20. K. Xu, J. L. Ba, K. Kiror, K. Cho, A. Courville, R. Slakhutdinov, R. Zemel, Y. Bengio, “Show, Attend and Tell: Neural Image Captions Generation with Visual Attention,” 2015, rev. 2016. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.03044.pdf. 21.

Connecting Interdisciplinary Research on Learning to Practice and Policy in Education) Shanghai, 1-6 March 2014 Summary Report. https://www.oecd.org/edu/ceri/International-Convention-on-the-Science-of -Learning-1-6-March-2014-Summary-Report.pdf. 27. See B. Bloom, “The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One Tutoring,” Educational Researcher 13, no. 6 (1984): 4–16. 28. John Markoff, “Virtual and Artificial, but 58,000 Want Course,” New York Times, August 15, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/16/science/16stanford .html. 29. One of my favorite letters was from a fifth-grade student: February 2, 2015 Dear Professors, I took my final exams and it was great. I am in grade five.

Johana Bhuiyan, “Ex-Google Sebastian Thrun Says That the Going Rate for SelfDriving Talent Is $10 Million per Person,” Recode, September 17, 2016. https://www .recode.net/2016/9/17/12943214/sebastian-thrun-self-driving-talent-pool. 41. Geoffrey Hinton is the chief scientific advisor of the Vector Institute. See http:// vectorinstitute.ai/. 42. Paul Mozur and John Markoff, “Is China Outsmarting America in A.I.?” New York Times, May 27, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/27/technology/china -us-ai-artificial-intelligence.html. 43. Paul Mozur, “Beijing Wants A.I. to Be Made in China by 2030,” New York Times, July 20, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/20/business/china-artificial -intelligence.html. 44.


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The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

Tactics.” See also Rock, interview by Amy Blitz, March 2001, 9, library.hbs.edu/content/download/60633/file/Rock_Arthur.pdf. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 32 Wilson, New Venturers, 36. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 33 John Markoff, “An Evening with Legendary Venture Capitalist Arthur Rock in Conversation with John Markoff,” Computer History Museum, May 1, 2007, 16, archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2012/05/102658253-05-01-acc.pdf. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 34 Rock, interview with the author, Feb. 7, 2017. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 35 Rock, “Strategy vs.

As it turned out, the $750,000 shock coincided with a portent of UUNET’s eventual triumph. That December, the front of the New York Times business section featured a story on a revolutionary web browser called Mosaic, “a map to the buried treasures of the Information Age,” as the article described it.[57] Almost a year earlier, the same author, John Markoff, had captured the excitement about Al Gore’s vision for an information superhighway. Now the new buzz was about its dowdier rival, rendered suddenly sexy by Mosaic’s point-and-click navigation. Before, finding information on the internet had required typing commands like “Telnet 192.100.81.100.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27 For an account emphasizing the public-sector role in creating the internet, see Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths (New York: Anthem Press, 2013), 76. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 28 For an example of the excitement about Gore’s vision, see John Markoff, “Building the Electronic Superhighway,” New York Times, Jan. 24, 1993. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 29 The key figure in this process was Stephen S. Wolff, the program director for computer networking at the NSF. In November 1991, Wolff issued a plan to replace the NSFNET with competing commercial networks.


User Friendly by Cliff Kuang, Robert Fabricant

A Pattern Language, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bill Atkinson, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, data science, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fake news, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, Google Glasses, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Dyson, John Markoff, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Norbert Wiener, Paradox of Choice, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skinner box, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tacit knowledge, Tesla Model S, three-martini lunch, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush, women in the workforce

Pagan Kennedy, “The Tampon of the Future,” New York Times, April 1, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/04/03/opinion/sunday/the-tampon-of-the-future.html. 7. HUMANITY 1. John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Penguin, 2005), 148–50. 2. “Military Service—Douglas C. Engelbart,” Doug Engelbart Institute, www.dougengelbart.org/about/navy.html. 3. Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, 48. 4. John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots (New York: Ecco, 2016). 5. Matthew Panzarino, “Google’s Eric Schmidt Thinks Siri Is a Significant Competitive Threat,” The Next Web, November 4, 2011, https://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/11/04/googles-eric-schmidt-thinks-siri-is-a-significant-competitive-threat. 6.

While mankind had spent thousands of years creating tools for changing the physical world, Bush argued, it was now time to create knowledge tools. He proposed several, including one he hastily dubbed the memex, which would allow a person to store every book or communication he’d ever need, and call it up with “exceeding speed and flexibility.” As Bush wrote, “It is an enlarged supplement to his memory.” This was a loaded sentence. As John Markoff writes in his definitive history of Engelbart’s milieu, What the Dormouse Said, “Previously, teams of humans had served a single computer; now, the computer would become a personal assistant.”3 (Emphasis mine.) The most far-reaching metaphor in computing was born. Engelbart spent the next twenty years developing that vision of a personal assistant, utterly wedded to an infinite view of human progress.


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WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency by Micah L. Sifry

1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital rights, Evgeny Morozov, Gabriella Coleman, Google Earth, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Network effects, RAND corporation, school vouchers, Skype, social web, source of truth, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Chapter 4 1 David Weinberger, “Transparency is the New Objectivity,” JOHO the Blog, July 19, 2009, www.hyperorg.com/blogger/2009/07/19/transparency-isthe-new-objectivity. The video of Weinberger’s talk is posted here www. youtube.com/watch?v=o3qSDLF6lU4. 2 John Markoff, “Plan Opens More Data to the Public,” The New York Times, October 22, 1993. 3 Carl Malamud, “By the People,” Address to the Government 2.0 Summit, Washington D.C., September 9, 2009, http://public.resource.org/people. 4 John Markoff, “Group to Widen Access to Federal Data Bases,” The New York Times, December 23, 1994. 5 Gary Ruskin, “America Off-Line: Gingrich’s Unfulfilled Internet Promise,” The Washington Post, November 16, 1997, www.washingtonpost.com/ wp-srv/politics/govt/fedguide/stories/fig112197.htm. 6 Daniel Charles, “2006 Young Innovators Under 35,” Technology Review, www.technologyreview.biz/TR35/Profile.aspx?


pages: 345 words: 84,847

The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World by David Eagleman, Anthony Brandt

active measures, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 13, Burning Man, cloud computing, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, microbiome, Netflix Prize, new economy, New Journalism, pets.com, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Simon Singh, skeuomorphism, Solyndra, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, X Prize

Learning of the Wright brothers’ success, he built a similar glider, but this time with ailerons. 6 From email correspondence with David Hagerman, curator of the Raymond Loewy estate and COO of Loewy Design. 7 Jillian Eugenios, “Lowe’s Channels Science Fiction in New Holoroom,” CNN, June 12, 2014, accessed May 11, 2016, <http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/12/technology/innovation/lowes-holoroom/> 8 John Markoff, “Microsoft Plumbs Ocean’s Depths to Test Underwater Data Center,” New York Times, January 31, 2016, accessed May 11, 2016, <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/01/technology/microsoft-plumbs-oceans-depths-to-test-underwater-data-center.html> 9 Gail Davidson, “The Future of Television,” Cooper Hewitt, August 16, 2015, accessed May 11, 2016, <http://www.cooperhewitt.org/2015/08/16/the-future-of-television/> 10 Ian Wylie, “Failure Is Glorious,” Fast Company, September 30, 2001, accessed May 11, 2016, <http://www.fastcompany.com/43877/failure-glorious> 11 Malcolm Gladwell, “Creation Myth,” New Yorker, May 16, 2011, accessed May 11, 2016, <http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/16/creation-myth> 12 B.

Learning of the Wright brothers’ success, he built a similar glider, but this time with ailerons. 6 From email correspondence with David Hagerman, curator of the Raymond Loewy estate and COO of Loewy Design. 7 Jillian Eugenios, “Lowe’s Channels Science Fiction in New Holoroom,” CNN, June 12, 2014, accessed May 11, 2016, <http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/12/technology/innovation/lowes-holoroom/> 8 John Markoff, “Microsoft Plumbs Ocean’s Depths to Test Underwater Data Center,” New York Times, January 31, 2016, accessed May 11, 2016, <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/01/technology/microsoft-plumbs-oceans-depths-to-test-underwater-data-center.html> 9 Gail Davidson, “The Future of Television,” Cooper Hewitt, August 16, 2015, accessed May 11, 2016, <http://www.cooperhewitt.org/2015/08/16/the-future-of-television/> 10 Ian Wylie, “Failure Is Glorious,” Fast Company, September 30, 2001, accessed May 11, 2016, <http://www.fastcompany.com/43877/failure-glorious> 11 Malcolm Gladwell, “Creation Myth,” New Yorker, May 16, 2011, accessed May 11, 2016, <http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/16/creation-myth> 12 B.


A People’s History of Computing in the United States by Joy Lisi Rankin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Charles Babbage, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, corporate social responsibility, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Multics, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, pink-collar, profit motive, public intellectual, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog, wikimedia commons

Cold War Research (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). Accounts that highlight the role of the counterculture in personal computing’s origins include Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) and John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture S ­ haped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Viking Penguin, 2005). 5. ­T hese works include Susan Rosegrant and David Lampe, Route 128: Lessons from Boston’s High-­Tech Community (New York: Basic Books, 1992); 245 246 Notes to Pages 3–5 AnnaLee Saxenian, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Christophe Lécuyer, Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930–1970 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); and Barry Katz, Make It New: The History of Silicon Valley Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).

The most comprehensive work on Engelbart is Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). The demonstration is viewable at https://­w ww​.­youtube​.­com ​/­watch​?­v ​= y­ JDv​-­z dhzMY. Many works describe it, including Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought: The P ­ eople and Ideas ­behind the Next Computer Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985); and John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture ­Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Viking, 2005). 98. Alan Kay, “The Early History of Smalltalk,” in History of Programming Languages II, ed. Thomas Bergin Jr. and Richard Gibson Jr. (New York: ACM , 1996), 511–579. 99. Michael A.

According to Levy, Albrecht was on a “planner” mission to spread computing far and wide, while Moore exhibited a “hacker” fascination with hardware. Yet Levy ­later notes (222) that ­others also dismissed the Homebrew crew as “chip-­monks, ­people obsessed with chips.” 18. ­People’s Computer Com­pany 3, no. 3 (January 1975). 19. ­People’s Computer Com­pany 3, no. 4 (March 1975), 6–7; capitalization of TINY BASIC in original. 20. Ibid. 21. John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture ­Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Viking, 2005), 264–265. Note the play on byte, overbyte, and overbite, leading to “orthodontia” in the title. 22. Jim Warren quoted in Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, 265. 23. Warren quoted in Levy, Hackers, 235.


pages: 565 words: 151,129

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, business logic, business process, Chris Urmson, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, crowdsourcing, demographic transition, distributed generation, DIY culture, driverless car, Eben Moglen, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, general purpose technology, global supply chain, global village, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, mirror neurons, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, phenotype, planetary scale, price discrimination, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, RFID, Richard Stallman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search inside the book, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social web, software as a service, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

EDiscovery is a software program that can sift through millions of legal documents, looking for patterns of behavior, lines of thought, concepts, and the like, at speeds that would trump the best Harvard-educated lawyers and with crisp analysis that even the most well-trained legal scholars might miss. The savings in labor cost is equally impressive. The New York Times journalist John Markoff cites the example of a blockbuster lawsuit in 1978 involving five television studios, the U.S. Justice Department, and CBS. The studios’ lawyers and paralegals had the unenviable task of reading through more than 6 million documents over months at a cost of $2.2 million in labor time. In January 2011 BlackStone Discovery, a Palo Alto, California, enterprise, analyzed 1.5 million legal documents using eDiscovery software for less than $100,000.

Peter Joseph, Roxanne Meadows, and Jacque Fresco, “The Zeitgeist Movement: Observations and Responses,” Zeitgeist Movement, February 2009 http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/socio politica/zeitgeist08.htm (accessed June 13, 2013). 14. Caroline Baum, “So Who’s Stealing China’s Manufacturing Jobs?,” Bloomberg, October 14 2003, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aRI4bAft7Xw4 (accessed July 1, 2013). 15. John Markoff, “Skilled Work, without the Worker,” New York Times, August 18, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/business/new-wave-of-adept-robots-is-changing-global-indus try.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (accessed July 1, 2013). 16. Ibid. 17. “World Robotics 2012 Industrial Robots,” International Federation of Robotics, http://www.ifr .org/industrial-robots/statistics/ (accessed May 26, 2013). 18.

Jason Perlow, “In the Battle of Clicks versus Bricks, Retail Must Transform or Die,” ZDNet, December 8, 2011, http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/in-the-battle-of-clicks-versus-bricks-retail -must-transform-or-die/19418 (accessed August 3, 2013). 33. “Occupational Employment and Wages News Release,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, March 29, 2013, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.htm (accessed June 8, 2013). 34. John Markoff, “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software,” New York Times, March 4, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html?pagewanted=all (accessed October 20, 2013). 35. Ibid. 36. Christopher Steiner, “Automatons Get Creative,” New York Times, August 17, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10000872396390444375104577591304277229534#printprin (accessed June 30, 2013). 37.


pages: 382 words: 105,819

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Lanier has been a thought leader in technology for three decades, with an early emphasis on virtual reality, but in this book he speaks as a concerned technologist who is also a philosopher about technology. This book did not need ten arguments, but I learned something from every one. One of Lanier’s major concerns—unrestricted development of artificial intelligence—is the subject of Machines of Loving Grace, by John Markoff (New York: Ecco, 2015). The book explains how artificial intelligence risks undermining humans, rather than leveraging them. To understand the world of Big Data, and the challenges it poses to society, I recommend Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction (New York: Crown, 2016), which has the best explanation of the good, the bad, and the ugly of algorithms that I have ever read.

The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, by Walter Isaacson (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), looks back on the key people whose work created Silicon Valley. What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, by John Markoff (New York: Viking, 2005), shows how hippie culture became the culture of the PC industry. Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1968) is a helpful introduction to the culture embraced by a core group in Silicon Valley at a critical time. Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer, by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine (Berkeley: Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 1984), is the best book I know on the early days of the personal computer industry, from computer clubs to the start of Microsoft and Apple, to the battle that followed.

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, by Steven Levy (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984), investigates a key subculture in Silicon Valley. Levy wrote this as it was happening, which makes the book particularly helpful, as in the case of The Facebook Effect. Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier, by Katie Hafner and John Markoff (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), picks up the story of Hackers and carries it forward. * * * — I RECOMMEND LEARNING ABOUT the origin stories of the other internet platforms. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, by Brad Stone (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2013), blew my mind.


pages: 394 words: 117,982

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age by David E. Sanger

active measures, air gap, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, computer age, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Google Chrome, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, RAND corporation, ransomware, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

Bloomberg among others, folded: Edward Wong, “Bloomberg Code Keeps Articles from Chinese Eyes,” New York Times, November 28, 2013, sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/28/bloomberg-code-keeps-articles-from-chinese-eyes/. A secret State Department cable: Described in the New York Times “State’s Secrets” series in 2010. James Glanz and John Markoff, “Vast Hacking by a China Fearful of the Web,” New York Times, December 5, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/world/asia/05wikileaks-china.html?pagewanted=print. “images of China’s military”: Ibid. in December 2009, Google’s top executives discovered: David E. Sanger and John Markoff, “After Google’s Stand on China, U.S. Treads Lightly,” New York Times, January 15, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/world/asia/15diplo.html. “Operation Aurora”: Kim Zetter, “Google Hack Attack Was Ultra Sophisticated, New Details Show,” Wired, January 14, 2010, www.wired.com/2010/01/operation-aurora/.

The centrifuges at the Natanz nuclear facility—I knew from years of covering Iran’s nuclear program and interviewing inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency—were organized in groups of 164. That left little mystery about the intended target. The following summer and fall, two Times colleagues, Bill Broad and John Markoff, and I published several stories about the hints emerging from the Stuxnet code. Markoff uncovered stylistic and substantive evidence of Israel’s role in the code writing. Next, we found one of several American calling cards embedded in the code—an expiration date, when the code would drop dead.


pages: 440 words: 117,978

Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll

affirmative action, call centre, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, information security, John Markoff, Menlo Park, old-boy network, Paul Graham, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, undersea cable

As I thought about it, Stanford was following different people. If anything, the Berkeley hacker seemed to prefer the name, “Hunter,” though I knew him by the several different account names he stole. Three days later, the headlines of the October 3 San Francisco Examiner blared, “Computer Sleuths Hunt A Brilliant Hacker.” Reporter John Markoff had sniffed out the Stanford story. On the side, the newspaper mentioned that this hacker had also gotten into the LBL computers. Could this be true? The story described Dan’s snares and his inability to catch Stanford’s Pfloyd hacker. But the reporter got the pseudonym wrong—the newspaper reported “a crafty hacker using the name ‘Pink Floyd.’ ” Cursing whoever leaked the story, I prepared to close things up.

And they published the story two weeks before I was going to. Damn. One year of silence. A year of covert cooperation with the authorities. Betrayed to a cheap tabloid in Germany. How ignominious. Even with a copy of my notebook, Quick was anything but accurate. Not much to do but get the facts out ourselves. Damn. Whatever we did, we’d be late. John Markoff—now at the New York Times—had heard about the story and was asking questions. Damn. Only one thing to do: my lab announced a press conference. With me at center stage. Damn. That evening, at 11 P.M., I was nervous and worried sick. Me? At a press conference? A phone call from the NSA didn’t help, either.

Now that’s efficient. Ten hours after I call them, the National Computer Security Center has found the culprit. But I hadn’t. He’s still a mystery to me, so it’s back to snooping around the networks. If I could only find the computer that had been first infected. No, that won’t work. There’s thousands out there. John Markoff, a reporter from the New York Times, called. “I heard a rumor that the person who wrote the virus has the initials RTM. Is that any help?” “Not much, but I’ll check it out.” How do you find someone from his initials? Of course … you look him up in the network directory. I log into the Network Information Center and search for anyone with the initials RTM.


pages: 234 words: 67,589

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future by Ben Tarnoff

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, business logic, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, decentralized internet, deep learning, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial intermediation, future of work, gamification, General Magic , gig economy, God and Mammon, green new deal, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, lockdown, lone genius, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, smart grid, social distancing, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, techlash, Telecommunications Act of 1996, TikTok, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, UUNET, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, web application, working poor, Yochai Benkler

But telecoms are notoriously bad at complying with the program’s requirements, and routinely overcharge schools and libraries; see Jeff Gerth, “AT&T, Feds Neglect Low-Price Mandate Designed to Help Schools,” ProPublica, May 1, 2012; Laura Meckler and Douglas MacMillan, “‘There Has to Be an Accounting’: Former AT&T Lawyer Says Company Systemically Overcharged Neediest Schools,” Washington Post, March 18, 2021. 22, The idea didn’t get far. Chester quotes: John Markoff, “The Media Business; New Coalition to Seek a Public Data Highway,” New York Times, October 26, 1993. 22, Without a social movement … The “Framework for Global Electronic Commerce” is available at clintonwhitehouse4.archives.gov. 23, There was nothing in the technical … Free-nets and Grundner’s Corporation for Public Cybercasting: Ashley Dunn, “Information Freeway?

., 16. 83, These three elements … My analysis is informed by Nick Srnicek, who identifies four characteristics of “platforms”: they are intermediaries, they “produce and are reliant on ‘network effects,’” they often use “cross-subsidisation” to reduce the price of a good or service, and they have “a designed core architecture that governs the interaction possibilities”; see Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 36–48. 6. Online Malls 85, Back in 1993 … “A virtual …”: Quoted in John Markoff, “The Media Business; New Coalition to Seek a Public Data Highway,” New York Times, October 26, 1993. Shopping malls metaphor: Jathan Sadowski, “The Internet of Landlords: Digital Platforms and New Mechanisms of Rentier Capitalism,” Antipode 52, no. 2 (2020): 562–80. For an earlier analysis of online commodification that uses the shopping mall metaphor, see Jennifer S.


pages: 363 words: 94,139

Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products by Leander Kahney

Apple II, banking crisis, British Empire, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Computer Numeric Control, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Dynabook, Ford Model T, General Magic , global supply chain, interchangeable parts, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, PalmPilot, race to the bottom, RFID, Savings and loan crisis, side project, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, the built environment, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, work culture

The couple moved into a modest house on San Francisco’s Twin Peaks, the highest hill in the city, from which they enjoyed a stunning view of the city that extended the length of Market Street to the skyscrapers downtown. Inside, the place reflected Jony’s design tastes. “There is a fireplace in the sparsely appointed interior and a tiny television sitting atop an upscale stereo with a turntable, and virtually all the furniture is on wheels,” wrote reporter John Markoff, who visited Jony and his wife for a New York Times profile a few years later.1 “The room is lighted by a futuristic lamp, which appears to hang like a red orb, but there isn’t a personal computer in sight.” Jony bought an orange Saab convertible for the commute to Apple, about thirty-five miles away down the Peninsula in Cupertino.

Businessweek, originally in Radical Craft Conference, the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California., http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2006-09-24/who-is-jonathan-ive 52. Design Museum, http://designmuseum.org/design/jonathan-ive. 53. Ibid. 54. Interview with Peter Phillips, Spring 2013. CHAPTER 4 Early Days at Apple 1. John Markoff, “At Home with Jonathan Ive: Making Computers Cute Enough to Wear,” http://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/05/garden/at-home-with-jonathan-ive-making-computers-cute-enough-to-wear.html, published Feruary 05, 1998. 2. Paul Kunkel, AppleDesign, (New York: Graphis Inc., 1997), p. 81. 3. Interview with Robert Brunner, March 2013. 4.


pages: 350 words: 90,898

A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload by Cal Newport

Cal Newport, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, collaborative editing, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, fault tolerance, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Garrett Hardin, hive mind, Inbox Zero, interchangeable parts, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, Nash equilibrium, passive income, Paul Graham, place-making, pneumatic tube, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, work culture , Y Combinator

The article also notes that at this point, most motion picture studios still depended on a primitive communication device called the Amtel, a combination of screen and keyboard that was used to send short text messages. (A common use of the Amtel in Hollywood was to allow assistants to inform executives, without interrupting their closed-door meetings, about who was holding on various phone lines.) In a 1989 article, the venerable technology writer John Markoff provides more insight into the dynamics that helped accelerate email’s growth.5 “Electronic mail, which has taken a secondary position to the facsimile machine through the personal computer boom of the 1980’s,” he writes, “is finally coming into its own.” As Markoff’s piece clarifies, in the late 1980s, email was largely used to connect employees within the same company.

It was clear by the 1980s that pneumatic tubes were quite old-fashioned compared with the newly arrived ability to communicate with electrons through wires. 3. Erik Sandberg-Diment, “Personal Computers: Refinements for ‘E-mail,’” New York Times, May 26, 1987. 4. Anne Thompson, “The Executive Life: Forget Doing Lunch—Hollywood’s on E-mail,” New York Times, September 6, 1992. 5. John Markoff, “Computer Mail Gaining a Market,” New York Times, December 26, 1989. 6. Stephen C. Miller, “Networking: Now Software Giants Are Targeting E-mail,” New York Times, May 31, 1992. 7. Peter H. Lewis, “Personal Computers: The Good, the Bad and the Truly Ugly Faces of Electronic Mail,” New York Times, September 6, 1994. 8.


Free as in Freedom by Sam Williams

Asperger Syndrome, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Debian, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Eben Moglen, Free Software Foundation, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Larry Wall, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Maui Hawaii, Multics, Murray Gell-Mann, PalmPilot, profit motive, Project Xanadu, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, slashdot, software patent, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, urban renewal, VA Linux, Y2K

In August of 1998, when chip-maker Intel purchased a stake in GNU/Linux vendor 142 Red Hat, an accompanying New York Times article described the company as the product of a movement "known alternatively as free software and open source."See Amy Harmon, "For Sale: Free Operating System," New York Times (September 28, 1998). Six months later, a John Markoff article on Apple Computer was proclaiming the company's adoption of the "open source" Apache server in the article headline.See John Markoff, "Apple Adopts 'Open Source' for its Server Computers," New York Times (March 17, 1999). Such momentum would coincide with the growing momentum of companies that actively embraced the "open source" term. By August of 1999, Red Hat, a company that now eagerly billed itself as "open source," was selling shares on Nasdaq.


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

By assessing the likelihood and utility of each scenario, and understanding how to achieve or avoid them, we may be able to achieve the most positive outcome of the economic singularity. 6. - Scenarios 6.1 – No Change In a July 2015 interview with Edge, an online magazine, Pulitzer Prize-winning veteran New York Times journalist John Markoff lamented the deceleration of technological progress - in fact he claimed that it has come to a halt.[cccxlii] He reported that Moore’s Law stopped reducing the price of computer components in 2013, and pointed to the disappointing performance of the robots entered into the DARPA Robotics Challenge in June 2015 (which we reviewed in chapter 3.7).

As a trainee BBC journalist writing about Central and Eastern Europe long before the Berlin Wall fell, I soon realised how fortunate I was to have grown up in the capitalist West. I didn’t expect to be heading back in the other direction in later life. [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.


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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

Thus the query is dispatched to the closest data center, which produces a speedier result. But the data centers are meant for more than search. Eric Schmidt, Schachter noted, has been proselytizing for cloud computing for two decades, since he was a Sun executive touting “network computing.” That same year, 2004, John Markoff of the New York Times spotted it too. While others saw Microsoft training its guns on search, he saw Google taking aim at Microsoft’s software. The scale of the Google computer system, as well as the backgrounds of its management, he wrote, “suggests that while Microsoft may want to be the next Google, the Web search company has its own still-secret plans to become the next Microsoft.”

“Your choices suck”: author interview with Mel Karmazin, May 13, 2008. 12 “I will believe in the 500-channel world”: Sumner Redstone speech before the National Press Club, October 19, 1994. 13 Vinod Khosla ... once told: “An Oral History of the Internet,” Vanity Fair, July 2008. 13 “a tsunami”: author interview with Craig Newmark, January 11, 2008. 14 Nielsen reported: The Nielsen Company, “Three Screen Report,” May 2008. 14 In 2008, more Americans: press release from the Pew Research Center for People & the Press, December 23, 2008. 14 the number one network teleuision show: Nielsen Media Research. 14 an estimated 1.6 billion: Universal McCann study, “Wave.3,” March 2008, and John Markoff, the New York Times, August 30, 2008. 14 newspapers, which traditionally claimed nearly a quarter: JackMyers.com. 14 lost 167,000 jobs: Advertising Age report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, February 18, 2008. 14 two hundred billion dollars: Myers Advertising and Marketing Investment Insights, annual advertising spending forecast, September 15, 2007. 14 plunge below 20 percent: McCann Erickson Worldwide chart of percentage of ad dollars by media, 1980-2007. 15 it took telephones seventy-one years ... just five years: Progress & Freedom Foundation report, January 16, 2008, and “The Decade of Online Advertising,” DoubleClick, April 2005. 15 thirty-four technology stocks: charts provided to the author by Yossi Vardi. 15 1 million job applications: author interview with Lazslo Bock, August 22, 2007. 15 Its revenues... from advertising and other Google statistics: Google’s SEC filing for fiscal year ending December 31, 2007, Google Amendment No. 9 to Form S-1, filed with the SEC August 18, 2004, and Google 10-K filed with the SEC, December 31, 2008. 16 daily advertising impressions: Google Product Strategy Meeting attended by the author, April 16, 2008. 16 Google’s hundreds of millions of daily auctions: reported in its Google 10-K SEC filing for the year ending December 31, 2007. 16 index contained: Google’s third-quarter earnings report, October 16, 2008. 16 billions of pages per day: Google internal documents for March 2008, presented at an April 16, 2008, Google Product Strategy Meeting attended by the author. 16 tens of billions: May 2007 revenue report, the Interactive Advertising Bureau. 16 YouTube ... twenty-five million unique daily visitors; DoubleClick posted seventeen billion: Eric Schmidt presentation to Google employees, April 28, 2008. 16 Google’s ad revenues in 2008: “Media Spending 2006-2009 Estimates,” JackMyers. com, January 29, 2008. 16 “We began”: Google 10-K filed in 2008 for the period ending December 31, 2007. 16 “We are in the advertising business”: author interview with Eric Schmidt, October 9, 2007. 17 likens Google to ...

“: author interview with Marissa Mayer, November 4, 2008. 108 The stock reached $108.31 ... to its employees: SEC Form S-1, August 2004. 109 Even Bonnie Brown: Stefanie Olsen, CNET News, January 23, 2008. 110 ”We began as a technology company“: Google IPO, SEC form 3-1, August 2004. 110 two hundred million dollars in 2003: author interview with Benjamin Schachter, February 15, 2008. 110 ”In a second“: author interview with Matt Cutts, March 26, 2008. 111 ”suggests that while Microsoft“: John Markoff, ”Why Google Is Peering Out, at Microsoft,“ New York Times, May 3, 2004. 111”we believe that our user focus“: Google IPO, August 2004. 112 ”Being less experienced“: author interview with Larry Page, March 25, 2008. 112. ”A lot of it is common sense“: author interview with Sergey Brin, September 18, 2008. 112 ”They wanted to replicate the Stanford culture“: author interview with Ram Shriram, June 12, 2008. 112 ”They predicted things that did not make sense to me“: author interview with Urs Hölzle, September 10, 2007. 112 ”Their clear, coherent point of view“: author interview with Terry Winograd, September 25, 2007. 112”The number of times they made me change my opinion“: author interview with Rajeev Motwani, October 12, 2007. 113 the construct framed by Eric Steven Raymond: Eric Steven Raymond, ”The Cathedral and the Bazaar,“ found at http:/wwwcatb.org/-esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/. 113 Page and Brin actually have more experience: author interview with Eric Schmidt, September 12, 2007. 113 ”quintessential Montessori kids“: author interview with Marissa Mayer, August 21, 2007. 114 ”question everything“: Larry Page speech at University of Michigan, 2005. 114 ”There’s kind of a strength in the duo“: author interview with Bill Campbell, October 8, 2007. 114 ”We agree eighty to ninety percent of the time“: author interview with Sergey Brin, March 26, 2008. 114 ”If we both feel the same way ... we’re probably right“: author interview with Larry Page, March 25, 2008. 114 strength ”to be different“: author interview with Susan Wojcicki, September 10, 2007. 114 ”having a mental sparring partner“: author interview with Jen Fitzpatrick, September 12, 2007. 114 ”Having the two of them being completely in sync“: author interview with Omid Kordestani, September 12, 2007. 114 ”to force a conversation“: author interview with Eric Schmidt, September 12, 2007. 115 ”Some companies would be worried“: author interview with Sheryl Sandberg, October 11, 2007. 115 ”people saw values we believed in“: author interview with Craig Newmark, January 11, 2008. 115 the reason the troika ”works is that whoever you go to“: author interview with Sheryl Sandberg, October 11, 2007. 116 ”Eric is the leader for the company“: author interview with Sergey Brin, October 11, 2007. 116 ”I can’t imagine“: author interview with Bill Campbell, October 8, 2007. 116 ”A balanced appreciation“: author interview with Dan Rosensweig, February 27, 2008. 116 ”It borders on insulting“: author interview with Elliot Schrage, October 12, 2007. 116 ”catcher“: author interviews with Eric Schmidt, September 12, 2007, and October 9, 2007. 116 At the press lunch: post-Zeitgeist lunch attended by author, October 11, 2007. 117 ”the best business partner“: annual Google shareholder meeting attended by author, May 10, 2007. 117 ”Eric is the person who said“: author interview with Sheryl Sandberg, October 11, 2007. 117 ”I’ve become a huge cheerleader“: author interview with Michael Moritz, March 31, 2009. 118 an incident at the 2005 World Economic Forum: author interview with Andrew Lack, October 4, 2007. 118 ”no recollection of the specific incident“: e-mail from Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., April 29, 2009. 118 ”Schmidt confirmed Lack’s account“: author interview with Eric Schmidt, April 1, 2009. 118 ”Here’s the part you don’t see“: author interview with Bill Campbell, April 1, 2009. 119 ”We’re smart guys“: author interview with Terry Winograd, September 25, 2007. 120 ”privacy concerns“: Google IPO, August 2004.


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Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator

Taxi Business Could (Finally) Get Some Disruption,” TechCrunch, https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/31/what-if-ubercab-pulls-an-airbnb-taxi-business-could-finally-get-some-disruption/. Chapter 7: THE TALLEST MAN IN VENTURE CAPITAL 65 “It’s magic”: GigaOm, “Bill Gurley, Benchmark Capital (full version),” YouTube video, 32:48, December 14, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBaYsK_62EY. 65 fund returned $250 million: John Markoff, “Internet Analyst Joins Venture Capital Firm,” New York Times, July 14, 1997, https://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/14/business/internet-analyst-joins-venture-capital-firm.html. 66 worked at the Johnson Space Center: Marissa Barnett, “Former Resident Donates $1M to Dickinson,” Galveston County Daily News, September 6, 2017, http://www.galvnews.com/news/article_7c163944-63ee-5499-8964-fec7ef7e0540.html. 66 Lucia spent her spare time: Bill Gurley, “Thinking of Home: Dickinson, Texas,” Above the Crowd (blog), September 6, 2017, http://abovethecrowd.com/2017/09/06/thinking-of-home-dickinson-texas/. 66 one of the first relatively inexpensive: “Commodore VIC-20,” Steve’s Old Computer Museum, http://oldcomputers.net. 66 he mostly rode the bench: Eric Johnson, “Full Transcript: Benchmark General Partner Bill Gurley on Recode Decode,” Recode, September 28, 2016, https://www.recode.net/2016/9/28/13095682/bill-gurley-benchmark-bubble-uber-recode-decode-podcast-transcript. 66 He played for one minute: “Bill Gurley,” Sports Reference, College Basketball (CBB), https://www.sports-reference.com/cbb/players/bill-gurley-1.html and “Bill Gurley Season Game Log,” Sports Reference, College Basketball (CBB), https://www.sports-reference.com/cbb/players/bill-gurley-1/gamelog/1988/. 67 he was infatuated: Gabrielle Saveri, “Bill Gurley Venture Capitalist, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners,” Bloomberg, August 25, 1997, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/1997-08-24/bill-gurley-venture-capitalist-hummer-winblad-venture-partners. 70 “He’s kind of an animal”: Stross, Randall E., EBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work (Crown Publishers, 2000). 71 Gurley wrote: Bill Gurley, “Benchmark Capital: Open for Business,” Above the Crowd (blog), December 1, 2008, https://abovethecrowd.com/2008/12/01/benchmark-capital-open-for-business/.

Chapter 18: CLASH OF THE SELF-DRIVING CARS 176 “The reason I’m excited”: James Temple, “Brin’s Best Bits from the Code Conference (Video),” Recode, May 28, 2014, https://www.recode.net/2014/5/28/11627304/brins-best-bits-from-the-code-conference-video. 178 “We get stuff like this”: Biz Carson, “New Emails Show How Mistrust and Suspicions Blew Up the Relationship Between Uber’s Travis Kalanick and Google’s Larry Page,” Business Insider, July 6, 2017, https://www.businessinsider.com/emails-uber-wanted-to-partner-with-google-on-self-driving-cars-2017-7. 181 Trucking was an enormous industry: American Trucking Associations, “News and Information Reports, Industry Data,” https://www.trucking.org/News_and_Information_Reports_Industry_Data.aspx. 181 Trucks drive 5.6 percent: National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration, “USDOT Releases 2016 Fatal Traffic Crash Data,” https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/usdot-releases-2016-fatal-traffic-crash-data. 182 “I want to be in the driver seat”: Duhigg, “Did Uber Steal Google’s Intellectual Property?” 182 autonomous vehicle engineering specialists: John Markoff, “Want to Buy a Self-Driving Car? Big-Rig Trucks May Come First,” New York Times, May 17, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/17/technology/want-to-buy-a-self-driving-car-trucks-may-come-first.html. 182 Levandowski ignored them: Mark Harris, “How Otto Defied Nevada and Scored a $60 Million Payout from Uber,” Wired, November 28, 2016, https://www.wired.com/2016/11/how-otto-defied-nevada-and-scored-a-680-million-payout-from-uber/#.67khcq4w5. 183 “Safety Third”: Chafkin and Bergen, “Fury Road.” 183 “brother from another mother”: Chafkin and Bergen, “Fury Road.” 184 “Super Duper” version of Uber: From Waymo LLC v.

., https://twitter.com/ariannahuff/status/207915187846656001. 228 an unfaithful journalist: Vanessa Grigoriadis, “Maharishi Arianna,” New York, November 20, 2011, http://nymag.com/news/media/arianna-huffington-2011-11. 228 a warm, intelligent woman: Lauren Collins, “The Oracle: The Many Lives of Arianna Huffington,” New Yorker, October 13, 2008, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/10/13/the-oracle-lauren-collins. 228 “Your dowry is your education”: Collins, “The Oracle.” 229 “a kind of liberal foil”: Collins, “The Oracle.” 230 “a unified theory of Arianna”: Meghan O’Rourke, “The Accidental Feminist,” Slate, September 22, 2006, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2006/09/arianna-huffington-the-accidental-feminist.html. 230 “There are two schools of thought”: Maureen Orth, “Arianna’s Virtual Candidate,” Vanity Fair, November 1, 1994, https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/1994/11/huffington-199411. 230 Her political career: https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/1994/11/huffington-199411. Chapter 24: NO ONE STEALS FROM LARRY PAGE 232 first consumer-ready version: John Markoff, “No Longer a Dream: Silicon Valley Takes on the Flying Car,” New York Times, April 24, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/technology/flying-car-technology.html. 233 “a new way forward in mobility”: Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Google Parent Company Spins Off Self-Driving Car Business,” New York Times, December 13, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/technology/google-parent-company-spins-off-waymo-self-driving-car-business.html. 233 suing him months ago: Biz Carson, “Google Secretly Sought Arbitration Against Its Former Self-Driving Guru Months Before the Uber Lawsuit,” Business Insider, March 29, 2017, https://www.businessinsider.com/google-filed-against-anthony-levandowski-in-arbitration-before-uber-lawsuit-2017-3. 233 old Google workplace accounts: Waymo LLC v.


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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

Also by Katie Hafner The House at the Bridge: A Story of Modern Germany Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier (with John Markoff) TOUCHSTONE Rockefeller Center 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 Visit us on the World Wide Web: http://www.SimonSays.com Copyright © 1996 by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. First Touchstone Edition 1998 TOUCHSTONE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc. Includes index. ISBN-10: 0-684-87216-1 ISBN-13: 978-0-684-87216-2 To the memory of J.

Memories were growing fuzzy in late 1993, when we first started thinking about doing a book, and Frank Heart and others were interested in having BBN’s considerable role in the creation of the original ARPANET recorded. Not only did the company open its archives to us and cooperate in every way but it helped fund the project as well, while agreeing to exercise no control over the content of the book. Marian Bremer, then BBN’s head librarian, made the initial phone call that led to the book. Cary Lu and John Markoff urged us to take on the project. 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.


The Pirate's Dilemma by Matt Mason

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, blood diamond, citizen journalism, creative destruction, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, future of work, glass ceiling, global village, Hacker Ethic, haute couture, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, patent troll, peer-to-peer, prisoner's dilemma, public intellectual, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, SETI@home, side hustle, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog

There a handful of young tech students, who were involved with both the antiwar and the hippie movements, fed their psychedelic social ideas into the development of the computer. Many scientists working on similar projects at nearby R&D facility Xerox PARC also were influenced by flower power. Some were hippies themselves. According to John Markoff, author of What the Dormouse Said: How 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer, “There was this very interesting parallel between the way they worked with psychedelics—which was about augmenting human potential— and the works of a man named Doug Engelbart [a pioneer of humancomputer interaction, who, among other things, invented the mouse], who was attempting to build a machine that he thought would augment the human mind.”

For those who want a more detailed account of the history of the Loft and how disco evolved, I would recommend: Tim Lawrence, Love Saves the Day (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life (London: Headline, 1999). Page 143 R. U. Sirius (aka Ken Goffman), True Mutations (San Francisco: Pollinator Press, 2006), p. 15. 260 | Notes John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said (New York: Penguin, reprint edition 2006). Page 145 Bill Gates, “An Open Letter to Hobbyists,” February 3, 1976. http://www .blinkenlights.com/classiccmp/gateswhine.html. Page 146 R. U. Sirius (aka Ken Goffman) and Dan Joy, Counterculture Through the Ages (New York: Villard, 2004), p. 353.


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Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy by Erik Brynjolfsson

Abraham Maslow, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, business cycle, business process, call centre, combinatorial explosion, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, hiring and firing, income inequality, intangible asset, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, minimum wage unemployment, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Ray Kurzweil, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, self-driving car, shareholder value, Skype, the long tail, too big to fail, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

But it’s also true, as the examples in this chapter show, that as we move deeper into the second half of the chessboard, computers are rapidly getting better at both of these skills. We’re starting to see evidence that this digital progress is affecting the business world. A March 2011 story by John Markoff in the New York Times highlighted how heavily computers’ pattern recognition abilities are already being exploited by the legal industry where, according to one estimate, moving from human to digital labor during the discovery process could let one lawyer do the work of 500. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000. … “From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out,” said Bill Herr, who as a lawyer at a major chemical company used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end.


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Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World by Joseph Menn

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Rubin, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, commoditize, corporate governance, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, Google Chrome, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Naomi Klein, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, pirate software, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, ransomware, Richard Stallman, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, tech worker, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

For kindly housing and looking after me during my research trips, I would like to thank Ralph and Shan Logan, Andrea Shallcross and Jonathan Burn, Rachel Layne and John Mulrooney, Barbara Bestor and Tom Stern, and assorted relatives. I am also indebted to a number of talented and hardworking authors who brought clarity to various aspects of historic and current issues in security touched on here, including John Markoff, Phil Lapsley, Fred Kaplan, Ronald Deibert, Shane Harris, Andy Greenberg, Bruce Sterling, Steven Levy, and Gabriella Coleman. For those interested in learning more about the bulletin board era, I strongly recommend Jason Scott Sadofsky’s multipart documentary and his text file collection, both publicly available.

“Attendee Dale Drew of Arizona”: Drew went on to have a serious security career with Tymnet, MCI, and Level 3 Communications, where he was chief security officer. He didn’t respond to my interview request. “Barlow’s fellow acid-taking Deadhead”: For more on Brand and the connections between psychedelics and major technology innovations, see John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said (New York: Viking, 2005). “I’ve been in redneck bars wearing shoulder-length curls”: John Perry Barlow, “Crime and Puzzlement,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, June 1990, www.eff.org/pages/crime-and-puzzlement. The site has a collection of his other writings as well. “Ladopoulos and Abene were arrested and prosecuted”: One member of MoD who got away, Red Knight, was also in cDc.


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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

The ads that appeared in 1976 for their first Apple computer announced that “our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost” and “yes folks, Apple BASIC is Free.”16 1984 During the decade after Computer Lib, as personal computers became fixtures in American homes and as computer companies became established organizations in their own right, the notion that personal computers represented a naked challenge to the centralized power of both computing and larger institutions persisted. John Markoff’s account of the counterculture’s influence on personal computing relates how “[t]he old computing world was hierarchical and conservative. Years later, after the PC was an established reality, Ken Olson, the founder of minicomputer maker Digital Equipment Corporation, still … publicly asserted that there was no need for a home computer.”17 On the other hand, antiestablishment ideology became entrenched in manifold specifics of the PC’s design; Markoff relates, for instance, that the visualization that comes with iTunes—the pretty colors that move and change in sequence with the music—was inspired in part by Jobs’s use of LSD, which Jobs called “one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life.”

The quotation is taken from his essay “We Owe It All to the Hippies,” Time, 1 Mar. 1995. 13. http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/peoples-computer/peoples-1972-oct/index.html 14. http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/homebrew_and_how_the_apple.php 15. http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/V2_01/index.html 16. http://www.gadgetspage.com/comps-peripheral/apple-i-computer-ad.html 17. John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Penguin, 1996). 18. http://pdgmag.com/2012/02/02/steve-jobs-lee-clow-and-ridley-scott-the-three-geniuses-who-made-1984-less-like-1984/ 19. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8 20.


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The Internet of Garbage by Sarah Jeong

4chan, Aaron Swartz, Brian Krebs, Compatible Time-Sharing System, crowdsourcing, John Markoff, Kickstarter, Network effects, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior

In her documentation of the phenomenon of doxing, Katherine Cross writes, “I am at pains to remind the reader that all of this traces back to opinions about video games, a seething hatred of feminists who play and write about them, and a harassment campaign that began as an extended act of domestic violence against developer Zoe Quinn by a vengefully abusive ex-boyfriend.” Doxing Women Bruce Schneier notes that doxing has existed since 2001. Others recall seeing the term come up in IRC channels in the mid-2000s, particularly regarding retaliation against New York Times writer John Markoff, who had written a controversial exposé of the hacker Kevin Mitnick. Markoff is credited (or blamed) by some to have helped with Mitnick’s later arrest and imprisonment. (The journalist’s email account was compromised in 1996.) In 2011, dox were dropped on HBGary Federal, a company that claimed to be able to out members of Anonymous and LulzSec (infamous Internet vigilante groups composed of entirely anonymous or pseudonymous members) by gathering information on social media.


pages: 889 words: 433,897

The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey by Emmanuel Goldstein

affirmative action, Apple II, benefit corporation, call centre, disinformation, don't be evil, Firefox, game design, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, information retrieval, information security, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, late fees, license plate recognition, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Oklahoma City bombing, optical character recognition, OSI model, packet switching, pirate software, place-making, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RFID, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, undersea cable, UUNET, Y2K

To put it mildly, we thought it was treating the hacker community and Mitnick in particular in a very unfair manner. So we decided to speak up about it. And that would lead to the making of our own film.... When Hackers Ride Horses: A Review of Cyberpunk (Summer, 1991) Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier By Katie Hafner and John Markoff $22.95, Simon and Schuster, 354 pages Review by The Devil’s Advocate The exploits of Kevin Mitnick, Pengo, and Robert Morris have become legendary both in and out of the hacker mainstream. Until now, however, hackers have had to worship their idols from afar. Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier unites hackers in this true-life testimony by presenting an in-depth, up-front view of these “techno-menaces” without the overreactive doomsday prophecies that usually accompany such a work.

Rather, Littman’s brand of compassion is 245 94192c08.qxd 6/3/08 3:32 PM Page 246 246 Chapter 8 an acute understanding of the abuses of his own craft, that of the media in distorting facts to the point of creating fiction. Fugitive is the story of how just such irresponsible journalism turned computer expert Kevin Mitnick into “the most wanted computer hacker in the world.” Readers will remember Mitnick as the spiteful and vindictive teenager featured in Katie Hafner and John Markoff’s Cyberpunk: Computers and Outlaws on the Electronic Frontier. At the time of its release, Cyberpunk’s portrayal of Mitnick was thought to be biased, allegedly because Mitnick was the only hacker featured who refused to be interviewed. Biased or not, he was portrayed by the authors as a “Dark Side” hacker, and the antithesis of the hacker ethic.

Question authority. Fugitive is replete with questioning, most of which remains unanswered. While loose ends are not usually considered praiseworthy for an investigative work, in this case, the kudos are indeed appropriate because Littman seems to be the only one doing the questioning. Certainly John Markoff, despite Cyberpunk and all of his New York Times pieces, has never bothered to scratch below the surface of Mitnick or acquire the true facts of his case. Littman spends entire chapters debunking the myths and distortions surrounding Mitnick, most of which originated from these very sources. And Littman’s questions have a way of reminding the reader to remain skeptical, that things are never as simple as we 94192c08.qxd 6/3/08 3:32 PM Page 247 Pop Culture and the Hacker World would like them to be.


pages: 324 words: 92,805

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification by Paul Roberts

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, business cycle, business process, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, double helix, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, impulse control, income inequality, inflation targeting, insecure affluence, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge worker, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, performance metric, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the long tail, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, value engineering, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

“‘Father of Aerobics,’ Kenneth Cooper, MD, MPH to Receive Healthy Cup Award from Harvard School of Public Health,” press release, April 16, 2008, http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/2008-releases/aerobics-kenneth-cooper-to-receive-harvard-healthy-cup-award.html. 22. J. D. Reed, “America Wakes Up,” Time, Nov. 16, 1981, http://www.time.com/time/subscriber/printout/0,8816,950613,00.html. 23. Personal communication, October 5, 2012. 24. Kurt Eichenwald with John Markoff, “Wall Street’s Souped-up Computers,” New York Times, Oct. 16, 1988, http://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/16/business/wall-street-s-souped-up-computers.html. 25. Dean Baker, “The Run-up in Home Prices: Is It Real or Is It Another Bubble” briefing paper, Center for Economic and Policy Research, August 2002, http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/housing_2002_08.pdf; and Dean Baker, “The Productivity to Paycheck Gap: What the Data Show,” briefing paper, April 2007, http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/growth_failure_2007_04.pdf. 26.

Daniel Katz, “Quantitative Legal Prediction—Or—How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Preparing for the Data-Driven Future of the Legal Services Industry,” Emory Law Journal, 62, no. 909 (2013): 965. 3. Laura Manning, “65 Students Chasing Each Training Contract Vacancy,” Lawyer 2B, June 28, 2011, http://l2b.thelawyer.com/65-students-chasing-each-training-contract-vacancy/1008370.article. 4. John Markoff, “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software,” The New York Times, March 4, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.htmlpagewanted=1&_r=1&hp. 5. Thor Olavsrud, “Big Data Analytics Lets Businesses Play Moneyball,” ComputerworldUK, Aug. 24, 2012, http://www.computerworlduk.com/in-depth/it-business/3377796/big-data-analytics-lets-businesses-play-money ball/. 6.


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

Fairfield, Owned: Property, Privacy, and the New Digital Serfdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 7. Sheila Jasanoff, The Ethics of Invention:Technology and the Human Future (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016), 169. 8. Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2015), 21. 9. John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace: the Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), xvi. 10. Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning The Internet Against Democracy (New York: The New Press, 2014), 166. 11. McChesney, Digital Disconnect, 162. 12.

contentCollection=weekendreads&referer=> (accessed 1 December 2017); Bence Kollanyi, Philip N. Howard, and Samuel C. Woolley,‘Bots and Automation over Twitter during the U.S. Election’, Computational Propaganda Project, 2016 <http://comprop.oii.ox.ac. uk/2016/11/17/bots-and-automation-over-twitter-during-the-us-election/> (accessed 1 December 2017); John Markoff, ‘Automated Pro-Trump Bots Overwhelmed Pro-Clinton Messages, Researchers Say’, New York Times, 17 November 2016 http://www.nytimes. com/2016/11/18/technology/automated-pro-trump-botsoverwhelmed-pro-clinton-messages-researchers-say.html)> (accessed 1 December 2017). 20. Ian Sample, ‘Study Reveals Bot-on-Bot Editing Wars Raging on Wikipedia’s Pages’, The Guardian, 23 February 2017 <https:// www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/23/wikipedia-botediting-war-study> (accessed 1 December 2017).


pages: 299 words: 19,560

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities by Howard P. Segal

1960s counterculture, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, complexity theory, David Brooks, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, deskilling, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, Future Shock, G4S, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, intentional community, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nikolai Kondratiev, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, pneumatic tube, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog

Singer, “The Unmanned Mission,” Fortune, 161 (March 1, 2010), S2; Associated Press, “Robot Performs Wedding Ceremony in Tokyo,” Boston Globe, May 17, 2010, A3; and Kirsner, “You, Robot,” Boston Sunday Globe, May 30, 2010, G1, G4. Interestingly, Ramo has recently argued that robots could and should replace humans as much as possible in future space landings on Mars and elsewhere. See Simon Ramo, “Too Big a Step for Mankind,” Los Angeles Times, April 26, 2010, A15. 59 John Markoff, “Race to Build a Robot More Like Us,” Science Times, New York Times, July 12, 2011, D1. 60 See Karl Ritter, Associated Press, “Nobel Prize in Medicine Goes to In Vitro Fertilization Pioneer,” Boston Globe, October 5, 2010, A4; and Nicholas Wade, “In Vitro Fertilization Pioneer Wins Nobel Prize,” New York Times, October 5, 2010, A1, A3. 61 Quoted by Gwynne Dyer in his “A Long Way from Designing Chromosomes,” Bangor Daily News, May 25, 2010, A7. 62 Review by Deborah D.

The issue’s cover title was explicit: “What’s So Great About the iPad? Everything. How Steve Jobs Will Revolutionize Reading, Watching, Computing, Gaming— and Silicon Valley.” Similarly, Time’s cover story for 175 (April 12, 2010), 6, 36–43, was “Inside Steve’s Pad.” On new visions of artificial intelligence, see John Markoff, “The Coming Superbrain: Computers Keep Getting Smarter, While We Just Stay the Same,” Sunday New York Times, Week in Review, May 24, 2009, 1, 4; and Alex Beam, “Apocalypse Later: Ray Kurzweil Predicts the Not-So-Near Future in ‘Post-Biological’ Visions of Humanity,” Boston Globe, June 29, 2010, G23.


pages: 332 words: 97,325

The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups by Randall Stross

affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, always be closing, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Burning Man, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Elon Musk, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, index fund, inventory management, John Markoff, Justin.tv, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, medical residency, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Morris worm, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, transaction costs, Y Combinator

This is the basis for the remainder of this account of Viaweb, other than specific exceptions noted. 6. Biographical details are drawn from PG’s biography on the Viaweb Web site, preserved at http://ycombinator.com/viaweb/com.html. 7. John Markoff, “How a Need for Challenge Seduced Computer Expert,” New York Times, November 6, 1988, www.nytimes.com/1988/11/06/us/how-a-need-for-challenge-seduced-computer-expert.html; John Markoff, “Computer Intruder Is Put on Probation and Fined $10,000,” New York Times, May 5, 1990, www.nytimes.com/1990/05/05/us/computer-intruder-is-put-on-probation-and-fined-10000.html. Coverage of the incident did not fail to note that this Robert Morris—Robert Tappan Morris—was the son of Robert Morris, the well-known computer scientist who was then the chief scientist for the National Computer Security Center, a division of the National Security Agency.


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

Provine Don’t Ring Me: Aubrey de Grey A Thousand Hours a Year: Simon Baron-Cohen Thinking Like the Internet, Thinking Like Biology: Nigel Goldenfeld The Internet Makes Me Think in the Present Tense: Douglas Rushkoff Social Prosthetic Systems: Stephen M. Kosslyn Evolving a Global Brain: W. Tecumseh Fitch Search and Emergence: Rudy Rucker My Fingers Have Become Part of My Brain: James O’Donnell A Mirror for the World’s Foibles: John Markoff a completely new form of sense: Terence Koh By Changing My Behavior: Seirian Sumner There Is No New Self: Nicholas A. Christakis I Once Was Lost but Now Am Found, or How to Navigate in the Chartroom of Memory: Neri Oxman The Greatest Pornographer: Alun Anderson My Sixth Sense: Albert-László Barabási The Internet Reifies a Logic Already There: Tom McCarthy Instant Gratification: Peter H.

What all this means is that we are in a different space now, one that is largely unfamiliar to us even when we think we’re using familiar tools (like a “newspaper” that has never been printed or an “encyclopedia” vastly larger than any shelf of buckram volumes), and one that has begun life by going through rapid changes that only hint at what is to come. I’m not going to prophesy where that goes, but I’ll sit here a while longer, watching the ways I’ve come to “let my fingers do the walking,” wondering where they will lead. A Mirror for the World’s Foibles John Markoff Journalist; covers Silicon Valley for the New York Times; author, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry It’s been three decades since Les Earnest, then assistant director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, introduced me to the ARPANET.


pages: 383 words: 105,021

Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War by Fred Kaplan

air gap, Big Tech, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, computer age, data acquisition, drone strike, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, game design, hiring and firing, index card, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John von Neumann, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Morris worm, national security letter, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, packet switching, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stuxnet, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Wargames Reagan, Y2K, zero day

He and the other L0pht denizens: The hearing can be seen on YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVJldn_MmMY. Three days after Mudge’s testimony: Bill Clinton, Presidential Decision Directive/NSC-63, “Critical Infrastructure Protection,” May 22, 1998, http://fas.org/irp/offdocs/pdd/pdd-63.htm. FIDNET, as he called it: John Markoff, “U.S. Drawing Plan That Will Monitor Computer Systems,” New York Times, July 28, 1999; and interviews. “Orwellian”: Tim Weiner, “Author of Computer Surveillance Plan Tries to Ease Fears,” New York Times, Aug. 16, 1999; and interviews. “While the President and Congress can order”: Bill Clinton, National Plan for Information Systems Protection, Jan. 7, 2000, http://cryptome.org/cybersec-plan.htm.

Knake, Cyber War (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 44–47. “cyber-offensive teams”: Zachary Fryer-Biggs, “U.S. Sharpens Tone on Cyber Attacks from China,” DefenseNews, March 18, 2013, http://mobile.defensenews.com/article/303180021; and interviews. In Obama’s first year as president: Choe Sang-Hun and John Markoff, “Cyberattacks Jam Government and Commercial Web Sites in U.S. and South Korea,” New York Times, July 18, 2009; Clarke and Knake, Cyber War, 23–30. A year and a half later: Zetter, Countdown to Zero Day, 276–79. Four months after that: “Nicole Perlroth, “In Cyberattack on Saudi Firm, U.S. Sees Iran Firing Back,” New York Times, Oct. 23, 2013.


pages: 371 words: 108,317

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

., “Industrial Robot Automation,” White Paper FP6-001917, European Robotics Research Network, 2005. Priced at $25,000: Angelo Young, “Industrial Robots Could Be 16% Less Costly to Employ Than People by 2025,” International Business Times, February 11, 2015. all but seven minutes of a typical flight: John Markoff, “Planes Without Pilots,” New York Times, April 6, 2015. 3: FLOWING steady flow of household replenishables: “List of Online Grocers,” Wikipedia, accessed August 18, 2015. new medium imitates the medium it replaces: Marshall McLuhan, Culture Is Our Business (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970).

Parkes, “The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilation on the Development of the Book,” in Medieval Learning and Literature: Essays Presented to Richard William Hunt, eds. J.J.G. Alexander and M. T. Gibson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 115–27. gaining visual intelligence rapidly: John Markoff, “Researchers Announce Advance in Image-Recognition Software,” New York Times, November 17, 2014. “one can only reread it”: Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980). “He who receives an idea from me”: Thomas Jefferson, “Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson, 13 Aug. 1813,” in Founders’ Constitution, eds.


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

Michelle Delio, “The Grid Draws Its Battle Lines,” Wired News, 20 February 2002, <http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,50538,00.html> (29 March 2002). 36. Ian Foster, “Internet Computing and the Emerging Grid,” Nature, 7 December 2000, <http://www.nature.com/nature/webmatters/grid/grid.html> (23 November 2001). 37. Ibid. 38. John Markoff, “The Soul of the Ultimate Machine,” New York Times, 12 December 2000, <http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/10/technology/10SMAR.html> (24 January 2002). 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Steve Lohr, “IBM Making a Commitment to Next Phase of the Internet,” New York Times, 2 August 2001, <http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/02/technology/02BLUE.html > 42.

ex=100> (23 February 2002). 28. PlayaNet, <http://www.playanet.org > (23 February 2002). 29. Burning Man, <http://www.burningman.com > (23 February 2002). 30. Cory Doctorow, email correspondence, 25 February 2001. 31. “SFLan Manifesto,” <http://www.sflan.com/index.html > (23 February 2002). 32. John Markoff, “The Corner Internet Network vs. the Cellular Giants,” New York Times, 4 March 2002, <http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/04/technology/04MESH.html > (6 March 2002). 33. Michael Behar, “The Broadband Militia,” Washington Monthly, March 2002, <http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0203.behar.html > (6 March 2002). 34.


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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

The c-punks had seen that the spooks at Fort Meade could tweak the law and play politics. But the activists also knew the secret agency hated publicity. So Gilmore started calling some of the technology reporters he knew through the cypherpunks list. One of the best-known journalists in San Francisco at the time was John Markoff, from the New York Times. Gilmore reached out to him. The Times later ran the story. “In Retreat, U.S. Spy Agency Shrugs at Found Secret Data,” the headline read.49 Gilmore’s plan worked as predicted: the NSA shunned the light. The agency declassified the Friedman documents in response to the high-profile publicity.

., 61. 39.Kelly, “Cypherpunks, e-Money,” 46. 40.May, “Announcement.” 41.Ibid. 42.Kelly, “Cypherpunks, e-Money,” 42. 43.Kevin Kelly, Out of Control (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995), 178. 44.May, “True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy,” 82. 45.James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), 47–56. 46.The find wasn’t too remarkable. James Bamford had prominently reported on the wider Friedman papers in an influential book on the NSA: The Puzzle Palace, published in 1982. John Gilmore, interview by the author, April 7, 2014. 47.Gilmore, interview, April 7, 2014. 48.Ibid. 49.John Markoff, “In Retreat, U.S. Spy Agency Shrugs at Found Secret Data,” New York Times, November 28, 1992. 50.Gilmore, interview, April 7, 2014. 51.John Perry Barlow, “Remarks,” in First International Symposium: “National Security & National Competitiveness: Open Source Solutions”: Proceedings, vol. 2 (Reston, VA: Open Source Solutions, 1992), 182–83. 52.Timothy May, “‘Stopping Crime’ Necessarily Means Invasiveness,” e-mail to cypherpunks@toad.com, October 17, 1996.


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The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

He saw the Left as a countervailing force against technological progress. “They wanted to destroy the new machines,” as Tom Wolfe put it in a 1983 Esquire profile of Noyce. “They wanted to call off the future.” This was mostly forgotten in Silicon Valley by the early 2000s, when Apple and Google were preaching individual empowerment and books like John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said were arguing that LSD had, in some spiritual way, created the internet, when in fact it had been created with funding from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (better known as DARPA). Thiel saw tech the way Noyce had seen it—as fundamental to the rise of Western civilization and American power.

as he’d write: Peter Thiel, “The End of the Future,” National Review, October 3, 2011, https://www.nationalreview.com/2011/10/end-future-peter-thiel/. essential to the operation: “Tracking GhostNet,” The Information Warfare Monitor, March 29, 2009, https://citizenlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/ghostnet.pdf; John Markoff, “Tracking Cyberspies Through the Web Wilderness,” The New York Times, May 11, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/science/12cyber.html. had already agreed: Steve Brill, “Trump, Palantir, and the Battle to Clean Up a Huge Army Procurement Swamp,” Fortune, March 27, 2017 https://fortune.com/longform/palantir-pentagon-trump/.


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Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller by Alec Nevala-Lee

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American energy revolution, Apple II, basic income, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Columbine, complexity theory, Computer Lib, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, declining real wages, digital nomad, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Golden Gate Park, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hydraulic fracturing, index card, information retrieval, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Graham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, remote working, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Gray, Sam Green, Rob Grip, Tony Gwilliam, Rich Heinemeyer, Paul Hendrickson, Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Higgins, Dan Hooper, Tony Huston, Donald E. Ingber, Lloyd Kahn, Barry M. Katz, Alan Kay, Dodie Kazanjian, Jonathon Keats, Lisa Kessler, Christopher Kitrick, Dale Klaus, Daniel Kottke, Lady Margaret Kroto, Jaron Lanier, Mira Lehr, Lore Devra Levin, David D. Levine, Lim Chong Keat, Casey Mack, Jerry Manock, John Markoff, Gillian Meller, Ann Mintz, Federico Neder, Bill Perk, Prop Anon, Michael Ravnitzky, Michael Reid, Hugh Ryan, the late Shoji Sadao, Edwin Schlossberg, Stephen E. Selkowitz, Shirley Sharkey, Deborah Snyder, Tom Solari, the late Carl Solway, Yrjö Sotamaa, Barbara Stevenson, Jonathan Stoller, Roger Stoller, Calvin Tomkins, Thomas Turman, Tom Vinetz, Tim Wessels, Robert Williams, Paul Young, the late Gene Youngblood, Thomas T.

“Google in paperback form”: Jobs, Stanford commencement address, June 12, 2005. “That definitely comes”: Stewart Brand interview, The Tim Ferriss Show, February 3, 2018, https://tim.blog/2018/02/03/the-tim-ferriss-show-transcripts-stewart-brand (accessed January 2021). “The stuff came out”: Evgeny Morozov, “Making It,” New Yorker, January 13, 2014, 70. Marc LeBrun: John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said (New York: Penguin, 2006), 183–84. Lee Felsenstein: Lee Felsenstein, email to author, December 18, 2020. “an architect and engineer”: Charles Raisch, “Pueblo in the City,” Mother Jones, May 1976, 30. ideas for the Exploratorium: Hilde Hein, The Exploratorium: The Museum as Laboratory (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1990), 239n10.

“Amid the fever I was in”: Brand, Last Whole Earth Catalog, 439. “Techniques and tools”: Ibid. “I dunno, Whole Earth Catalog”: Ibid. “with manufacturers”: Stewart Brand to RBF, April 10, 1968, quoted in Wong, 454. “We are as gods”: Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968, 3. “access to tools”: John Markoff, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (New York: Penguin, 2022), 138. “People who beef about Fuller”: Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968, 3. “one of the most original”: Ibid. “baling wire hippies”: J. D. Smith, quoted in Andrew G. Kirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 76.


Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America by David Callahan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, automated trading system, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Thorp, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial independence, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, medical malpractice, mega-rich, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, power law, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, short selling, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, systems thinking, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor, World Values Survey

“Computers are c08.indd 191 5/11/10 6:24:56 AM 192 fortunes of change mostly used against people instead of for people; used to control people instead of to free them,” stated the first newsletter of a Silicon Valley organization called the People’s Computer Company that Moore helped found in the early 1970s. “Time to change all that.” In his book What the Doormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, John Markoff argues that it was inevitable that the PC would emerge on the West Coast. “The East Coast computing industry didn’t get it,” Markoff wrote. “The old computing world was hierarchical and conservative.” Markoff documents how computer engineers in the Bay Area—such as Douglas Engelbart, who would invent the computer mouse— experimented with LSD, believing that the drug could spur their creativity.

Paul Festa, “High-Tech Advocates Clash over School Vouchers, Skilled Labor,” CNET News, September 22, 2000, http://news .cnet.com/High-tech-advocates-clash-over-school-vouchers,-skilledlabor/2100-1023_3-246068.html. 18. Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, “The Social and Political Views of American Professors,” Harvard University, Working Paper, September 24, 2007. 19. John Markoff, What the Doormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Viking, 2005). 9. Patrician Politicians 1. Robert Frank, “A Richistani Runs for Office,” Wall Street Journal Online, May 23, 2007, http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2007/05/ 23/a-richistani-runs-for-office/. 2.


pages: 1,172 words: 114,305

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

Staff of the US Securities and Exchange Commission and Staff of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Joint Study on the Feasibility of Mandating Algorithmic Descriptions for Derivatives (April 2011), 16, 16n77, 24, https://www.sec.gov/news/studies/2011/719b-study.pdf. 28. John Markoff, “The Creature That Lives in Pittsburgh,” New York Times, April 21, 1991, http://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/21/business/the-creature-that-lives-in-pittsburgh.html?pagewanted=all; Rodney Brooks, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (New York: Pantheon, 2002). 29. See John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), which describes pioneering IA work by Doug Engelbart and a long line of proteges. See also Doug Engelbart, Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework (Washington, DC: Air Force Office of Scientific Research, 1962). 30.


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

DEDICATION To Marvin Minsky CONTENTS DEDICATION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS PREFACE: THE 2015 EDGE QUESTION MURRAY SHANAHAN Consciousness in Human-Level AI STEVEN PINKER Thinking Does Not Imply Subjugating MARTIN REES Organic Intelligence Has No Long-Term Future STEVE OMOHUNDRO A Turning Point in Artificial Intelligence DIMITAR D. SASSELOV AI Is I FRANK TIPLER If You Can’t Beat ’em, Join ’em MARIO LIVIO Intelligent Machines on Earth and Beyond ANTONY GARRETT LISI I, for One, Welcome Our Machine Overlords JOHN MARKOFF Our Masters, Slaves, or Partners? PAUL DAVIES Designed Intelligence KEVIN P. HAND The Superintelligent Loner JOHN C. MATHER It’s Going to Be a Wild Ride DAVID CHRISTIAN Is Anyone in Charge of This Thing? TIMO HANNAY Witness to the Universe MAX TEGMARK Let’s Get Prepared! TOMASO POGGIO “Turing+” Questions PAMELA MCCORDUCK An Epochal Human Event MARCELO GLEISER Welcome to Your Transhuman Self SEAN CARROLL We Are All Machines That Think NICHOLAS G.

If you’re willing to entertain the simulation hypothesis, then maybe—given the amount of effort currently under way to control or curtail an AI that doesn’t yet exist—you’ll consider that this world is the simulation to torture those who didn’t help it come into existence earlier. Maybe, if you do work on AI, our superintelligent machine overlords will be good to you. OUR MASTERS, SLAVES, OR PARTNERS? JOHN MARKOFF Senior writer, science section, New York Times; author, Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots Hegel wrote that in the relationship between master and slave, both are dehumanized. That insight touched a wide range of thinkers, from Marx to Buber, and today it’s worth remembering.


pages: 587 words: 117,894

Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know by P. W. Singer, Allan Friedman

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, air gap, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business continuity plan, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, do-ocracy, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fault tolerance, Free Software Foundation, global supply chain, Google Earth, information security, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, M-Pesa, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, packet switching, Peace of Westphalia, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, Twitter Arab Spring, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day, zero-sum game

Drones,” Wall Street Journal, December 17, 2009, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126102247889095011.html. “preserve of great states” Lewis, “The Threat,” p. 20. “the most to lose” Clayton, “The New Cyber Arms Race.” “tons of vulnerabilities” Ibid. “power equalization” Nye, “Power and National Security in Cyberspace,” p. 14. dummy set of centrifuges William J. Broad, John Markoff, and David E. Sanger, “Israeli Test on Worm Called Crucial in Iran Nuclear Delay,” New York Times, January 15, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/world/middleeast/16stuxnet.html? pagewanted=all&_r=0. “smaller dogs bite” Nye, “Power and National Security in Cyberspace,” p. 14. escalation dominance Mahnken, “Cyberwar and Cyber Warfare,” p. 61.

tried to harm Facebook Dennis Fisher, “How Facebook Prepared to Be Hacked,” Threatpost, March 8, 2013, http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/how-facebook-prepared-be-hacked-030813. offensive tactics and tricks Samuel L. King, Peter M. Chen, Yi-Min Wang, et al., “SubVirt: Implementing Malware with Virtual Machines,” University of Michigan, http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~pmchen/papers/king06.pdf, accessed August 11, 2013. “Israelis tried it out” William J. Broad, John Markoff, and David E. Sanger, “Israeli Test on Worm Called Crucial in Iran Nuclear Delay,” New York Times, January 15, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/world/middleeast/16stuxnet.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. network-based attack Tucker Bailey, James Kaplan, and Allen Weinberg, “Playing Wargames to Prepare for a Cyberattack,” McKinsey Quarterly, July 2012.


pages: 423 words: 126,096

Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity by Edward Tenner

A. Roger Ekirch, Apple Newton, Bonfire of the Vanities, card file, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Lewis Mumford, Multics, multilevel marketing, Network effects, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, QWERTY keyboard, safety bicycle, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, women in the workforce

Scot Ober, “Review of Research on the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard,” Delta Pi Epsilon Journal, vol. 34, no. 4 (Fall 1992), 167–82; Scot Ober, “Relative Efficiencies of the Standard and Dvorak Simplified Keyboards,” Delta Pi Epsilon Journal, vol. 35, no. 1 (Winter 1993), 1–13, and references cited in each article; Peter J. Howe, “Different Strokes Catch On,” Boston Globe, January 15, 1996; Jennifer B. Lee, “Keyboards Stuck in the Age of NumLock; Defunct Keys and Odd Commands Still Bedevil Today’s PC User,” New York Times, August 12, 1999. 43. Neal Taslitz, telephone interview, August 17, 2002. 44. John Markoff, “Microsoft Sees New Software Based on Pens,” New York Times, November 9, 2000; “Newtonian Marketing Lessons,” Advertising Age, August 15, 1994, 20. 45. Frank R. Wilson, The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 309–10; Lisa Guernsey, “For Those Who Would Click and Cheat,” New York Times, April 26, 2001. 46.

Fowler, “In the Digital Age, ‘All Thumbs’ Is Term of Highest Praise,” Wall Street Journal, April 17, 2002; Libby Copeland, “Thumbs Up: After Eons Spent in Its Siblings’ Shadow, the Dumpy Digit Finally Counts,” Washington Post, June 24, 2002; Frank Wilson, The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 146. 7. Eric von Hippel, The Sources of Innovation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 1–25, 102–16; Kim J. Vicente, Cognitive Work Analysis: Towards Safe, Productive, and Healthy Computer-Based Work (Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum), 109–38. 8. John Markoff, “Kristen Nygaard, 75, Who Built Framework for Modern Computer Languages,” New York Times, August 14, 2001. Suggestions for Further Reading On human culture in comparative perspective, the best survey that I have found is Tim Ingold, ed., Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology (London: Routledge, 1994), with a number of important articles by leading figures on themes such as tools and tool behavior, technology, and artifacts.


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Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell

air gap, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, do what you love, Elon Musk, fail fast, follow your passion, General Magic , Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hiring and firing, HyperCard, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Kickstarter, Mary Meeker, microplastics / micro fibres, new economy, pets.com, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, synthetic biology, TED Talk, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Y Combinator

All the encouragement, support, and great ideas from friends and readers—Cameron Adams, David Adjay, Cristiano Amon, Frederic Arnault, Hugo Barra, Juliet de Baubigny, Yves Behar, Scott Belsky, Tracy Beiers, Kate Brinks, Willson Cuaca, Marcelo Claure, Ben Clymer, Tony Conrad, Scott Cook, Daniel Ek, Jack Forester, Case Fadell, Pascal Gauthier, Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, Hermann Hauser, Thomas Heatherwick, Joanna Hoffman, Ben Horowitz, Phil Hutcheon, Walter Isaacson, Andre Kabel, Susan Kare (designer of the famous walking lemon, among a million other things), Scott Keogh, Randy Komisar, Swamy Kotagiri, Toby Kraus, Hanneke Krekels, Jean de La Rochebrochard, Jim Lanzone, Sophie Le Guen, Jenny Lee, John Levy, Noam Lovinsky, Chip Lutton, Micky Malka, John Markoff, Alexandre Mars, Mary Meeker, Xavier Niel, Ben Parker, Carl Pei, Ian Rogers, Ivy Ross, Steve Sarracino, Naren Shaam, Kunal Shah, Vineet Shahani, Simon Sinek, David and Alaina Sloo, Whitney Steele, Lisette Swart, Anthony Tan, Min-Liang Tan, Sebastian Thrun, Mariel van Tatenhove, Steve Vassallo, Maxime Veron, Gabe Whaley, Niklas Zennström, Andrew Zuckerman—your frank comments and advice helped so much to shape this book and give us the confidence to continue through the tough weeks.

—Randy Komisar, general partner, Kleiner Perkins and author, The Monk and the Riddle “Tony Fadell takes the reader on a rollercoaster ride, revealing what it’s really like to work in Silicon Valley and simultaneously providing a compelling instruction manual for anyone who wants to follow in his footsteps.” —John Markoff, author, Machines of Loving Grace “Tony’s experience can be applied to any builder or creator anywhere in the world. The challenges are always the same, and Tony shares a number of insights on how to navigate them.” —Micky Malka, managing partner, Ribbit Capital “Truly historic anecdotes, backstories, and straight-talk advice from a hall of fame entrepreneur who has seen and done it all.


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

Over the next few years, however, Engelbart’s team began to expand their horizons, working amid the San Francisco Bay area’s petri dish of cultural experimentation. When Engelbart took the stage in San Francisco that day in 1968, many of the attendees felt they had experienced a revelation. As New York Times reporter John Markoff puts it, “Every significant aspect of today’s computing world was revealed in a magnificent hour and a half.”15 Some members of that audience became enthusiastic converts to the digital revolution. Brown University computer science professor and early hypertext pioneer Andy van Dam was there and subsequently dubbed the event “the Mother of all Demos.”


pages: 263 words: 75,610

Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger

digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, full text search, George Akerlof, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, information trail, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, John Markoff, Joi Ito, lifelogging, moveable type in China, Network effects, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, power law, RFID, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systematic bias, The Market for Lemons, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Vannevar Bush, Yochai Benkler

In fact, information on a hard disk drive even survived the catastrophic disintegration of Space Shuttle Columbia. See Minkel, “Hard Disk Recovered from Columbia Shuttle.” 27. See, for example, Oakley, “E-Beam Hard Disk Drive Using Gated Carbon Nano Tube Source and Phase Change Media,” 245–50. 28. John Markoff, “H. P. Reports Big Advance in Memory Chip Design,” The New York Times, May 1, 2008. 29. Markoff, “Redefining the Architecture of Memory,” The New York Times. 30. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution, 64–73. 31. Kilgour, The Evolution of the Book, 76–77. 32. Ibid., 94–95. 33. Cole, Suspect Identities. 34.


pages: 291 words: 77,596

Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything by Gordon Bell, Jim Gemmell

airport security, Albert Einstein, book scanning, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, full text search, information retrieval, invention of writing, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, language acquisition, lifelogging, Menlo Park, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, performance metric, RAND corporation, RFID, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Ted Nelson, telepresence, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, web application

The data and report illustrate Gray’s fondness for understanding through constant building and experimentation. Through various paths, Jim infected me with the importance of data. It’s “all about the data,” he would say. In one of our more playful times, while discussing how to get the concern for data into the national computing resource allocation agenda, we bumped into John Markoff, a friend and columnist at The New York Times who also had an office in our building. We made the case that the national computing agenda was missing the point by just thinking about computation speed. John took our picture in the lab on Friday and wrote an article that appeared in the Times on Sunday.


pages: 416 words: 129,308

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant

Airbnb, animal electricity, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Black Lives Matter, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, deep learning, DeepMind, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Higgs boson, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, information security, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, John Gruber, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Large Hadron Collider, Lyft, M-Pesa, MITM: man-in-the-middle, more computing power than Apollo, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, pirate software, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, TSMC, Turing test, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, zero day

Apple is one of the most secretive companies in the world, and the imperative originated at the top. Jobs was always proactive in managing his company’s media appearances; from the early days, he was keen on developing relationships with editors and writers at the major magazines and newspapers. But he wasn’t always super-secretive. The New York Times reporter John Markoff, one of the writers who’d earned access to Apple, noticed the change in the late 1990s and early 2000s. “Since Mr. Jobs returned to Apple, he has increasingly insisted that the company speak with just the voices of top executives,” Markoff noted after being denied an interview with a driving force behind the iPod, Tony Fadell.

Books that provided extraordinarily useful detail, research, and background were Dogfight, by Fred Vogelstein; Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson; Becoming Steve Jobs, by Brent Schlender; Inside Apple, by Adam Lashinsky; and Jony Ive, by Leander Kahney. Quotes attributed to Jony Ive, Steve Jobs, Mike Bell, and Douglas Satzger were drawn from those sources. John Markoff’s New York Times reporting and Steven Levy’s book The Perfect Thing and his work in Newsweek were used for reference. Sales figures cited are provided by Apple unless otherwise stated. Acknowledgments A key theme of this book is that little progress is possible without deep collaboration and sustained collective effort—nothing could be truer about writing this thing too.


pages: 459 words: 140,010

Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer by Michael Swaine, Paul Freiberger

1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, commoditize, Computer Lib, computer vision, Dennis Ritchie, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Fairchild Semiconductor, Gary Kildall, gentleman farmer, Google Chrome, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, world market for maybe five computers

Even Steve Jobs came to admire the first edition of this book, saying, “Reading it made me cry, thinking about those early days.” Fire in the Valley has stood the test of time well. It remains a great adventure that gives the reader a sense of being close to a historical movement that is still playing itself out. John Markoff Senior writer, science section, The New York Times San Francisco, May 2014 Copyright © 2014, The Pragmatic Bookshelf. Preface to the Third Edition It was a magic, crazy time when cranks and dreamers saw the power they imagined drop into their hands and used it to change the world.

Our friends Eva Langfeldt and John Barry read our initial proposal; Dave Needle provided timely research assistance; Thom Hogan initially prodded us to do the book and offered many useful suggestions; Dan McNeill often found just the right word; Nancy Groth brought grace with a red pencil; Nelda Cassuto offered sweet support in the form of zabaglione and editing; Levi Thomas and Laura Brisbee lent photographic expertise; Amy Hyams provided patient research and friendly conversation; Carol Moran opened secret doors; Scott Kildall gave his trust; John Markoff provided knowledge, insight, and friendship and wrote the foreword; Jason Lewis shared software wizardry; David Reed made corrections from his kitchen on the other coast; Charlie Athanas provided timely and generous insights; former colleagues Judy Canter, Phil Bronstein, and Richard Paoli of the San Francisco Examiner opened photo archives; Howard Bailen gave endless and persistent support.


From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry by Martin Campbell-Kelly

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business process, card file, Charles Babbage, computer age, computer vision, continuous integration, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, Donald Knuth, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, inventory management, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Larry Ellison, linear programming, longitudinal study, machine readable, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, Network effects, popular electronics, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, SimCity, software patent, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, vertical integration

Publisher Product Price Announced Released Notes VisiCorp VisiOn $495 November 1982 January 1984 Price reduced to $95 Digital Research GEM $399 November 1983 September 1984 Price included Concurrent DOS Microsoft Windows 1.0 $95 November 1983 November 1985 IBM TopView $149 August 1984 February 1985 Quarterdeck DESQ $399 Spring 1983 May 1984 Sources: John Markoff, “Five Window Managers for the IBM PC,” Byte Guide to the IBM PC (Fall 1984): 65–7, 71–6, 78, 82, 84, 87; Irene Fuerst, “Broken Windows,” Datamation (March 1, 1985): 46, 51–2; Allen G. Taylor, “It’s Gem vs. Topview as IBM, DRI Square Off,” Software News (August 1985): 71–3; Ken Polsson, History of Microcomputers: Chronology of Events, http://www.maxframe.com/hiszcomp.htm (accessed December 2000).

Steven Levy, Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything (Penguin, 1994). 28. See, e.g., “A Fierce Battle Brews Over the Simplest Software Yet,” Business Week, November 21, 1983: 61–63. 29. Phil Lemmons, “A Guided Tour of VisiOn,” Byte, June 1983: 256ff. 30. Irene Fuerst, “Broken Windows,” Datamation, March 1, 1985: 46, 51–52. 31. John Markoff, “Five Window Managers for the IBM PC,” Byte Guide to the IBM PC, fall 1984: 65–66, 71–76, 78, 82, 84, 87. 32. Efrem Sigel, “Alas Poor VisiCorp,” Datamation, January 15, 1985: 93–94, 96. 33. Lawrence D. Graham, Legal Battles That Shaped the Computer Industry (Quorum Books, 1999), pp. 35–41. 34.


pages: 476 words: 132,042

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

New York: Schenkman Publishing, p. 66. 134 known in statistics as a Poisson distribution: Dean Keith Simonton. (1978) “Independent Discovery in Science and Technology: A Closer Look at the Poisson Distribution.” Social Studies of Science, 8 (4). 134 greatest discoverers buy lots of tickets: Dean Keith Simonton. (1979) “Multiple Discovery and Invention: Zeitgeist, Genius, or Chance?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37 (9). 134 Westinghouse laboratory in Paris: John Markoff. (2003, February 24) “A Parallel Inventor of the Transistor Has His Moment.” New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/24/business/a-parallel-inventor-of-the-transistor-has-his-moment. html. 135 within months of each other in 1977: Adam B. Jaffe, Manuel Trajtenberg, et al. (2000, April) “The Meaning of Patent Citations: Report on the NBER/Case-Western Reserve Survey of Patentees.”

London: Gordon and Breach, p. 43. 158 to the Moon quite soon after that: Damien Broderick. (2002) The Spike: How Our Lives Are Being Transformed by Rapidly Advancing Technologies. New York: Forge, p. 35. 158 “Arthur C. Clarke had expected it to occur”: Ibid. 159 start-up making the integrated chips: John Markoff. (2005) What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer. New York: Viking, p. 17. 160 Plotting Moore’s Law: Data from Gordon Moore. (1965) “The Future of Integrated Electronics.” Understanding Moore’s Law: Four Decades of Innovation, ed. David C. Brock. Philadelphia: Chemical Heritage Foundation, p. 54. https://www.chemheritage.org/pubs/moores_law/; David C.


pages: 418 words: 128,965

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, British Empire, Burning Man, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eben Moglen, Ford Model T, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, open economy, packet switching, PageRank, profit motive, radical decentralization, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, seminal paper, sexual politics, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Ten years before Licklider wrote his paper, for instance, a young engineer named Douglas Engelbart was pondering what he might do with his life. He was recently married yet felt himself lost, an idealist in search of a meaningful contribution. One evening in 1950 he was struck with a powerful vision: a general purpose machine that might augment human intelligence and help humans negotiate life’s complexities. John Markoff, who has documented Engelbart’s life carefully, describes the vision in some detail: Engelbart “saw himself sitting in front of a large computer screen full of different symbols. He would create a workstation for organizing all of the information and communications needed for any given project.”5 Engelbart’s ideas were similar to Licklider’s, if a bit further along in their development.

For Rheingold’s description of the AN/FSQ-7, see Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 142–44. 4. J.C.R. Licklider, “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics HFE-1 (1960): 4. 5. John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Penguin, 2005), 9. 6. For an extensive discussion of Baran’s career and innovations, see Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 53–67.


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

IBM and MCI's venture, ANS, had been managing NSFNET since 1987; in 1991, ANS, a nonprofit corporation, set up a for-profit subsidiary called ANS CO+RE to sell CMC services. In a December 1991 story in the New York Times , headlined "U.S. Said to Play Favorites in Promoting Nationwide Computer Network," technology reporter John Markoff , who broke the story of the Morris Worm, wrote, "Just one week after President Bush signed legislation calling for the creation of a nationwide computer data `superhighway,' a debate has erupted over whether the government gave an unfair advantage to a joint venture of IBM and MCI that built and manages a key part of the network."

Neither of the major newsmagazines mentioned the potential for many-to-many communications between citizens. The most powerful alliance was disclosed in June 1993. Microsoft, the company started by home-brew PC hobbyist Bill Gates, dominates the PC software market. Tele-Communications Inc. is the world's largest cable television company. On June 13, John Markoff reported on the first page of the New York Times that Time-Warner, Microsoft, and Tele-Communications Inc. were forming a joint venture that, in Markoff's words, "would combine the worlds of computing and television and perhaps shape how much of popular culture is delivered." Markoff quoted James F.


pages: 558 words: 164,627

The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency by Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boston Dynamics, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, GPS: selective availability, Herman Kahn, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, license plate recognition, Livingstone, I presume, low earth orbit, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, place-making, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, social intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, traumatic brain injury, zero-sum game

In August 2002, John Poindexter unveiled TIA at the DARPATech conference in Anaheim, California. This technology conference marked the beginning of the program’s public end. In November 2002, a New York Times headline read “Pentagon Plans a Computer System That Would Peek at Personal Data of Americans.” Reporter John Markoff wrote that the Department of Defense had initiated a massive computer-based domestic surveillance program, “a vast electronic dragnet, searching for personal information as part of the hunt for terrorists around the globe—including the United States… without a search warrant.” Markoff named DARPA as the agency in charge, and reported that the computer system was called Total Information Awareness.

Robert Popp, DARPA’s Initiative on Countering Terrorism, TIA, Terrorism Information Awareness, Overview of TIA and IAO Programs, briefing slides. 26 a whooshing sound: Glenn Greenwald, “Inside the Mind of NSA Chief Gen. Keith Alexander,” Guardian, September 15, 2013. 27 “initial TIA experiment”: Quotes are from interview with Bob Popp; see also Harris, 187. 28 “a vast electronic dragnet”: John Markoff, “Pentagon Plans a Computer System That Would Peek at Personal Data of Americans,” New York Times, November 9, 2002. 29 Safire wrote: William Safire, “You Are a Suspect,” New York Times, November 14, 2002. 30 285 stories: Robert L. Popp and John Yen, 409. 31 true numbers: Belasco memo; DefenseNet transfers from Project ST-28 in FY2002 to Project ST-11 in 2003. 32 No interviews: Interview with Bob Popp, June 2014. 33 “I don’t know much about it”: U.S.


pages: 165 words: 50,798

Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything by Peter Morville

A Pattern Language, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, augmented reality, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Black Swan, business process, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Computer Lib, disinformation, disruptive innovation, folksonomy, holacracy, index card, information retrieval, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kanban, Lean Startup, Lyft, messenger bag, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Nelson Mandela, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Project Xanadu, quantum entanglement, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single source of truth, source of truth, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, zero-sum game

cxli Motor Vehicle Crash Injury Rates by Mode of Travel (2007). cxlii The Exercise Cure by Dr. Jordan Metzl (2013). cxliii The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979), p.76. cxliv The Outer Limits of Reason by Noson Yanofsky (2013), p.40. cxlv Yanofsky (2013), p.291. cxlvi Scientists Report Finding Reliable Way to Teleport Data by John Markoff (2014). cxlvii Yanofsky (2013), p.201. cxlviii The Closing Circle by Barry Commoner (1971). cxlix The Limits to Growth by Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William Behrens III (1972). cl Meadows (1972), p.1. cli Beyond the Limits by Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, and Jorgen Randers (1992).


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

Available from http:// www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12015774/site/newsweek 16 Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (Chicago, IL/London: University of Chicago Press, 2006) 17 Patrice Flichy, The Internet Imaginaire (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007) 18 Charles Leadbeater, ‘The DIY State’, Prospect 130, January 2007 19 Fred Turner, op. cit. 20 John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (Penguin, 2006) 21 Patrice Flichy, The Internet Imaginaire (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007) 22 Jonathan Lethem, ‘The Ecstasy of Influence’, Harper’s Magazine, February 2007 23 Garrett Hardin, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Science 162 (1968), pp. 1243–48 24 Elenor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (Cambridge University Press, 1990) 25 Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1999) and Free Culture (New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2004) 26 Melvyn Bragg, The Routes of English (BBC Factual and Learning, 2000); Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English (Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, 2003) 27 Jonathan Lethem, ‘The Ecstasy of Influence’, Harper’s Magazine, February 2007 28 Cory Doctorow et al., ‘On “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism” By Jaron Lanier’, Edge (2006). http://www.edge.org/discourse/digital_ maoism.html 29 Paul A.


pages: 554 words: 149,489

The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change by Bharat Anand

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Eyjafjallajökull, fulfillment center, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, managed futures, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Minecraft, multi-sided market, Network effects, post-work, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social web, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, two-sided market, ubercab, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

., “Facebook,” HBS No. 808-128 (Boston: Harvard Business Publishing, rev. March 20, 2014); Michael Arrington, “Facebook Responds to MySpace with Facebook Connect,” TechCrunch , May 9, 2008. Marketplace Stig Leschly et al., “Amazon.com—2002,” HBS No. 803-098 (Boston: Harvard Business Publishing, November 21, 2002). the App Store John Markoff and Laura M. Holson, “Apple’s Latest Opens a Developers’ Playground,” New York Times , July 10, 2008. to more than a billion Barbara Ortutay, “Facebook Tops 1 Billion Users,” Associated Press, October 4, 2012; Julie Sloane, “Facebook Got Its $15 Billion Valuation—Now What?,” Wired, October 26, 2007.

the numbers hadn’t increased much “Apple’s iTunes Store Passes 35 Billion Songs Sold Milestone,” MacDailyNews, May 29, 2014, accessed March 30, 2016; http://mac -dailynews.com/​2014/​05/​29/​apples-itunes-store-passes-35-billion-songs-sold-milestone-itunes-radio-now-has-40-million-listeners/ . “If anything can play on anything” John Markoff, “Jobs Calls for End to Music Copy Protection,” New York Times . A tire manufacturer I owe this example to Felix Oberholzer-Gee. “This isn’t a device, it’s a service” Jeff Bezos quoted in Steven Levy, “Amazon: Reinventing the Book,” Newsweek . In 2009 Tata Motors Information about Tata Nano here and elsewhere in the book is drawn primarily from Krishna Palepu, Bharat Anand, et al., “Tata Nano—The People’s Car,” HBS No. 710-420 (Boston: Harvard Business Publishing, rev.


pages: 688 words: 147,571

Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence by Jacob Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Basel III, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial exclusion, financial innovation, friendly fire, future of work, hallucination problem, hive mind, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, medical malpractice, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nudge unit, obamacare, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Philippa Foot, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, technological singularity, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, trolley problem, Turing test, Vernor Vinge

To hold rights, therefore, is to coexist with others capable of upholding or infringing upon those rights. This social feature of rights underscores the importance of considering how humans (as well as other entities already afforded rights, like corporations and animals) are to live alongside AI as it becomes increasingly prevalent. As science journalist and author John Markoff has written, we will need to ask ourselves whether robots are to become “our masters, slaves, or partners”.4 Following Markoff’s lead, this chapter asks whether AI can or should be treated as a “moral patient”, namely the subject of certain protections from the actions of “moral agents”. As explained in Chapter 2 at Section 2.1, agency involves a party being capable of understanding and acting on certain rules and principles.

This chapter and Chapter 8 distinguish between those rules which apply to “creators” and those which apply to “creations”. The term creators refers to the humans who (at present) design, programme, operate, collaborate with and otherwise interact with AI. Creations means the AI itself. Technology journalist John Markoff writes in Machines of Loving Grace: “[t]he best way to answer the hard questions about control in a world full of smart machines is by understanding the values of those who are actually building these systems”.2 This is true up to a point, but the answers to “hard questions” will also be shaped by what is technologically possible.


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Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell by Phil Lapsley

air freight, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, card file, classic study, cuban missile crisis, dumpster diving, Garrett Hardin, Hush-A-Phone, index card, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Markoff, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, The Home Computer Revolution, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, undersea cable, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

“It had more to do with the difficulty of opening up a bank account when you have the word ‘Party’ in your name.” 319 Third Annual Phone Phreak Convention: YIPL ran phone phreak conventions in 1972 and 1973, but a dry spell followed until THC-79. 319 “For several reasons, I have permanently retired”: John Draper, “Greetings” (open letter to THC-79 attendees), TAP, no. 59, September–October 1979. 320 “While intrepidly trekking”: Cheshire Catalyst, “The News Is In from the West, and It’s Beige,” TAP, no. 51, July 1978, p. 4. 320 CBBS: Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, “Hobbyist Computerized Bulletin Board,” Byte, vol. 3, no. 11, pp. 150–57. 320 first phone phreak/hacker BBSes: Katie Hafner and John Markoff, Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), p. 44; see also a description of the 8BBS in Santa Clara, California, which ran from 1980 to 1982, at http://everything2.com/title/8BBS. 321 “Enclosed for Bureau”: FBI file 117-HQ-2905, serial “X,” April 30, 1979 <db374>. 321 “nuclear yield”: FBI file 117-HQ-2905, serial 3, August 24, 1979 <db374>. 321 Judge Harold Greene: In an odd coincidence, in 1980 as part of a totally separate case, Judge Greene “ordered the FBI to stop destroying its surveillance files and to design a plan in which no files could be destroyed until historians and archivists could review them for historical value.”

Monaghan, in “The Child in a Man,” puts the year Engressia began calling himself Joybubbles as 1988. 328 “We were on a retreat”: Jim Ragsdale, “One Name Says It All,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, November 27, 2005, p. A1. 328 “I’m a survivor”: Huse, interview with Joybubbles. 329 legally changed his name: Ibid. 329 “Nobody knows how much peace”: Collier, “There’s Martin Luther King.” 329 selected it to be the word processor: John Markoff and Paul Freiberger, “Visit with Cap’n Software, Forthright Forth Enthusiast,” Infoworld, October 11, 1982, p. 31. 329 “wealthy executive”: Pete Carey, “Cap’n Crunch Programs His Way from Jail to Success,” Chicago Tribune, May 25, 1983, p. D1. 329 personal fortunes were crumbling: Alexander Besher, “The Crunching of America,” Infoworld, June 18, 1984, p. 66. 329 forging tickets to BART: Gary Richards, “‘Captain Crunch’ Charged in Ticket Forgery,” San Jose Mercury News, January 9, 1987, p. 1B; “John Draper at AutoDesk,” DigiBarn Computer Museum interview with John Draper, May 2006, at http://www.digibarn.com/collections/audio/digibarn-radio/06-05-john-draper-autodesk. 330 where-are-they-now newspaper article: Chris Rhodes, “The Twilight Years of Cap’n Crunch,” Wall Street Journal, January 13, 2007. 330 TAP ceased publication: See http://artofhacking.com/tap.


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After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul by Tripp Mickle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, airport security, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Boeing 747, British Empire, business intelligence, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, desegregation, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Magic , global pandemic, global supply chain, haute couture, imposter syndrome, index fund, Internet Archive, inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Laura Stevens read and improved an entire draft in forty-eight hours; Eliot Brown helped set the structure and refine the manuscript; Justin Catanoso assisted with outlining; John Ourand strategized on whom to call; and Rob Copeland pushed my reporting. As brilliant as they are, they are first and foremost amazing friends. The technology industry is complex, and learning about it requires guides. I was blessed with many, but none were more valuable than John Markoff and Talal Shamoon. Special thanks and love to my family for their encouragement, including my in-laws, Sally and Mark, and the Coopers, Jennifer, Josh, Madelynn, and Nathaniel. My parents, Marilynn and Russ, supported my interest in journalism and armed me with skills I use daily, including listening with curiosity and appreciating the written word.

Pascal Zachary and Ken Yamada, “Apple Picks Spindler for Rough Days Ahead,” Wall Street Journal, June 21, 1993. To reverse the declining sales: Interviews with Robert Brunner and Tim Parsey. Ive’s boss, Robert Brunner: Emma O’Kelly, “I’ve Arrived,” Design Week, December 6, 1996, https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/5-december-1996/ive-arrived/; John Markoff, “At Home with: Jonathan Ive: Making Computers Cute Enough to Wear,” New York Times, February 5, 1998, https://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/05/garden/at-home-with-jonathan-ive-making-computers-cute-enough-to-wear.html. “This is Jony”: Interview with Tim Parsey, former Apple design studio manager, 1991–1996.


pages: 602 words: 177,874

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

“By opening the way to non-silicon materials it gave Moore’s law another shot in the arm at a time when many people were thinking it was coming to an end,” said Sadasivan Shankar, who worked on Intel’s material design team at the time and now teaches materials and computational sciences at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Commenting on the breakthrough, the New York Times Silicon Valley reporter John Markoff wrote on January 27, 2007: “Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, has overhauled the basic building block of the information age, paving the way for a new generation of faster and more energy-efficient processors. Company researchers said the advance represented the most significant change in the materials used to manufacture silicon chips since Intel pioneered the modern integrated-circuit transistor more than four decades ago.”

champions in a three-day competition, Watson demonstrated the solution to the problem that “artificial intelligence researchers have struggled with for decades”: to create “a computer akin to the one on Star Trek that can understand questions posed in natural language and answer them” in natural language, as my colleague John Markoff put it in his February 16, 2011, New York Times story summing up the competition. Watson, by the way, won handily, showing great facility with some pretty complex clues that might easily stump a human, such as this one: “You just need a nap. You don’t have this sleep disorder that can make sufferers nod off while standing up.”


pages: 202 words: 59,883

Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy by Robert Scoble, Shel Israel

Albert Einstein, Apple II, augmented reality, call centre, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, connected car, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, factory automation, Filter Bubble, G4S, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Internet of things, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, lifelogging, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, ubercab, urban planning, Zipcar

Some experts are more optimistic about when driverless cars will arrive in a showroom near you. Bob Lutz, GM’s retired vice chairman, predicts that driverless cars would be ubiquitous in about 20 years. We think it will be more like ten years before the vehicles are technically ready and affordable. In the time it took us to write this chapter, our friend John Markoff, a New York Times technology reporter, may have witnessed a technological breakthrough when he was a passenger in a driverless, lidar-less Audi A7 that zipped down an Israeli highway at 65 miles an hour. Equipped with a system from a Netherlands-based start up called Mobileye Vision Technologies, the system could significantly reduce costs compared with lidar-based systems.


pages: 208 words: 57,602

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation by Kevin Roose

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, automated trading system, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, choice architecture, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, fake news, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Freestyle chess, future of work, Future Shock, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Google Hangouts, GPT-3, hiring and firing, hustle culture, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, lockdown, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, planetary scale, plutocrats, Productivity paradox, QAnon, recommendation engine, remote working, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture

An Oxford economist’s robust history of technological change, with new research and assumption-challenging conclusions. AI Superpowers by Kai-Fu Lee (2018). Lee, an experienced AI leader and venture capitalist, gave me new language to use in talking about AI and humanity, and provided a valuable window onto the Chinese AI market. Machines of Loving Grace by John Markoff (2015). Markoff, a legendary tech journalist and my former colleague at the Times, is an essential guide to the world of AI, and an expositor of the people and philosophy behind its design. Forces of Production by David F. Noble (1984). This book, an examination of the automation landscape after World War II, was essential to my thinking on the culture of industrial automation.


pages: 334 words: 93,162

This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America by Ryan Grim

airport security, Alexander Shulgin, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Burning Man, crack epidemic, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, failed state, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, global supply chain, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, mandatory minimum, new economy, New Urbanism, Parents Music Resource Center, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Tipper Gore, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, women in the workforce

Psychedelic drugs have influenced some of America’s foremost computer scientists. The history of this connection is well documented in a number of books, the best probably being What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer, by New York Times technology reporter John Markoff. Psychedelic drugs, Markoff argues, pushed the computer and Internet revolutions forward by showing folks that reality can be profoundly altered through unconventional, highly intuitive thinking. Douglas Engelbart is one example of a psychonaut who did just that: he helped invent the mouse. Apple’s Steve Jobs has said that Microsoft’s Bill Gates would “be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once.”


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

Here it’s the connectors who are more responsible than the inventors or even the specific siloed visionaries—men such as Frederick Terman, who coordinated the birth of Silicon Valley from the Stanford provost’s office, or the venture capitalists who adopted companies into corporate family structures inspired by the Japanese. More sophisticated than the Great Man version, this ecosystem analysis still takes its object for granted. The Great Region histories, like AnnaLee Saxenian’s Regional Advantage and John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said, see Silicon Valley as a place of creation rather than transformation. By placing these stories in the context of statewide, national, and global changes in the relations between workers and owners, we can better understand the microcomputer industry. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are very important characters in the story, but they’re more meaningful as personifications of impersonal social forces.

Leslie Berlin, Troublemakers: Silicon Valley’s Coming of Age (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), 29. 12. Michael A. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (New York: HarperBusiness, 1999), 67, 78. 13. Engelbart, “Augmenting Human Intellect,” para. 4d. 14. John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said—: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Viking, 2005), 26–28. 15. Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, Perennial Library (New York: Harper & Row, 1995), 178. 16. Willis W. Harman et al., “Psychedelic Agents in Creative Problem-Solving: A Pilot Study,” Psychological Reports 19, no. 1 (August 1966): 211–27. 17.

Pete Carey, “A Start-Up’s True Tale,” San Jose Mercury News, December 1, 2001, http://pdp10.nocrew.org/docs/cisco.html. 4. Mike Wilson, The Difference between God and Larry Ellison (New York: Morrow, 1997), 99. 5. Mark Hall and John Barry, Sunburst: The Ascent of Sun Microsystems (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1990), 14. 6. Ibid., 16, 20–21. 7. John Markoff, “Russian Research Pact for Sun Microsystems,” New York Times, September 2, 1992. 8. Douglas Fairbairn and Andy Bechtolsheim, “Oral History of Andreas ‘Andy’ Bechtolsheim,” (Computer History Museum, July 17, 2015), 5. 9. Amy Harmon, “Like ‘Toy Story,’ Pixar Stock Is a Hit Its First Day on the Street,” Los Angeles Times, November 30, 1995. 10.


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The Lights in the Tunnel by Martin Ford

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black-Scholes formula, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, credit crunch, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, full employment, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, pattern recognition, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, technological singularity, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

Web: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7293992.stm 56 Blue Brain Project, Web: http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/ 57 Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics, Oxford University Press, 1989 and Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness, Oxford University Press, 1994. 58 For example: John Markoff, “Scientists worry that Machines may Outsmart Man”, New York Times, July 25, 2009. Web: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/science/26robot.html?em


pages: 743 words: 201,651

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrew Keen, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clapham omnibus, colonial rule, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, index card, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Open Library, Parler "social media", Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snapchat, social graph, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, trolley problem, Turing test, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Yochai Benkler, Yom Kippur War, yottabyte

See also Internet Society, ‘Brief History of the Internet’, http://perma.cc/SNY8-TYAE 20. Mueller 2004, 86 21. Berners-Lee 1999, chapters 2–4; see also the original website at http://perma.cc/MWR3-VASS 22. see ‘The End of Moore’s Law’, The Economist, 19 April 2015, http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2015/04/economist-explains-17 and John Markoff, ‘Smaller, Faster, Cheaper, Over’, New York Times, 27 September 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/27/technology/smaller-faster-cheaper-over-the-future-of-computer-chips.html. Note that Moore’s Law is variously cited as predicting that the number of transistors on a microchip will double every two years, or every 18 months, while he originally predicted that it would happen every year.

Note that the UN estimate includes some 775 million adults and 122 million illiterate youth 29. Shteyngart 2010 30. Kurzweil 2005 31. Weizenbaum 1984 and Carr 2010, 201–8 32. Ian Sample and Alex Hern, ‘Scientists Dispute Whether Computer ‘Eugene Goostman’ Passed Turing Test’, The Guardian, 9 June 2014, http://perma.cc/9YMC-LJW7 33. John Markoff et al., ‘For Sympathetic Ear, More Chinese Turn to Smartphone Program’, New York Times, 31 July 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/04/science/for-sympathetic-ear-more-chinese-turn-to-smartphone-program.html 34. see Future of Life Institute, ‘Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence: An Open Letter’, http://perma.cc/ZD2A-DP7E, and Martin Rees, ‘Cheer Up, the Post-Human Era Is Dawning’, Financial Times, 10 July 2015, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4fe10870-20c2-11e5-ab0f-6bb9974f25d0.html#axzz3qv6zRoSp 35. this is essentially also the conclusion of Wu 2013 36. on the often neglected subject of touch, see Linden 2015 37.


Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Peter Warren Singer, Emerson T. Brooking

4chan, active measures, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Comet Ping Pong, content marketing, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jacob Silverman, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral panic, new economy, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, post-materialism, Potemkin village, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, reserve currency, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social web, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, Upton Sinclair, Valery Gerasimov, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

., “Russia Used Hundreds of Fake Accounts to Tweet About Brexit, Data Shows,” The Guardian, November 14, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/14/how-400-russia-run-fake-accounts-posted-bogus-brexit-tweets. 143 less than 1 percent: Howard and Kollanyi, “Bots, #Strongerin, and #Brexit.” 143 roughly 400,000 bot accounts: Alessandro Bessi and Emilio Ferrara, “Social Bots Distort the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election Online Discussion,” First Monday 21, no. 11 (November 2016), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/7090/5653. 143 “colonized” pro-Clinton hashtags: John Markoff, “Automated Pro-Trump Bots Overwhelmed Pro-Clinton Messages, Researchers Say,” New York Times, November 17, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/technology/automated-pro-trump-bots-overwhelmed-pro-clinton-messages-researchers-say.html?nytmobile=0&_r=0. 143 five-to-one ratio: Bence Kollanyi, Philip N.

Awakening,” New York Times Magazine, December 14, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html. 249 “giant machine democracy”: Ibid. 249 Google Brain project: Quoc V. Le et al., “Building High-Level Features Using Large Scale Unsupervised Learning,” in Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Machine Learning (Edinburgh, 2012). 249 pictures of cats: John Markoff, “How Many Computers to Identity a Cat? 16,000,” New York Times, June 25, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/technology/in-a-big-network-of-computers-evidence-of-machine-learning.html. 249 “We never told it”: Ibid. 250 where to put the traffic lights: Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, “The Business of Artificial Intelligence,” Harvard Business Review, July 2017, https://hbr.org/2017/07/the-business-of-artificial-intelligence. 250 more than a million: Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, “Building Scalable Systems to Understand Content,” Facebook Code, February 2, 2017, https://code.facebook.com/posts/1259786714075766/building-scalable-systems-to-understand-content/. 250 wearing a black shirt: Ibid. 250 80 percent: “An Update on Our Commitment to Fight Violent Extremist Content Online,” Official Blog, YouTube, October 17, 2017, https://youtube.googleblog.com/2017/10/an-update-on-our-commitment-to-fight.html. 250 “attack scale”: Andy Greenberg, “Inside Google’s Internet Justice League and Its AI-Powered War on Trolls,” Wired, September 19, 2016, https://www.wired.com/2016/09/inside-googles-internet-justice-league-ai-powered-war-trolls/. 251 about 90 percent: Ibid. 251 thoughts of suicide: Vanessa Callison-Burch, Jennifer Guadagno, and Antigone Davis, “Building a Safer Community with New Suicide Prevention Tools,” Facebook Newsroom, March 1, 2017, https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/03/building-a-safer-community-with-new-suicide-prevention-tools/%20https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/03/building-a-safer-community-with-new-suicide-prevention-tools/. 251 database of facts: Jonathan Stray, “The Age of the Cyborg,” Columbia Journalism Review, Fall/Winter 2016, https://www.cjr.org/analysis/cyborg_virtual_reality_reuters_tracer.php. 251 managing the “trade-offs”: Kurt Wagner, “Facebook’s AI Boss: Facebook Could Fix Its Filter Bubble If It Wanted To,” Recode, December 1, 2016, https://www.recode.net/2016/12/1/13800270/facebook-filter-bubble-fix-technology-yann-lecun. 251 Their more advanced version: For a good overview, see “Cleverbot Data for Machine Learning,” Existor, accessed March 20, 2018, https://www.existor.com/products/cleverbot-data-for-machine-learning/. 252 machine-driven communications tools: Matt Chessen, “Understanding the Psychology Behind Computational Propaganda,” in Can Public Diplomacy Survive the Internet?


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

Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1990), 53. 5 Peace, Robots, and Technological Unemployment 1. This chapter borrows very substantially from a previously published article: Mark Walker, “BIG and Technological Unemployment: Chicken Little Versus the Economists,” Journal of Evolution & Technology 24, 1 (2014): 5–25. 2. John Markoff, “Skilled Work, Without the Worker,” New York Times, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/business/new-wave-of-adept-robots-is-changing-global-industr y. html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. 3. Ibid. 4. Timorthy Lee, “Amazon Envisions Eventually Delivering Packages in 30 Minutes via Drones,” The Washington Post, 2013, http://www. washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/12/01/amazonwants-to-deliver-packages-in-30-minutes-with-drones/. 5.


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

Figure 41 gives a few examples of captions that the trained Show and Tell system generated on test images—that is, images that were not in its training set. It’s hard not to be dazzled, and maybe a bit stunned, that a machine can take in images in the form of raw pixels and produce such accurate captions. That’s certainly how I felt when I first read about these results in The New York Times. The author of that article, the journalist John Markoff, wrote a careful description: “Two groups of scientists, working independently, have created artificial intelligence software capable of recognizing and describing the content of photographs and videos with far greater accuracy than ever before, sometimes even mimicking human levels of understanding.”26 FIGURE 41: Four (accurate) automatically produced captions from Google’s Show and Tell system Other journalists were not so restrained.


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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute-force_search 81 Chatbots fail to convince judges that they’re human, 2011. New Scientist. http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/10/turing-test-chatbots-kneel-bef.html 82 Did you Know?, Jeopardy! http://www.jeopardy.com/showguide/abouttheshow/showhistory/ 83 Computer Program to Take On ’Jeopardy!’, John Markoff, 2009. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/technology/27jeopardy.html 84 According to IBM, Watson is a workload optimised system designed for complex analytics, made possible by integrating massively parallel POWER7 processors and the IBM DeepQA software to answer Jeopardy!


pages: 237 words: 64,411

Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Jerry Kaplan

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, bank run, bitcoin, Bob Noyce, Brian Krebs, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, driverless car, drop ship, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flash crash, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, haute couture, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, information asymmetry, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, Satoshi Nakamoto, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, Turing test, Vitalik Buterin, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

I’m indebted to my friend Carl Hewitt, known for his early logic programming language Planner, for his eyewitness report on this incident. Carl is now board chair of the International Society for Inconsistency Robustness. Seriously, it’s a real topic. 3. Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Stanford University, “Jedibot—Robot Sword Fighting,” May 2011, http://youtu.be/Qo79MeRDHGs. 4. John Markoff, “Researchers Announce Advance in Image-Recognition Software,” New York Times, November 17, 2014, science section. 5. “Strawberry Harvesting Robot,” posted by meminsider, YouTube, November 30, 2010, http://youtu.be/uef6ayK8ilY. 6. For an amazingly insightful analysis of the effects of increased communication and decreased energy cost across everything from living cells to civilizations, see Robert Wright, Nonzero (New York: Pantheon 2000). 7.


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

Research that once required well-paid legal scholars to trawl through piles of legal documents can now be done by computers, unhampered by headaches or eyestrain. A large chemical company that recently unleashed its software on work done by its own legal staff in the 1980s and 1990s found an accuracy rate of only 60%. “Think about how much money had been spent to be slightly better than a coin toss,” reflected one of the former lawyers. See: John Markoff, “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software,” The New York Times (March 4, 2011). http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html 16. Warren G. Bennis first said this. Cited in: Mark Fisher, The Millionaire’s Book of Quotations (1991), p. 15. 17. Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A.


pages: 239 words: 56,531

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000. I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer.” 14 . See Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). 15 . See John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer (New York: Viking, 2005). For a broader sense of the California spiritual landscape, see Erik Davis, Visionary State (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2006). 16 . There is no book-length biography of Kay, although there should be.


pages: 239 words: 70,206

Data-Ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else by Steve Lohr

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bioinformatics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Carl Icahn, classic study, cloud computing, computer age, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, Emanuel Derman, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, impulse control, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, lifelogging, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, meta-analysis, money market fund, natural language processing, obamacare, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, RAND corporation, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, skunkworks, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tony Fadell, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, yottabyte

At the Times, several editors have—and still do—encourage my reporting in the field of data science, and its implications. They include Larry Ingrassia, Dean Murphy, Damon Darlin, Suzanne Spector, Joseph Plambeck, James Kerstetter, Quentin Hardy, David Gillen, Lon Teter, Thomas Kuntz, and David Corcoran. Conversations with Natasha Singer have sharpened my thinking on the subject of data and privacy. Then there is John Markoff, a science reporter these days; he and I have labored agreeably and often together in the data-laden precincts of business and science coverage for years. While I was on leave from the Times, Mark Hansen generously offered me office space to work in and travel from and an appointment as a research fellow at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation.


pages: 244 words: 66,599

Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything by Steven Levy

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Atkinson, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, General Magic , Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, information retrieval, information trail, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Pepsi Challenge, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, the medium is the message, Vannevar Bush

I've also benefited from expertise and advice from many other Macworld col leagues, beginning with editors-in-chief David Bunnell, Jerry Borrell, and Adrian Mello, and down through the masthead-sadly, too many names to list here. The manuscript benefited from comments by Deb orah Branscum, Teresa Carpenter, Andy Hertzfeld, Joanna Hoffman, Susan Kare, John Markoff, and Larry Tesler. Thanks, too, to my agent Flip Brophy for constant support; and to editor Pam Dorman, whose enthusiasm for the project lured me to Viking. And, as always, my gratitude and love to Teresa and Andrew Max. The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.


pages: 801 words: 209,348

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Tim Berners-Lee attributed: Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (San Francisco, Harper, 1999), 22–23. making Jobs a billionaire: John Markoff, “Apple Computer Co-Founder Strikes Gold with New Stock,” New York Times, November 30, 1995. Apple agreed to buy: Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 301. lose over $1 billion: Apple Computer Inc., Annual Report (Washington DC: Securities and Exchange Commission, 1997). $150 million from Microsoft: Michele Matassa Flores and Thomas W. Haines, “Microsoft, Apple Join Forces: Disbelief, Boos Greet Today’s Stunning Announcement at Macworld Expo,” Seattle Times, August 6, 1997. “I’d shut it down”: John Markoff, “Michael Dell Should Eat His Words, Apple Chief Suggests,” New York Times, January 16, 2006


Americana by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Tim Berners-Lee attributed: Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (San Francisco, Harper, 1999), 22–23. making Jobs a billionaire: John Markoff, “Apple Computer Co-Founder Strikes Gold with New Stock,” New York Times, November 30, 1995. Apple agreed to buy: Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 301. lose over $1 billion: Apple Computer Inc., Annual Report (Washington DC: Securities and Exchange Commission, 1997). $150 million from Microsoft: Michele Matassa Flores and Thomas W. Haines, “Microsoft, Apple Join Forces: Disbelief, Boos Greet Today’s Stunning Announcement at Macworld Expo,” Seattle Times, August 6, 1997. “I’d shut it down”: John Markoff, “Michael Dell Should Eat His Words, Apple Chief Suggests,” New York Times, January 16, 2006


Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization by Edward Slingerland

agricultural Revolution, Alexander Shulgin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Burning Man, classic study, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, Day of the Dead, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Drosophila, experimental economics, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, hive mind, invention of agriculture, John Markoff, knowledge worker, land reform, lateral thinking, lockdown, lone genius, meta-analysis, microdosing, Picturephone, placebo effect, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, search costs, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Zenefits

When attempting to explain the rise of Silicon Valley, where ideas and inventions that have thoroughly transformed the modern world were hatched, pundits typically cite the presence of Stanford University, or the mild climate capable of attracting bright people from all over the world. Less commonly mentioned, but probably no less important, is its proximity to America’s psychedelic epicenter, San Francisco. As the writers John Markoff and Michael Pollan have documented, psychedelics—primarily pharmaceutical-grade LSD provided by a mysterious, colorful figure named Al Hubbard—played a central role from the very beginning of Silicon Valley’s rise.22 Ampex, an innovative, but now mostly forgotten, Silicon Valley–based manufacturer of storage devices, has been dubbed the “world’s first psychedelic corporation” because of the weekly workshops and retreats it organized around LSD use in the 1960s.


pages: 252 words: 75,349

Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime-From Global Epidemic to Your Front Door by Brian Krebs

barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, cashless society, defense in depth, Donald Trump, drop ship, employer provided health coverage, independent contractor, information security, John Markoff, mutually assured destruction, offshore financial centre, operational security, payday loans, pirate software, placebo effect, ransomware, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stuxnet, the payments system, transaction costs, web application

The good news is that Internet and security experts have long understood how to block these extraordinarily powerful attacks. “Indeed, a number of computer security specialists pointed out that the attacks would have been impossible if the world’s major Internet firms simply checked that outgoing data packets truly were being sent by their customers, rather than botnets,” wrote John Markoff and Nicole Perlroth of the New York Times. The bad news is that little has changed since these ultra-powerful attacks first surfaced more than a decade ago, said Rodney Joffe, senior vice president and senior technologist at Neustar, a security company that also helps clients weather huge online attacks.


pages: 236 words: 77,098

I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted by Nick Bilton

3D printing, 4chan, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Cass Sunstein, death of newspapers, en.wikipedia.org, Internet of things, Joan Didion, John Gruber, John Markoff, Marshall McLuhan, Nicholas Carr, QR code, recommendation engine, RFID, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The future is already here

Special, Special, Special Thanks Danielle Bilton, for your patience, understanding, love, and baked goods. Special, Special Thanks This book would not have happened without the invaluable input from following people: David Carr, John Mahaney, Karen Blumenthal, Matthew Fishbane, Mark Hansen, Katinka Matson, John Brockman, Clay Shirky, Clive Thompson, Larry Ingrassia, Tom Bodkin, Mike Young, John Markoff, Tim O’Reilly, Sam Sifton, Hubert McCabe, Mark Bittman. New York Times Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Janet Robinson, Martin Nisenholtz, Bill Keller, John Geddes, Jill Abramson, Rick Berke, Damon Darlin, David Gallagher, Suzanne Spector, Michael Zimbalist, Ted Roden, Alexis Lloyd, Justin Ouellette, Patricia McSweeney, Amy Hyde, Susan Edgerly, Brian Stelter, Jenna Wortham, Jim Roberts, Doug Latino, Kelly Doe, Brad Stone, Ashlee Vance, Steve Lohr, Matt Richtel, Miguel Helft, Tim O’Brien, Claire Cain Miller, Michael Golden, Evan “Scoop” Sandhaus, Bill Cunningham, Glenn Kramon, Rob Larson, Rob Samuels, Kevin McKenna, and Fiona Spruill.


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

Stephen Hawking, “This Is the Most Dangerous Time for Our Planet,” The Guardian, December 1, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/01/stephen-hawking-dangerous-time-planet-inequality. 4. “The Onrushing Wave,” The Economist, January 18, 2014, https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21594264-previous-technological-innovation-has-always-delivered-more-long-run-employment-not-less. 5. For more, see John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots (New York: Harper Collins, 2015); Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (New York: Basic Books, 2016); and Ryan Avent, The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century (London: St.


pages: 296 words: 78,631

Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms by Hannah Fry

23andMe, 3D printing, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Brixton riot, Cambridge Analytica, chief data officer, computer vision, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Chrome, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, John Markoff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, ransomware, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, selection bias, self-driving car, Shai Danziger, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, sparse data, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, systematic bias, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, trolley problem, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web of trust, William Langewiesche, you are the product

Alan Ohnsman, ‘Bosch and Daimler to partner to get driverless taxis to market by early 2020s’, Forbes, 4 April 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2017/04/04/bosch-and-daimler-partner-to-get-driverless-taxis-to-market-by-early-2020s/#306ec7e63c4b. 16. Ford, Looking Further: Ford Will Have a Fully Autonomous Vehicle in Operation by 2021, https://corporate.ford.com/innovation/autonomous-2021.html. 17. John Markoff, ‘Should your driverless car hit a pedestrian to save your life?’, New York Times, 23 June 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/24/technology/should-your-driverless-car-hit-a-pedestrian-to-save-your-life.html. 18. Clive Thompson, Anna Wiener, Ferris Jabr, Rahawa Haile, Geoff Manaugh, Jamie Lauren Keiles, Jennifer Kahn and Malia Wollan, ‘Full tilt: when 100 per cent of cars are autonomous’, New York Times, 8 Nov. 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/08/magazine/tech-design-autonomous-future-cars-100-percent-augmented-reality-policing.html#the-end-of-roadkill. 19.


pages: 366 words: 76,476

Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking) by Christian Rudder

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data science, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, Frank Gehry, Howard Zinn, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Snow's cholera map, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, p-value, power law, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, race to the bottom, retail therapy, Salesforce, selection bias, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Twitter Arab Spring, two and twenty

all the analysis was done anonymously and in aggregate It bears repeating that at no time was any data tied back to any individual. For the user photos and text cited in the book see the notes above related to them. Jaron Lanier My discussion of Lanier’s work focuses on his article “How Should We Think About Privacy?” “Using data drawn from queries” See John Markoff, “Unreported Side Effects of Drugs Are Found Using Internet Search Data, Study Finds,” New York Times, March 7, 2013, nytimes.com/2013/03/07/science/unreported-side-effects-of-drugs-found-using-internet-data-study-finds.html. a crowdsourced family tree Geni.com reports more than 75 million entries in its tree.


pages: 261 words: 79,883

Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Black Swan, business cycle, commoditize, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, hiring and firing, John Markoff, low cost airline, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, Pepsi Challenge, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route

Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations. New York: Free Press, 2003. 116 Geoffrey Moore expanded on Rogers’s ideas to apply the principle to high-tech product marketing: Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm. New York: Collins, 2002. 122 In 1997, TiVo was racing to market with a remarkable new device: John Markoff, “Netscape Pioneer to Invest in Smart VCR,” New York Times, November 9, 1998, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0DE0D6133EF93AA35752C1A96E958260. 123 TiVo finally shipped in 1999: http://www.tivo.com/abouttivo/aboutushome/index.html. 123 TiVo sold about 48,000 units the first year: Roy Furchgott, “Don’t People Want to Control Their TV’s?”


pages: 426 words: 117,775

The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child by Morgan G. Ames

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Benjamin Mako Hill, British Empire, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, clean water, commoditize, computer age, digital divide, digital rights, Evgeny Morozov, fail fast, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, hype cycle, informal economy, Internet of things, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Minecraft, new economy, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, SimCity, smart cities, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Hackers Conference, Travis Kalanick

His hallway pitch for a hundred-dollar laptop garnered a brief blog mention by Travis Kalanick, who was attending the World Economic Forum as a “technology pioneer” (and would later start the ride-sharing platform Uber), but this mention was more due to Negroponte’s other accomplishments than his idea for a hundred-dollar laptop. New York Times technology journalist John Markoff took up Negroponte’s pitch in more depth but concluded that Negroponte had not been given more of an official platform because the forum had moved on from the ideal of closing the digital divide to solving more “fundamental” inequalities.5 This tone changed considerably the following November, when Negroponte took the stage at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis.


pages: 786 words: 195,810

NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Bletchley Park, crowdsourcing, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, hydroponic farming, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Larry Wall, megacity, meta-analysis, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, New Journalism, pattern recognition, placebo effect, scientific mainstream, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, the scientific method, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

As hard-core fans of science fiction, ham radio, and Japanese monster movies: “Spacewars and Beyond: How the Tech Model Railroad Club Changed the World,” Henry Jenkins. http://henryjenkins.org/2007/10/spacewars_and_beyond_how_the_t.html#sthash.vNI7iDoK.dpuf equal parts of “science, fiction, and science fiction”: Scientific Temperaments, p. 266. “Do the arithmetic or be doomed to talk nonsense”: “John McCarthy, 84, Dies; Computer Design Pioneer,” John Markoff. New York Times, Oct. 25, 2011. François Mitterrand, the president of France, visited her office: Jean Hollands, personal communication. Homebrew Computer Club: Ibid. a combination of Sherlock Holmes and A. J. Raffles: The Senior Class Book, compiled by the class of 1906, Cornell University, 1906, p. 147.

Computer History Museum, p. 2. http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102702231 He began to think of the basement as a holy sanctuary: Lee Felsenstein, personal communication. “I realized that I had made a mistake”: Lee Felsenstein, interview with the author, 2014. While McCarthy wanted to design machines: “An Interview with John Markoff: What the Dormouse Said.” Ubiquity, Aug. 2005. tools that would facilitate “conviviality”: Tools for Conviviality, Ivan Illich. Harper & Row, 1973. a programmer at a bustling commune: “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death among the Computer Bums,” Stewart Brand. Rolling Stone, Dec. 7, 1972.


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

Casey Newton’s newsletter, The Interface, helped me keep current with the daily torrent of Facebook news. I spent a lot of time in California working over the past three years, and I owe a lot to those who provided me with shelter and support. 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.

instant messages: Nicholas Carlson, “At Last—The Full Story of How Facebook Was Founded,” Business Insider, March 5, 2010; and “EXCLUSIVE: Mark Zuckerberg’s Secret IMs from College,” Business Insider, May 17, 2012. Aaron Greenspan: Besides personal interviews, Greenspan’s story is drawn from his book Authoritas: One Student’s Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era (Think Press, 2008); John Markoff, “Who Founded Facebook? A New Claim Emerges,” New York Times, September 1, 2007. “unfazed”: Matt Welsh blogged, “How I Almost Killed Facebook,” February 20, 2009. Harry Lewis: Alexis C. Madrigal, “Before It Conquered the World, Facebook Conquered Harvard,” The Atlantic, February 4, 2019.


pages: 362 words: 86,195

Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down the Internet by Joseph Menn

Brian Krebs, dumpster diving, fault tolerance, Firefox, John Markoff, Menlo Park, offshore financial centre, pirate software, plutocrats, popular electronics, profit motive, RFID, Silicon Valley, zero day

I was fortunate to be aided by many of the most able private researchers, not all of whom are paid for their work, including Joe Stewart, Rafal Rohozinski, Don Jackson, Jart Armin, Paul Ferguson, Avivah Litan, and Dmitri Alperovich. My fellow journalistic specialists also do an important service for followers like me and for the world at large. Among the very best are Brian Krebs, John Markoff, Jon Swartz, Byron Acohido, Kevin Poulsen, Kim Zetter, John Leyden, and Robert McMillan. I am grateful to my former colleagues at the Los Angeles Times, who supported my early reporting and allowed me a leave to write; my new friends at the Financial Times, who gave me time to finish; Lindsay Jones and others at PublicAffairs; my agent Jill Marsal; Chris Gaither, who served as an unpaid manuscript editor; and those close to me who dealt with my prolonged distraction and repeated absences.


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

The other person Snowden contacted was the journalist Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian, with whom Poitras collaborated. 3. That start-up is Narrative Science, a computer program that generates sports stories. Janet Paskin, “The Future of Journalism?,” Columbia Journalism Review (November/December 2010): 10. 4. John Markoff, “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software,” New York Times, March 5, 2011, A1. 5. See Janice Gross Stein’s book based on her Massey Lecture: Janice Gross Stein, The Cult of Efficiency (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2002). 6. Christopher Steiner, Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World (New York: Portfolio, 2012), 88. 7.


pages: 383 words: 81,118

Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms by David S. Evans, Richard Schmalensee

Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Andy Rubin, big-box store, business process, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disruptive innovation, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Lyft, M-Pesa, market friction, market microstructure, Max Levchin, mobile money, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Wayback Machine, winner-take-all economy

Much of this section is based on Daniel Roth, “Google’s Open Source Android OS Will Free the Wireless Web,” Wired, June 23, 2008, http://archive.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/16-07/ff_android?currentPage=all. 34. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had met Andy Rubin and heard about his mobile vision when Rubin gave a talk to an engineering class at Stanford in 2002. John Markoff, “I Robot: The Man Behind the Google Phone,” New York Times, November 4, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/technology/04google.html?pagewanted=all. 35. Vogelstein, Dogfight, 46–48. 36. Symbian was based on legacy PDA code. West and Wood, “Tradeoffs of Open Innovation Platform Leadership.”


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

Richard Stallman, “The GNU Project,” available online at http://www.gnu.org/gnu/ thegnuproject.html and in Chris Dibona et al, eds., Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 1999). 57. Ross, Strange Weather, p. 80. 58. From a telephone interview with Kevin Mitnick, cited in Taylor, Hackers, p. 57. For more details on the Mitnick story, see the following texts: Katie Hafner and John Markoff, Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier (New York: Touchstone, 1991); Tsu- Chapter 5 170 A British hacker named Dr-K hardens this sentiment into an explicit anticommercialism when he writes that “[c]orporations and government cannot be trusted to use computer technology for the benefit of ordinary people.”59 It is for this reason that the Free Software Foundation was established in 1985.


pages: 330 words: 83,319

The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder by Sean McFate

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, drone strike, escalation ladder, European colonialism, failed state, fake news, false flag, hive mind, index fund, invisible hand, John Markoff, joint-stock company, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, nuclear taboo, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technoutopianism, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero day, zero-sum game

See Matt Cox, “Congress Wants More Control of Special Ops Iron Man Suit,” Military.com, 29 April 2014, www.military.com/defensetech/2014/04/29/congress-wants-more-control-of-special-ops-iron-man-suit; Matthew Cox, “Industry: Iron Man Still Hollywood, Not Reality,” Military.com, 7 June 2018, www.military.com/daily-news/2014/04/22/industry-iron-man-still-hollywood-not-reality.html. 4. Rise of the robots: Matthew Rosenberg and John Markoff, “The Pentagon’s ‘Terminator Conundrum’: Robots That Could Kill on Their Own,” New York Times, 25 October 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/us/pentagon-artificial-intelligence-terminator.html; Kevin Warwick, “Back to the Future,” Leviathan, BBC News, 1 January 2000, http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/special_report/1999/12/99/back_to_the_future/kevin_warwick.stm. 5.


pages: 283 words: 81,376

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe by William Poundstone

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DeepMind, digital map, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Elon Musk, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, tech billionaire, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, Turing test

This promptly led to speculation that one of the billionaires was Musk. Others wondered how it was even possible for simulated beings to break out of their simulation. Journalist Sam Kriss complained that “the tech industry is moving into territory once cordoned off for the occult.” New York Times science writer John Markoff called the simulation hypothesis “basically a religious belief system in the Valley”—Silicon Valley, naturally. The Omphalos Scenario How has the simulation hypothesis gained such intellectual currency? Does it merit being taken even a little seriously? The answer has to do with the self-sampling assumption, and with a set of beliefs ingrained in contemporary culture.


pages: 317 words: 84,400

Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World by Christopher Steiner

23andMe, Ada Lovelace, airport security, Al Roth, algorithmic trading, Apollo 13, backtesting, Bear Stearns, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, delta neutral, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, dumpster diving, financial engineering, Flash crash, G4S, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, High speed trading, Howard Rheingold, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge economy, late fees, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, medical residency, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Narrative Science, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Sergey Aleynikov, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator

Paul Kedrosky and Dane Stangler, Financialization and Its Entrepreneurial Consequences, Kauffman Foundation Research Series, March 2011, http://www.kauffman.org/uploadedfiles/financialization_report_3-23-11.pdf. CHAPTER 10: THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THE ALGORITHMS AND THEIR CREATORS 1. “Algorithm Measures Human Pecking Order,” MIT Technology Review, December 21, 2011, http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27437/. 2. John Markoff, “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software,” New York Times, March 4, 2011. 3. Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Race against the Machine (Digital Frontier Press e-book, 2011). 4. Steve Lohr, “More Jobs Predicted for Machines, Not People,” New York Times, October 23, 2011. 5.


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

I’d even read a little note about it: The site has since been changed, but it was accessible as of June 2011 at http://www.google.com/corporate/datacenter/index.html; a copy is preserved here: http://kalanaonline.blogspot.com/2011/02/where-is-your-data-google-and-microsoft.html. Where Google had kept everything top secret: John Markoff and Saul Hansell, “Hiding in Plain Sight, Google Seeks More Power,” New York Times, June 14, 2006 (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/14/technology/14search.html). “It’s time to stop treating data centers like Fight Club”: Maggie Shiels, “Facebook Shares Green Data Centre Technology,” BBC News, April 8, 2011 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13010766).


pages: 291 words: 81,703

Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen

Amazon Mechanical Turk, behavioural economics, Black Swan, brain emulation, Brownian motion, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deliberate practice, driverless car, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Flynn Effect, Freestyle chess, full employment, future of work, game design, Higgs boson, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, Loebner Prize, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, P = NP, P vs NP, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, reshoring, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra

On the German population growing again, see Suzanne Daley and Nicholas Kulish, “Brain Drain Feared as German Jobs Lure Southern Europeans,” The New York Times, April 28, 2012. On job growth in services, see A. Michael Spence and Sandile Hlatshwayo, “The Evolving Structure of the American Economy and the Employment Challenge,” Council on Foreign Relations, March 2011. For one recent look at reshoring, see John Markoff, “Skilled Work, Without the Worker,” The New York Times, August 18, 2012. Chapter 10: Relearning Education For figures on K–12, see Stephanie Banchero and Stephanie Simon, “My Teacher is an App,” The Wall Street Journal, November 12, 2011. The point about stronger incentives for innovation I owe to Alex Tabarrok.


pages: 294 words: 81,292

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


pages: 295 words: 84,843

There's a War Going on but No One Can See It by Huib Modderkolk

AltaVista, ASML, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, call centre, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Google Chrome, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine translation, millennium bug, NSO Group, ransomware, Skype, smart meter, speech recognition, Stuxnet, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

Piet Hein Donner press conference on hacking of government websites YouTube, 3 September 2011. 3 The Switzerland of the Surveillance World Abdul Qadeer Khan Jaco Alberts, ‘De Nederlandse connectie met de islamitische bom’, de Volkskrant, 19 November 2011. BBC China vessel intercepted in Italy Robin Wright, ‘Ship Incident May Have Swayed Libya’, Washington Post, 1 January 2004. Iraqi communication systems attacked in 2003 John Markoff and Thom Shanker, ‘Halted ’03 Iraq Plan Illustrates [U.S] Fear of Cyberwar Risk’, The New York Times, 1 August 2009. Natanz and its centrifuges Kim Zetter, Counting down to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weapon, Broadway Books, 2015. Casualties resulting from Natanz operation Kim Zetter and Huib Modderkolk, ‘Revealed: How a secret Dutch mole aided the U.S.


Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks by Keith Houston

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, classic study, computer age, cuban missile crisis, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, means of production, Multics, packet switching, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, trade route, wikimedia commons

Ceruzzi, “The ‘Go-Go’ Years and the System/360, 1961–1975,” in A History of Modern Computing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 154. 6.J. Daintith and Oxford University Press, “Teletypewriter,” in Oxford Dictionary of Computing, Oxford Paperback Reference (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004), 529. 7.Ibid. 8.“Want to Take Your Teletype Around with You?” Computerworld, March 1968, 4. 9.John Markoff, “Outlook 2000: Technology & Media: Talking the Future With: Robert W. Taylor; An Internet Pioneer Ponders the Next Revolution,” New York Times, December 20, 1999. 10.Ibid. 11.S.Segaller, “Something Seductive,” in Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet (New York: TV Books, 1998), 69. 12.Sastri L.


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

Everyone was attending preachy “workshops” where a narrative about a mystical path to self-empowerment was reinforced. If you found it to be a load of claptrap you learned to keep quiet. It wasn’t worth the arguments. We like to pretend this phase of Silicon Valley culture didn’t happen, but it did. To my mind, this was a distinct period from the 1970s hippie/tech crossover, which was documented nicely in John Markoff’s book What the Dormouse Said. Well before the computer nerds showed up, California was already a center of “Eastern Religion.” There were Tibetan temples and Hindu ashrams. The wave of Eastern-influenced spiritual style was inescapable. During the wild early development of Virtual Reality, in the 1980s, I lived for a while in a faux Greek temple in the Berkeley hills built by friends of the radical dancer Isadora Duncan much earlier in the century.


pages: 678 words: 216,204

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Brownian motion, business logic, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, dark matter, desegregation, digital divide, East Village, Eben Moglen, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, game design, George Gilder, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kenneth Arrow, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, machine readable, Mahbub ul Haq, market bubble, market clearing, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, New Journalism, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, precautionary principle, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, random walk, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, software patent, spectrum auction, subscription business, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, work culture , Yochai Benkler

., "Evaluating Information and Communications Technology: Perspective for a Balanced Approach," Report to the Kellogg Foundation (December 17, 2001), http:// www.si.umich.edu/pne/kellogg/013.html. 132. Norman H. Nie and Lutz Ebring, "Internet and Society, A Preliminary Report," Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society, February 17, 2000, 15 (Press Release), ‹http://www.pkp.ubc.ca/bctf/Stanford_Report.pdf›. 133. Ibid., 42-43, tables CH-WFAM, CH-WFRN. 134. See John Markoff and A. Newer, "Lonelier Crowd Emerges in Internet Study," New York Times, February 16, 2000, section A, page 1, column 1. 135. Nie and Ebring, "Internet and Society," 19. 136. Amitai Etzioni, "Debating the Societal Effects of the Internet: Connecting with the World," Public Perspective 11 (May/June 2000): 42, also available at http:// www.gwu.edu/ ccps/etzioni/A273.html. 137.

., "Evaluating Information and Communications Technology: Perspective for a Balanced Approach," Report to the Kellogg Foundation (December 17, 2001), http:// www.si.umich.edu/pne/kellogg/013.html. 132. Norman H. Nie and Lutz Ebring, "Internet and Society, A Preliminary Report," Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society, February 17, 2000, 15 (Press Release), ‹http://www.pkp.ubc.ca/bctf/Stanford_Report.pdf›. 133. Ibid., 42-43, tables CH-WFAM, CH-WFRN. 134. See John Markoff and A. Newer, "Lonelier Crowd Emerges in Internet Study," New York Times, February 16, 2000, section A, page 1, column 1. 135. Nie and Ebring, "Internet and Society," 19. 136. Amitai Etzioni, "Debating the Societal Effects of the Internet: Connecting with the World," Public Perspective 11 (May/June 2000): 42, also available at http:// www.gwu.edu/ ccps/etzioni/A273.html. 137.


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: 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

From “Hack your car with OpenXC, a platform for modding Ford car computers,” by Dean Takahashi, VentureBeat, September 12, 2011, http://www.venturebeat.com/2011/09/12/hack-your-car-with-openxc-platform-for-modding-ford-car-computers/. SELF-DRIVING CARS “Google is working on cars that will drive themselves.” From “Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic,” by John Markoff, The New York Times, October 9, 2010. JOB GROWTH “Job growth will be led by health care…” From “Occupational Outlook Handbook: 2010-20 Projections,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, March 29, 2012, http://www.bls.gov/ooh/About/Projections-Overview.htm. Chapter 3. Everything is a service Our mission statement about treating people with respect and dignity is not just words but a creed we live by every day.


pages: 307 words: 90,634

Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil by Hamish McKenzie

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, business climate, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, connected car, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, megacity, Menlo Park, Nikolai Kondratiev, oil shale / tar sands, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Solyndra, South China Sea, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, Zenefits, Zipcar

On an ordinary workday, Wu leaves his apartment on the outskirts of Beijing at 7:40 A.M., walks fifteen minutes to a subway station, and takes a train to Zhongguancun, where his autonomous driving start-up, Uisee, is based. It’s a forty-five-minute ride, during which he reads business and technology books. (He had been reading the New York Times reporter John Markoff’s history of AI, Machines of Loving Grace.) After getting off the train, Wu takes his bike out of a locker and rides the remaining twenty minutes to Uisee’s office, which, when I visited, was in a shared working space on the fifteenth floor of a building that once housed stores selling cheap electronics.


Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made by Andy Hertzfeld

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Atkinson, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, General Magic , HyperCard, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Mitch Kapor, Paul Graham, reality distortion field, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine

Tom Petrie, one of the two principals at Thunderware (the other was Victor Bull, who I worked with on my first project for Apple, the Silentype thermal printer), arranged a few demos for various computer magazines in hopes of currying favorable reviews to promote the product. On October 11th, 1984, I drove with Tom to an office in Hillsborough, just south of San Francisco, to demonstrate Thunderscan for Byte magazine. The Byte reviewer was John Markoff, a technology scribe for the San Francisco Chronicle and one of the best reporters covering the personal computer industry. Tom described Thunderscan while I set up the demo and started scanning. John asked a few questions, taking notes with his IBM PC, which was running a character-based text editor I viewed with the typical pious disdain of a Macintosh purist.


pages: 319 words: 90,965

The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere by Kevin Carey

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon-based life, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, declining real wages, deliberate practice, discrete time, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, informal economy, invention of the printing press, inventory management, John Markoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, Network effects, open borders, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush

Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, For Profit Higher Education: The Failure to Safeguard the Federal Investment and Ensure Student Success, July 30, 2012, http://www.help.senate.gov/imo/media/for_profit_report/PartI-PartIII-SelectedAppendixes.pdf. the average sticker price of attending a public four-year university increased by roughly 80 percent: College Board, Trends in College Pricing 2013. 6: THUNDER LIZARDS he came across an article: John Markoff, “Computer Visionary Who Invented the Mouse,” New York Times, July 3, 2013. he finished a PhD in electrical engineering: Doug Engelbart Institute, “Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart Curriculum Vitae,” http://dougengelbart.org/about/cv.html. In handwritten notes summarizing his speech: Doug Engelbart, “Augmented Man, and a Search for Perspective,” Stanford Research Institute, December 16, 1960.


pages: 474 words: 87,687

Stealth by Peter Westwick

Berlin Wall, centre right, computer age, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, fixed-gear, friendly fire, Haight Ashbury, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, knowledge economy, machine translation, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, Teledyne, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, white flight

Innovation and Enterprise in the National Security State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univesity Press, 2014), 7. On MITI: Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925–1975 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,1982). 11 For an example of military support leading to the personal computer: John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer (New York: Penguin Books, 2005). On the internet: Arthur L. Norberg and Judy O’Neill, Transforming Computer Technology: Information Processing for the Pentagon, 1962–1986 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). 12 See the various contributions in John Griffin, ed., Pioneers of Stealth (Morrisville, NC: Lulu.com, 2017). 13 Sherman Mullin in Griffin, Pioneers of Stealth, 250.


pages: 332 words: 93,672

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

A pithy introduction to the technology of machine learning is Yaser S. Abu-Mostafa, Malik Magdon-Ismail, Tsuan-Tien Lin, Learning from Data: A Short Course (AMLbook.com). Abu-Mostafa introduced me to his mastery of machine learning in a fascinating dinner at the Caltech Athenaeum in February 2013. 5. John Markoff, “How Many Computers to Identify a Cat? 16,000,” New York Times, June 25, 2012. 6. Claude Elwood Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” published in the Bell Systems Technical Journal in October 1948 and available in N. J. A. Sloane, Aaron D. Wyner, edits, Shannon Collected Papers (Piscataway, N.J.: IEEE Press, 1993), section 12: “Equivocation and Channel Capacity,” 33. 7. 


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

“The Inside Story on LA Schools’ iPad Rollout: ‘A Colossal Disaster.’” Hechinger Report, September 30, 2013. Konnikova, Maria. “Will MOOCs Be Flukes?” New Yorker, November 7, 2014. Lewin, Tamar. “After Setbacks, Online Courses Are Rethought.” New York Times, December 10, 2013. Lewin, Tamar, and John Markoff. “California to Give Web Courses a Big Trial.” New York Times, January 15, 2013. McNeish, Joanne, Mary Foster, Anthony Francescucci, and Bettina West. “Exploring e-Book Adopters’ Resistance to Giving Up Paper.” International Journal of the Book, 2014. ———. “The Surprising Foil to Online Education: Why Students Won’t Give Up Paper Textbooks.”


pages: 347 words: 97,721

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Thomas H. Davenport, Julia Kirby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Amazon Robotics, Andy Kessler, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, commoditize, conceptual framework, content marketing, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, flying shuttle, follow your passion, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, game design, general-purpose programming language, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Hans Lippershey, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial robot, information retrieval, intermodal, Internet of things, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, precariat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, speech recognition, spinning jenny, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, tech worker, TED Talk, the long tail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, revised and expanded edition (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010). 6. Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, 3rd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2011). 7. Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer, “Emotional Intelligence,” Imagination, Cognition and Personality 9, no. 3 (March 1990): 185–211. 8. John Markoff, “Skilled Work, Without the Worker,” New York Times, August 18, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/business/new-wave-of-adept-robots-is-changing-global-industry.html?_r=0. 9. Michigan News, “Empathy: College Students Don’t Have as Much as They Used To,” May 27, 2010, http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/7724-empathy-college-students-don-t-have-as-much-as-they-used-to. 10.


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

They are-Accusation 0. that I am ignorant; Accusation 1. that I am lying or exaggerating about what I’ve worked on, or claim to have thought of early; Accusation 2. that backers have lost a lot of money on me; Accusation 3. that even with resources and leverage, I could not have done anything I was attempting; Accusation 4. that the Xanadu project was an incoherent, “Utopian,”1 “Quixotic,”2 impossible idea. 1 2 Tim Berners-Lee. John Markoff. All these accusations are false. I will go over them one at a time. Accusation 0. Was He Ignorant? -- What Did He Know and When Did He Know It? -- And How Could He Possibly Have Known? “What did he know and when did he know it?” That’s what they asked about Richard Nixon in the Watergate days.


pages: 344 words: 96,690

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff

business process, call centre, centre right, citizen journalism, crowdsourcing, demand response, Donald Trump, estate planning, Firefox, folksonomy, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, off-the-grid, Parler "social media", Salesforce, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, social bookmarking, social intelligence, Streisand effect, the long tail, Tony Hsieh

He’s been logged into the forum for over 473,000 minutes, the equivalent of 123 working days a year: Dell representatives provided us with these statistics on Predator’s time spent and postings on the Dell community forum. 6. Caterina Fake, cofounder of the photo-sharing site Flickr, called it “the culture of generosity”: See, for example, “Web Content by and for the Masses” by John Markoff, New York Times, June 29, 2005, visible at http://forr.com/gsw8-6. 7. We call it the search for psychic income: The term psychic income—meaning nonmonetary compensation—entered the lexicon through the work of the economists F. A. Fetter and Irving Fisher in the 1920s. In the groundswell it becomes a crucial form of currency.


pages: 418 words: 102,597

Being You: A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth

AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, backpropagation, carbon-based life, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, Filter Bubble, GPT-3, GPT-4, John Markoff, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Plato's cave, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, speech recognition, stem cell, systems thinking, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, TikTok, Turing test

When the chatbot won: ‘Eugene Goostman is a real boy – the Turing Test says so’, Guardian Pass notes, 9 June 2014. See https://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2014/jun/09/eugene-goostman-turing-test-computer-program. the humans failed: The description of the Turing test as a test of ‘human gullibility’ comes from a 2015 New York Times article by John Markoff, ‘Software is smart enough for SAT, but still far from intelligent’, New York Times, 21 September 2015. See www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/technology/personaltech/software-is-smart-enough-for-sat-but-still-far-from-intelligent.html. vast artificial neural network: GPT stands for ‘Generative Pre-trained Transformer’ – a type of neural network specialised for language prediction and generation.


pages: 362 words: 97,288

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

Just One Thing Might Stand in Their Way,” MIT Technology Review, December 19, 2018, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612598/chinas-tech-giants-want-to-go-global-just-one-thing-might-stand-in-their-way/. 199“sheds with beds”: Citi GPS and Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment, Technology at Work v. 3.0: Automating E-commerce from Click to Pick to Door, Global Perspectives and Solutions (Citigroup, 2017), 83. 202synergy of software trains and compact neighborhoods: John Markoff, “Urban Planning Guru Says Driverless Cars Won’t Fix Congestion,” New York Times, October 27, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/27/technology/driverless-cars-congestion.html. 202Switzerland’s Les Vergers Ecoquartier: “Venir aux Verges,” Les Vergers Ecoquartier, accessed May 23, 2019, https://www.lesvergers-meyrin. ch/ecoquartier/venir-aux-vergers. 202Micromobility, as this emerging sector is called: Joe Cortright, “What Drives Ride-Hailing: Parking, Drinking, Flying, Peaking, Pricing,” City Commentary, February 19, 2018, http://cityobservatory.org/what-drives-ride-hailing-parking-drinking-flying-peaking-pricing/; under-five-mile journeys: “Disrupting the Car: How Shared Cars, Bikes, Scooters, Are Reshaping Transportation and Cannibalizing Car Ownership,” CB Insights Research Briefs, September 5, 2018, https://www.cbinsights.com/research/disrupting-cars-car-sharing-scooters-ebikes/. 202more rides via its Jump bike-share: Tony Bizjack, “What’s More Popular Than Uber?


pages: 464 words: 155,696

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender, Rick Tetzeli

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, Byte Shop, Charles Lindbergh, computer age, corporate governance, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, market design, McMansion, Menlo Park, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, planned obsolescence, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Stephen Fry, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

When one councilwoman tried to joke with him that perhaps the city should get free Wi-Fi in return for approving the move, Steve said, “Well, you know, I’m kind of old-fashioned. I believe that we pay taxes, and that the city then gives us services.” Over the last few months, a steady flow of visitors came by the house in Palo Alto. Bill Clinton came to visit, as did President Obama, for dinner with a select group of Silicon Valley leaders. John Markoff, of the New York Times, and Steven Levy, who had written several books about Silicon Valley, including ones about the development of the Macintosh and the iPod, dropped by together to pay their respects. Bill Gates wound up spending four hours with Steve one afternoon. “Steve and I will always get more credit than we deserve, because otherwise the story’s too complicated,” Gates says.


pages: 696 words: 143,736

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, fudge factor, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, information retrieval, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, ought to be enough for anybody, pattern recognition, phenotype, punch-card reader, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

Phenomenology and Existentialism: An Introduction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984. Guillen, Michael. Bridges to Infinity: The Human Side of Mathematics. Los Angeles: Jeremy P Tarcher, 1983. Guthrie, W K. C. A History of Greek Philosophy. 6 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962-1981. Hafner, Katie and John Markoff. Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991. Halberstam, David. The Next Century. New York: William Morrow, 1991. Hameroff, Stuart R., Alfred W Kaszniak, and Alwyn C. Scott, eds. Toward a Science of Consciousness: The First Tucson Discussions and Debates.


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

Federal agents tailed the people at the meeting back to Stanley and his lab in Orinda, California; during the bust, they reportedly found 350,000 doses of LSD. * The two best accounts of the counterculture’s (and its chemicals’) influence on the computer revolution are Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) and John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Penguin Books, 2005). * Leary wrote in Flashbacks that he was initially frightened to take psilocybin in a prison with violent criminals. When he confessed his fear to one of the prisoners, the inmate admitted he was afraid too.


pages: 495 words: 144,101

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apollo 11, bank run, barriers to entry, centralized clearinghouse, collective bargaining, creative destruction, desegregation, feminist movement, financial independence, gentleman farmer, George Gilder, Herbert Marcuse, invisible hand, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, side project, Stewart Brand, The Chicago School, The Wisdom of Crowds, union organizing, urban renewal, We are as Gods, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog

Rand may also have inspired Brand’s later insistence that his hippy partners become comfortable with money and overcome their guilt about using it to reform the world. For libertarian and counterculture connections to cyberspace, see Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Viking Penguin, 2005). Rand’s intersection with the computer culture is noted in Christopher Hitchens, “Why So Many High-Tech Executives Have Declared Allegiance to Randian Objectivism,” Business 2.0, August/September 2001, 129–32, and is surely worth further exploration. 49.


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

Harpaz, N.H. Shah, W. DuMouchel and E. Horvitz, “Toward enhanced pharmacovigilance using patient-generated data on the Internet,” Journal of Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics 96, no. 2 (August 2014): 239–46. 12 “All Things Considered,” NPR Radio, aired 8 April 2015. 13 Slang for “Internet” 14 John Markoff, “Computer wins on ‘Jeopardy!’: Trivial, It’s Not!” New York Times, 16 February 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/science/17jeopardy-watson.html. 15 Irana Ivanova, “IBM’s Watson joins Genome Center to cure cancer,” Crain’s New York Business, 19 March 2014, http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20140319/HEALTH_CARE/140319845/ibmswatson-joins-genome-center-to-cure-cancer. 16 p53 is often called a “tumour suppressor protein structure” because of its role in defending the body against the formation of cancer cells. 17 Ian Steadman, “IBM’s Watson is better at diagnosing cancer than human doctors,” Wired, 11 February 2013, http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/11/ibm-watson-medical-doctor. 18 “IBM and Partners to Transform Person Health with Watson and Open Cloud,” IBM Press Release, 13 April 2015, https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/46580.wss. 19 Friction here refers to the user workload required to use the software.


pages: 359 words: 110,488

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bioinformatics, corporate governance, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, Google Chrome, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, obamacare, Ponzi scheme, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Travis Kalanick, ubercab, Wayback Machine

Theranos filed its fourteen-page complaint: Theranos Inc. v. Avidnostics Inc., No. 1-07-cv-093-047, California Superior Court in Santa Clara, complaint filed on August 27, 2007, 12–14. The technique was not new: Anthony K. Campbell, “Rainbow Makers,” Chemistry World, June 1, 2003. 3. APPLE ENVY In January of that year: John Markoff, “Apple Introduces Innovative Cellphone,” New York Times, January 9, 2007. One of them was Ana Arriola: Ana used to be a man named George. She transitioned from male to female after she worked at Theranos. “We have lost sight of our business objective”: Email with the subject line “IT” sent by Justin Maxwell to Ana Arriola in the early morning hours of September 20, 2007.


pages: 344 words: 104,077

Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together by Thomas W. Malone

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asperger Syndrome, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, business process, call centre, carbon tax, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, happiness index / gross national happiness, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Rulifson, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, Lyft, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, prediction markets, price mechanism, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Coase, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Ng, “Building High-Level Features Using Large Scale Unsupervised Learning,” in Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Machine Learning, ed. John Langford and Joelle Pineau (Edinburgh, Scotland: Omnipress, 2012), http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en/us/pubs/archive/38115.pdf; John Markoff, “How Many Computers to Identify a Cat? 16,000,” New York Times, June 25, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/technology/in-a-big-network-of-computers-evidence-of-machine-learning.html. 20. James Randerson, “How Many Neurons Make a Human Brain? Billions Fewer Than We Thought,” Guardian, February 28, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2012/feb/28/how-many-neurons-human-brain; Federico A.


pages: 422 words: 104,457

Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance by Julia Angwin

AltaVista, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Graeber, Debian, disinformation, Edward Snowden, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, incognito mode, informal economy, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, medical residency, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, prediction markets, price discrimination, randomized controlled trial, RFID, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, sparse data, Steven Levy, Tragedy of the Commons, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

In 1996, however, the government dropped: Phil Zimmermann, “Significant Moments in PGP’s History: Zimmermann Case Dropped” philzimmermann.com (personal blog), January 12, 1996, http://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/news/PRZ_case_dropped.html. And in 1999, the United States dropped: Jeri Clausing, “White House Eases Export Controls on Encryption,” New York Times, September 17, 1999, http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/09/biztech/articles/17encrypt.html. It developed the “Clipper chip” to encrypt: John Markoff, “Technology; Wrestling over the Key to the Codes,” New York Times, May 9, 1993, http://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/09/business/technology-wrestling-over-the-key-to-the-codes.html. copies of the encryption keys: Steven Levy, “Battle of the Clipper Chip,” New York Times, June 12, 1994, http://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/12/magazine/battle-of-the-clipper-chip.html?


pages: 385 words: 101,761

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, declining real wages, demographic dividend, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, game design, gamification, gentrification, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gruber, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lone genius, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Minsky moment, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, reshoring, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The Myth of the Rational Market, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, We are the 99%, Y Combinator, young professional, Zipcar

ZDNet, February 8, 2002, accessed September 5, 2012, http://www.zdnet.com/news/ will-merger-hurt-hps-printing-biz/120630. 197 About 300 million have been: HP release, “Twenty Years of Innovation,” http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/ press_kits/2008/deskjet20/ bg_deskjet20thannivtimeline.pdf. 197 In 2011, HP’s Imaging: Ibid. 197 A month before: Robinson and Stern, Corporate Creativity, 165. 197 He wandered into the calligraphy: Steve Jobs, text and video of Stanford commencement address, June 12, 2005, posted on the Stanford Report, June 14, 2005, accessed September 4, 2012, http://news.stanford.edu/news/ 2005/june15/jobs-061505.html. 198 Without Peggy Guggenheim: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Jackson_Pollock; http://totallyhistory.com/jackson-pollock/, accessed September 5, 2012. 198 in Long Island where his Drip paintings: http://totallyhistory.com/jackson-pollock/, accessed September 5, 2012. 198 Guggenheim also introduced: Helen Gent, “Peggy Guggenheim, Mistress of Modernism,” Marie Claire, June 19, 2009, accessed September 5, 2012, http://au.lifestyle.yahoo.com/marie-claire/ features/life-stories/article/-/5869429/peggy-guggenheim-mistress-of-modernism/. 198 Of course, Guggenheim played: Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 96–97. 198 More recently, Stanford University: Liz Gannes, “Stanford Professors Launch Coursera with $16M from Kleiner Perkins and NEA,” All Things D, April 18, 2012, accessed September 5, 2012, http://allthingsd.com/20120418/ stanford-professors-launch-coursera-with-16m -from-kleiner-perkins-and-nea/; John Markoff, “Online Education Venture Lures Cash Infusion and Deals with 5 Top Universities,” New York Times, April 18, 2012, accessed September 5, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/ 04/18/technology/coursera-plans- to-announce-university-partners-for-online-classes.html. 198 one of two VCs who invested: Markoff, “Online Education Venture.” 198 In December 2009, Jesse Genet: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ lumi/lumi-co-a-new-textile-printing-technology, accessed September 5, 2012. 199 a printing system based: Morgan Furst, Q&A with Jesse Genet, Source 4 Style, December 22, 2011, accessed September 5, 2012, http://www.source4style.com/trends/the-academy/ qa-with-jesse-genet-printing-with-light/; http://lumi.co/, accessed September 5, 2012. 199 Angoulvant needed $50,000: http://lumi.co/collections/kickstarter, accessed September 5, 2012; http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ lumi/print-on-fabric-using-sunlight-the-lumi-process, accessed September 5, 2012. 199 Eddie Huang was a twenty-three-year-old: Baohaus story based on interviews with Evan Huang; Fresh Off the Boat, Eddie Huang’s blog, http://thepopchef.blogspot.com/; New York magazine, accessed September 8, 2012, Salon, January 19, 2011; http://www.baohausnyc.com/about.html, accessed September 5, 2012. 200 the small meat-filled buns: Joe DiStefano, “A First Look at Baohaus (in Which I Learn I Fit the Profile), January 11, 2012, accessed September 5, 2012, http://newyork.seriouseats.com/2010/01/ a-first-look-at-baohaus-review-lower-east-side-manhattan-new.html; http://www.baohausnyc.com/about.html, accessed September 5, 2012. 200 Huang wanted to call: Evan Huang, interviews with the author, spring 2012. 200 Eddie’s father may have been: “The Year of Asian Hipster Cuisine,” New York magazine “Grub Street,” July 8, 2012, accessed September 5, 2012, http://newyork.grubstreet.com/2012/ 07/asian_hipster_cuisine.html. 200 Luckily, several of Eddie: Evan Huang, interviews with the author, spring 2012. 201 They arrived in 2009: interviews with Huang, spring 2012; http://thepopchef.blogspot.com/search?


pages: 374 words: 111,284

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

An observed phenomenon is described as a “law” and conclusions that must “inevitably” follow are drawn. Often such assertions rest on flimsy, if not nonexistent, foundations. Disappointment and disillusion are the “inevitable” result. Indeed, some good judges think that the pace of AI advances may recently have slowed down. This is the view of John Markoff, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist. He was struck by the disappointing performance of the robots entered into the DARPA Robotics Challenge in June 2015. Markoff claims that there has been no profound technological innovation since the invention of the smartphone in 2007.23 Technological underperformance There are serious doubts about just how capable robots and AI will really be.


pages: 419 words: 109,241

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

Aaron Smith and Janna Anderson, “AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs: Key Findings,” Pew Research Center, 6 August 2014, available at http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/08/06/future-of-jobs/ (accessed August 2018).   3.  See, for instance, Erik Brynjolfsson and Tom Mitchell, “What Can Machine Learning Do? Workforce Implications,” Science 358, no 6370 (2017).   4.  John Markoff, “How Many Computers to Identify a Cat? 16,000,” New York Times, 25 June 2012.   5.  Jeff Yang, “Internet Cats Will Never Die,” CNN, 2 April 2015.   6.  Colin Caines, Florian Hoffman, and Gueorgui Kambourov, “Complex-Task Biased Technological Change and the Labor Market,” International Finance Division Discussion Papers 1192 (2017).   7.  


The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot by Yolande Strengers, Jenny Kennedy

active measures, Amazon Robotics, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Boston Dynamics, cloud computing, cognitive load, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, cyber-physical system, data science, deepfake, Donald Trump, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, game design, gender pay gap, Grace Hopper, hive mind, Ian Bogost, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, Masayoshi Son, Milgram experiment, Minecraft, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Turing test, Wall-E, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

Many social robotic projects have been funded by government military programs, which are interested in robots that can serve in the hypermasculine defense sector (Robertson, “Gendering Humanoid Robots”). While efforts to create the smart warrior provide a fascinating subplot to the smart wife, this is not something we delve into here. 7. John Markoff, “What Comes after the Roomba?,” New York Times, October 21, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/21/business/what-comes-after-the-roomba.html. 8. Steffen Sorrell, Consumer Robotics ~ From Housekeeper to Friend (Basingstoke: Juniper Research, 2017), http://www.juniperresearch.com. 9. Katelyn Swift-Spong, Elaine Short, Eric Wade, and Maja J.


Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Thanks to the many dedicated journalists with whom we have collaborated, and in particular Colin Freeze, Mark Harrison, Joseph Menn, Barton Gellman, Ellen Nakashima, Irina Borogan, Andrei Soldatov, Andy Greenberg, Robert Steiner, Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, Jeremy Wagstaff, Dave Seglins, Noah Shachtman, Shane Harris, Ryan Tate, Trevor Timm, David Walmsley, Avi Asher-Schapiro, Joseph Cox, Chris Bing, Nathan VanderKlippe, Glenn Greenwald, Robert McMillan, John Markoff, Mark MacKinnon, Nahlah Ayed, Josh Rogin, Ronen Bergman, Suzanne Smalley, Michael Isikoff, Raphael Satter, Nicole Perlroth, Eva Dou, Thomas Brewster, Kim Zetter, Sandro Contenta, Mehul Srivastava, Zack Whittaker, Kate Allen, Amy Goodman, and Stephanie Kirchgaessner. Special thanks to Eric Sears and John Palfrey at the MacArthur Foundation, Vera Franz and Hannah Draper at OSF, Jenny Toomey, Lori McGlinchey, Alberto Cerda Silva, Matt Mitchell, and Michael Brennan at the Ford Foundation, Eli Sugarman and Patrick Collins at the Hewlett Foundation, Laurent Elder, Ruhiya Seward, Matthew Smith, and Phet Sayo at IDRC, Adam Lynn and Libby Liu at OTF, Michael Madnick at Mountain, and the Oak Foundation and Sigrid Rausing Trust.


pages: 405 words: 105,395

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator by Keith Houston

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, classic study, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Grace Hopper, human-factors engineering, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, machine readable, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Neil Armstrong, off-by-one error, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert X Cringely, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Home Computer Revolution, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, V2 rocket, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

Cortada, “How the IBM PC Won, Then Lost, the Personal Computer Market,” IEEE Spectrum, July 21, 2021, https://spectrum.ieee.org/how-the-ibm-pc-won-then-lost-the-personal-computer-market. 33 Dan Bricklin, “National Computer Conference,” Software Arts and VisiCalc, accessed January 20, 2022, http://www.bricklin.com/history/saincc.htm. 34 Fylstra, “Creation and Destruction of VisiCalc,” 8–9; Jennings, “VisiCalc 1979 (Part 3).” 35 Campbell-Kelly and Ceruzzi, “Interview with Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston,” 28. 36 Campbell-Kelly and Ceruzzi, “Interview with Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston,” 21–22; Jennings, “VisiCalc 1979 (Part 3).” 37 Campbell-Kelly and Ceruzzi, “Interview with Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston,” 28. 38 Jennings, “VisiCalc 1979 (Part 3)”; Dan Bricklin, “The First Product,” Software Arts and VisiCalc, accessed January 21, 2022, http://www.bricklin.com/history/saiproduct1.htm. 39 Licklider, “Ten Years of Rows and Columns,” 327. 40 Bricklin, “Ben Rosen’s Reaction.” 41 Robert E. Ramsdell, “The Power of VisiCalc,” BYTE 5, no. 11 (November 1980): 192; John Markoff, “Radio Shack: Set Apart from the Rest of the Field,” InfoWorld, July 5, 1982, 43. 42 Gregg Williams and Rob Moore, “The Apple Story,” BYTE, January 1985, 174. 43 Robert X. Cringely, Accidental Empires (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1991), 71. 44 Mary Brandel, “PC Software Transforms the PC,” Computerworld, August 2, 1999. 45 Tim Bajarin, “The Application That Birthed The IBM PC,” Forbes, August 18, 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/timbajarin/2021/08/18/the-application-that-birthed-the-ibm-pc/. 46 John F.


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

Humphreys, “Legalizing Lawlessness: On Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception,” European Journal of International Law 17, no. 3 (2006): 677–87, https://doi.org/10.1093/ejil/chl020. 35. Levy, In the Plex, 83–85. 36. Levy, 86–87 (italics mine). 37. See Lee, “Postcards.” 38. Lee. 39. Lee. 40. Auletta, Googled. 41. John Markoff and G. Pascal Zachary, “In Searching the Web, Google Finds Riches,” New York Times, April 13, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/13/business/in-searching-the-web-google-finds-riches.html. 42. Peter Coy, “The Secret to Google’s Success,” Bloomberg.com, March 6, 2006, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2006-03-05/the-secret-to-googles-success (italics mine). 43.

See Matt Marshall, “Spying on Startups,” Mercury News, November 17, 2002. 73. Marshall, “Spying on Startups.” 74. Mark Williams Pontin, “The Total Information Awareness Project Lives On,” MIT Technology Review, April 26, 2006, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/405707/the-total-information-awareness-project-lives-on. 75. John Markoff, “Taking Spying to Higher Level, Agencies Look for More Ways to Mine Data,” New York Times, February 25, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/25/technology/25data.html. 76. Inside Google, “Lost in the Cloud: Google and the US Government,” Consumer Watchdog, January 2011, insidegoogle.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/GOOGGovfinal012411.pdf. 77.


pages: 566 words: 163,322

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency peg, dark matter, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, Gini coefficient, global macro, Goodhart's law, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, hype cycle, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Internet of things, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, New Economic Geography, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open immigration, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population

Displacement and Job Creation,” World Bank, 2014. 11 BCA Research, “The End of Europe’s Welfare State,” Weekly Report, June 26, 2015. 12 Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?,” Oxford University Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology, September 17, 2013. 13 David Rotman, “How Technology Is Destroying Jobs,” MIT Technology Review, June 12, 2013. 14 John Markoff, “The Next Wave,” Edge, July 16, 2015. Chapter 2: The Circle of Life 1 Fareed Zakaria, The Post-American World and the Rise of the Rest (New York: Norton, 2008). 2 Jonathan Wheatley, “Brazil’s Leader Blames White People for Crisis,” Financial Times, March 27, 2009. 3 Global Emerging Markets Equity Team, “Tales from the Emerging World: The Myths of Middle-Class Revolution,” Morgan Stanley Investment Management, July 16, 2013. 4 “The Quest for Prosperity,” Economist, May 15, 2007. 5 Saeed Naqvi, “A Little Left of Self Interest,” The Friday Times, June 26, 2015. 6 William Easterly, The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (New York: Basic Books, 2014).


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

Learning Deep Architectures for AI,* by Yoshua Bengio (Now, 2009), is a brief introduction to deep learning. The problem of error signal diffusion in backprop is described in “Learning long-term dependencies with gradient descent is difficult,”* by Yoshua Bengio, Patrice Simard, and Paolo Frasconi (IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, 1994). “How many computers to identify a cat? 16,000,” by John Markoff (New York Times, 2012), reports on the Google Brain project and its results. Convolutional neural networks, the current deep learning champion, are described in “Gradient-based learning applied to document recognition,”* by Yann LeCun, Léon Bottou, Yoshua Bengio, and Patrick Haffner (Proceedings of the IEEE, 1998).


pages: 390 words: 109,870

Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World by Jamie Bartlett

Andrew Keen, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, brain emulation, Californian Ideology, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, gig economy, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, life extension, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, off grid, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, QR code, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rosa Parks, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the long tail, Tragedy of the Commons

* Openness is also thought to be a good predictor of creativity, which is why LSD is so often associated with music. Steve Jobs said taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he’d ever done. (The interesting overlaps between the early computer scene and psychedelics are brilliantly documented in John Markoff’s 2005 book What the Dormouse Said.) * At the very least, there may be some kind of two-way relationship: People with higher levels of openness, or more open to the prospects of self-development, appear to get more out of their experience; and the more people get out of their experience, the more open they become.


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

My friend and colleague Ashlee Vance proved an invaluable sounding board when I needed to discuss the thornier challenges of telling this story. I also want to thank fellow journalists Steven Levy, Ethan Watters, Adam Rogers, George Anders, Dan McGinn, Nick Bilton, Claire Cain Miller, Damon Darlin, John Markoff, Jim Brunner, Alan Deutschman, Tom Giles, Doug MacMillan, Adam Satariano, Motoko Rich, and Peter Burrows. Nick Sanchez provided stellar research and reporting assistance for this book, and Morgan Mason from the journalism program at the University of Nevada at Reno assisted with interviews of Amazon associates at the fulfillment center in Fernley, Nevada.


pages: 421 words: 110,406

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You by Sangeet Paul Choudary, Marshall W. van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, digital map, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, Free Software Foundation, gigafactory, growth hacking, Haber-Bosch Process, High speed trading, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, market design, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pre–internet, price mechanism, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social contagion, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, the long tail, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Denise Dubie, “Microsoft Struggling to Convince about Vista,” Computerworld UK, November 19, 2007, http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/it-vendors/microsoft-struggling-to-convince-about-vista-6258/. 9. Robin Bloor, “10 Reasons Why Vista is a Disaster,” Inside Analysis, December 18, 2007, http://insideanalysis.com/2007/12/10-reasons-why-vista-is-a-disaster/2/. 10. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP. 11. Steve Lohr and John Markoff, “Windows Is So Slow, but Why?” New York Times, March 27, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/technology/27soft.html?_r=1. 12. Carliss Young Baldwin and Kim B. Clark, Design Rules: The Power of Modularity, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 13. Robert S. Huckman, Gary P. Pisano, and Liz Kind, “Amazon Web Services,” Harvard Business School Case 609-048, 2008. 14.


pages: 450 words: 113,173

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

Cited in Nadine Strossen, “Thoughts on the Controversy over Politically Correct Speech,” SMU Law Review 46 (1992): 119–44. The poll was carried out by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA. It showed: 4.9% far left, 36.8% liberal, 40.2% moderate, 17.8% conservative. In 1983, no Harvard undergraduate: Author’s recollection. That was also the year: John Markoff, “Innovators of Intelligence Look to Past,” New York Times, December 16, 2014. In fact, the percentage of people: Samuel A. Stouffer, Communism, Conformity and Civil Liberties: A Cross-Section of the Nation Speaks Its Mind (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2009 [New York: Doubleday, 1955]).


The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America by Timothy Snyder

active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American ideology, anti-globalists, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, crony capitalism, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, fake news, gentrification, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, John Markoff, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, Robert Mercer, sexual politics, Steve Bannon, Transnistria, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

See also Anders Åslund and Andrew Kuchins, The Russia Balance Sheet (Washington, D.C.: Peterson Institute, 2009). In matters of peace and war Estonia: Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Krogerus, “Weaken from Within,” New Republic, Dec. 2017, 18; Marcel Van Herpen, Putin’s Propaganda Machine (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), 121. Georgia: John Markoff, “Before the Gunfire, Cyberattacks,” NYT, Aug. 12, 2008; D. J. Smith, “Russian Cyber Strategy and the War Against Georgia,” Atlantic Council, Jan. 17, 2014; Irakli Lomidze, “Cyber Attacks Against Georgia,” Ministry of Justice of Georgia: Data Exchange Agency, 2011; Sheera Frenkel, “Meet Fancy Bear, the Russian Group Hacking the US election,” BuzzFeed, Oct. 15, 2016.


pages: 414 words: 117,581

Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix by Dade Hayes, Dawn Chmielewski

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, borderless world, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, data science, digital rights, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, George Floyd, global pandemic, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, hockey-stick growth, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, late fees, lockdown, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, Netflix Prize, Osborne effect, performance metric, period drama, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, QR code, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, remote working, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech bro, the long tail, the medium is the message, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, vertical integration, WeWork

CHAPTER 1: THE DISCOVERY OF TELEVISION AMONG THE BEES David Blair, Thomas Kessler, Mark Cuban, Rob Glaser, Jonathan Taplin, and Ira Rubenstein were interviewed by the authors. This chapter also draws from material in John Battelle, “WAX or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees,” Wired, February 2, 1993; John Markoff, “Cult Film Is a First on Internet,” New York Times, May 24, 1993; Kara Swisher and Evan Ramstad, “Yahoo to Announce Acquisition of Broadcast.com for $5.7 Billion,” Wall Street Journal, April 1, 1999; “Blockbuster Acquires Movielink,” Bloomberg News, August 9, 2007; and John Kisseloff’s The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1929–1961 (Golden, CO: ReAnimus Press, 2013).


pages: 476 words: 125,219

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

This essay was unpublished until 2012; it was originally written for inclusion in their book Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966) but was not approved by both authors before Baran’s untimely death in 1964. 24. The United States produces nearly 25 percent greater output than it did in 1999 with the same number of workers, but real wages have been stagnant or declined. See David J. Lynch, “Did That Robot Take My Job?” Bloomberg Businessweek, Jan. 9–15, 2012, 15. 25. See John Markoff, “Skilled Work, Without the Worker,” New York Times, Aug. 19, 2012, A1. 26. For a moving account of the deterioration of American life and specifically the growth of poverty among the working class, see Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (New York: Nation Books, 2012). 27.


pages: 472 words: 117,093

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

With a plan?”: “Ballmer Laughs at iPhone,” YouTube, September 18, 2007, 2:22, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U. 152 “When [the iPhone] first came out in early 2007”: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 501. 152 “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC”: John Markoff, “Phone Shows Apple’s Impact on Consumer Products,” New York Times, January 11, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/11/technology/11cnd-apple.html. 162 Steve Jobs made a “nine-digit” acquisition offer: Victoria Barret, “Dropbox: The Inside Story of Tech’s Hottest Startup,” Forbes, October 18, 2011, http://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2011/10/18/dropbox-the-inside-story-of-techs-hottest-startup/#3b780ed92863. 162 84% of total revenue for Facebook: Facebook, “Facebook Reports Third Quarter 2016 Results,” November 2, 2016, https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2016/Facebook-Reports-Third-Quarter-2016-Results/default.aspx. 163 “grand slam”: Apple, “iPhone App Store Downloads Top 10 Million in First Weekend,” July 14, 2008, http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/07/14iPhone-App-Store-Downloads-Top-10-Million-in-First-Weekend.html. 164 $6 billion: Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Apple’s App Store Sales Hit $20 Billion, Signs of Slower Growth Emerge,” Wall Street Journal, January 6, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-app-store-sales-hit-20-billion-signs-of-slower-growth-emerge-1452087004. 165 “Jobs soon figured out”: Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 501. 165 Facebook’s offer to publish: Henry Mance, “UK Newspapers: Rewriting the Story,” Financial Times, February 9, 2016, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/0aa8beac-c44f-11e5-808f-8231cd71622e.html#axzz3znzgrkTq. 166 “we only have the faintest idea”: Peter Rojas, “Google Buys Cellphone Software Company,” Engadget, August 17, 2005, https://www.engadget.com/2005/08/17/google-buys-cellphone-software-company. 166 “best deal ever”: Owen Thomas, “Google Exec: Android Was ‘Best Deal Ever,’ ” VentureBeat, October 27, 2010, http://venturebeat.com/2010/10/27/google-exec-android-was-best-deal-ever. 166 Android founder Andy Rubin: Victor H., “Did You Know Samsung Could Buy Android First, but Laughed It Out of Court?”


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

,” Neurobiology of Aging, April 2009, Volume 30, Issue 4, pp. 507–14. 10Radical technologies 1.Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky, “Topic 487: State of the World 2016,” The WELL, January 3, 2016, well.com. 2.Mark Bergen, “Nest CEO Tony Fadell Went to Google’s All-Hands Meeting to Defend Nest. Here’s What He Said,” Recode, April 13, 2016. f 3.Brad Stone and Jack Clark, “Google Puts Boston Dynamics Up for Sale in Robotics Retreat,” Bloomberg Technology, March 17, 2016. 4.John Markoff, “Latest to Quit Google’s Self-Driving Car Unit: Top Roboticist,” New York Times, August 5, 2016. 5.Mark Harris, “Secretive Alphabet Division Funded by Google Aims to Fix Public Transit in US,” Guardian, June 27, 2016. 6.Siimon Reynolds, “Why Google Glass Failed: A Marketing Lesson,” Forbes, February 5, 2015. 7.Rajat Agrawal, “Why India Rejected Facebook’s ‘Free’ Version of the Internet,” Mashable, February 9, 2016. 8.Mark Zuckerberg, “The technology behind Aquila,” Facebook, July 21, 2016, facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/the-technology-behind-aquila/10153916136506634/. 9.Mari Saito, “Exclusive: Amazon Expanding Deliveries by Its ‘On-Demand’ Drivers,” Reuters, February 8, 2016. 10.Alan Boyle, “First Amazon Prime Airplane Debuts in Seattle After Secret Night Flight,” GeekWire, August 4, 2016. 11.Farhad Manjoo, “Think Amazon’s Drone Delivery Idea Is a Gimmick?


pages: 415 words: 103,231

Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence by Robert Bryce

addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, congestion pricing, decarbonisation, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, financial independence, flex fuel, Ford Model T, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it's over 9,000, Jevons paradox, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, low earth orbit, low interest rates, Michael Shellenberger, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, peak oil, price stability, Project for a New American Century, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stewart Brand, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yom Kippur War

In 2005, it was 378.4 million gallons. EIA data available: http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/ dnav/pet/hist/c100000001A.htm. 20. EIA, Annual Energy Outlook 2007, Table D14, 204. 21. Electricity consumption figures are per EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook 2007, Table D6, 196. 22. Google. Available: http://www.google.com/corporate/execs.html. 23. John Markoff and Saul Hansell, “Hiding in Plain Sight, Google Seeks More Power,” New York Times, June 14, 2006. 24. A 10,000-square-foot data center uses as much electricity as 1,000 homes. See Robert Bryce, “Power Struggle,” Interactive Week, December 19, 2000. Two football fields are equal to about 115,000 square feet.


pages: 394 words: 118,929

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg

A Pattern Language, AOL-Time Warner, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, call centre, collaborative editing, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, continuous integration, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, functional programming, General Magic , George Santayana, Grace Hopper, Guido van Rossum, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, index card, intentional community, Internet Archive, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, L Peter Deutsch, Larry Wall, life extension, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, Mitch Kapor, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, scientific management, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, slashdot, software studies, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Therac-25, thinkpad, Turing test, VA Linux, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

My account of Douglas Engelbart’s work draws on readings from his work collected at the Bootstrap Institute Web site at http://www.bootstrap.org/, as well as the accounts in Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping (Stanford University Press, 2000); Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought (Simon & Schuster, 1985); and John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said (Viking, 2005). The video of Engelbart’s 1968 demo is at http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.htm. “store ideas, study them”: From the Invisible Revolution Web site, devoted to Engelbart’s ideas, at http://www.invisiblerevolution.net/nls.htm. “successful achievements can be utilized”: From the “Whom to Augment First?”


pages: 402 words: 126,835

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era by Ellen Ruppel Shell

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, big-box store, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, company town, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, follow your passion, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, game design, gamification, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, human-factors engineering, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, precariat, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban renewal, Wayback Machine, WeWork, white picket fence, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game

“Labor is the highest-cost factor” Tim Linder, “New Patent Report,” Connected World Magazine, January 28, 2014, https://connect­edworld.com/​new-patent-report-january-28-2014/. Sawyer (and his older brother, the two-armed Baxter robot) Dr. Brooks gave $4 per hour as the approximate cost of employing Baxter in response to a question at the Technonomy 2012 Conference in Tucson. See John Markoff, Andrew McAfee, and Rodney Brooks, “Where’s My Robot?,” Techonomy, November 2012, http://techonomy.com/​conf/​12-tucson/​future-of-work/​wheres-my-robot/. the Weather Channel broadcasts 18 million forecasts John Koetsier, “Data Deluge: What People Do on the Internet, Every Minute of Every Day,” Inc.com, July 25, 2017, https://www.inc.com/​john-koetsier/​every-minute-on-the-internet-2017-new-numbers-to-b.html.


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

Jack Wiles et al. (23 Aug 2008), Techno Security’s Guide to Securing SCADA, Ingress, https://books.google.com/books?id=sHtIdWn1gnAC. 69In 2007, Israel attacked: David A. Fulghum, Robert Wall, and Douglas Barrie (5 Nov 2007), “Details about Israel’s high-tech strike on Syria,” Aviation Week Network, http://aviationweek.com/awin/details-about-israel-s-high-tech-strike-syria. 69In 2008, Russia coordinated: John Markoff (13 Aug 2008), “Before the gunfire, cyberattacks,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/13/technology/13cyber.html. 69The US conducted a series: Alan D. Campen, ed. (1992), The First Information War: The Story of Communications, Computers, and Intelligence Systems in the Persian Gulf War, AFCEA International Press, https://archive.org/details/firstinformation00camp. 69In 2016, President Obama acknowledged: Barack Obama (13 Apr 2016), “Statement by the president on progress in the fight against ISIL,” White House Office of the Press Secretary, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/04/13/statement-president-progress-fight-against-isil. 69In 2017, we learned about a group: This operation has been named “Dragonfly.”


pages: 386 words: 122,595

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated) by Charles Wheelan

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, congestion charging, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, demographic transition, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, libertarian paternalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Malacca Straits, managed futures, market bubble, microcredit, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, open economy, presumed consent, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

Giacomo Balbinotto Neto, Ana Katarina Campelo, and Everton Nunes da Silva, “The Impact of Presumed Consent Law on Organ Donation: An Empirical Analysis from Quantile Regression for Longitudinal Data,” Berkeley Program in Law & Economics, Paper 050107–2 (2007). CHAPTER 4. GOVERNMENT AND THE ECONOMY II 1. John Markoff, “CIA Tries Foray into Capitalism,” New York Times, September 29, 1999. 2. March 6, 2001. 3. Jackie Calmes and Louise Story, “In Washington, One Bank Chief Still Holds Sway,” New York Times, January 19, 2009. 4. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 5.


pages: 481 words: 120,693

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else by Chrystia Freeland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, assortative mating, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Bullingdon Club, business climate, call centre, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, double helix, energy security, estate planning, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, high net worth, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, job automation, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberation theology, light touch regulation, linear programming, London Whale, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, NetJets, new economy, Occupy movement, open economy, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, postindustrial economy, Potemkin village, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the long tail, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

average starting salary for a law school graduate See the National Association of Law Placement’s Employment Report and Salary Survey for the Class of 2010. http://www.nalp.org/uploads/Classof2010SelectedFindings.pdf. average lawyer earned May 2011 National Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates, Bureau of Labor Statistics. http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes231011.htm. The most advanced example of this trend is e-discovery See John Markoff, “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software,” New York Times, March 4, 2011. (Meanwhile, DLA Piper, one of the law firms) See Nathan Koppel and Vanessa O’Connell. “Pay Gap Widens at Big Law Firms as Partners Chase Star Attorneys,” Wall Street Journal, February 8, 2011. In the age of the global super-elite, even dentists Joan Juliet Buck, “Drill, Bébé, Drill,” New York Times T Magazine, August 10, 2011.


pages: 540 words: 119,731

Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech by Geoffrey Cain

Andy Rubin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, business intelligence, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double helix, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Hacker News, independent contractor, Internet of things, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, patent troll, Pepsi Challenge, rolodex, Russell Brand, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

showed Samsung leading: Galaxy marketer, interview by the author, November 8, 2016. black rectangle with rounded edges: Jody Akana et al., Portable Display Device, U.S. Design Patent No. US D670,286 S, filed November 23, 2011, issued November 6, 2012, https://assets.sbnation.com/​assets/​1701443/​USD670286S1.pdf. “Steven P. Jobs, 1955–2011”: John Markoff, “Apple’s Visionary Redefined Digital Age,” The New York Times, October 5, 2011 (online version published a day earlier under a different title), https://www.nytimes.com/​2011/​10/​06/​business/​steve-jobs-of-apple-dies-at-56.html. “Outside the flagship Apple store”: Matt Richtel, “Jobs’s Death Draws Outpouring of Grief and Tributes,” The New York Times, October 5, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/​2011/​10/​06/​technology/​jobss-death-prompts-grief-and-tributes.html.


pages: 521 words: 118,183

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Nitze School of Advanced International Studies,” The American Presidency Project, March 8, 2000, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-paul-h-nitze-school-advanced-international-studies. 93 Singer and Brooking, LikeWar, 97. 94 Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, “Unrestricted Warfare,” Cryptome, January 18, 2000, http://www.cryptome.org/cuw.htm. 95 “Neither war nor peace,” The Economist, January 25, 2018, https://www.economist.com/special-report/2018/01/25/neither-war-nor-peace. 96 Carlin, Dawn of the Code War, e-book, 200. 97 Osnos, Age of Ambition, 30. 98 Sanger, The Perfect Weapon, 18. 99 Ibid. 100 James Glanz and John Markoff, “Vast Hacking by a China Fearful of the Web,” New York Times, December 4, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/world/asia/05wikileaks-china.html?_r=2&hp. 101 Carlin, Dawn of the Code War, e-book, 323. 102 Ibid., 324. 103 Ben Buchanan, The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 90. 104 Andrew Jacobs and Miguel Helft, “Google, Citing Attack, Threatens to Exit China,” New York Times, January 12, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/world/asia/13beijing.html?


pages: 675 words: 141,667

Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise) by Andrew L. Russell

Aaron Swartz, American ideology, animal electricity, barriers to entry, borderless world, Californian Ideology, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, creative destruction, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, open economy, OSI model, packet switching, pre–internet, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, vertical integration, web of trust, work culture

Brock, The Second Information Revolution (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2003), 106–111. 29 Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (New York: Doubleday, 1984); Edwards, Closed World; Atsushi Akera, “Voluntarism and the Fruits of Collaboration: The IBM User Group, Share,” Technology and Culture 42 (2001): 710–736; Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Penguin, 2006); Ted Friedman, Electric Dreams: Computers in American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Steven W. Usselman, “Comment: Mediating Innovation: Reflections on the Complex Relationships of User and Supplier,” Enterprise & Society 7 (2006): 477–484. 30 Steven W.


Making Globalization Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business process, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jones Act, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, microcredit, moral hazard, negative emissions, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil rush, open borders, open economy, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, statistical model, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

See also Richard Poynder, “Enclosing the Digital Commons,” Information Today, vol. 20, no. 5 (May 2003), pp. 37–38; and Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (New York: Random House, 2001). 15.In negotiations with AOL, for example, Microsoft demanded that AOL drop RealNetworks’ RealPlayer, which was in direct competition with Microsoft’s Windows Media Player. RealNetworks’s anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft quoted a Microsoft executive as saying Microsoft would target RealNetworks “for obliteration.” See John Markoff, “RealNetworks Accuses Microsoft of Restricting Competition,” New York Times, December 19, 2003, p. C5. For more details on Microsoft’s attacks on Netscape and the subsequent lawsuit, see Paul Abrahams and Richard Waters, “You’ve Got Competition,” Financial Times, January 24, 2002, p. 16. The Council of Economic Advisers became concerned about the economic impact of Microsoft’s dominant position while I served as member and chair.


pages: 515 words: 132,295

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Bogle, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Justin Hyde, “First Pontiac Aztek’s Sale Highlights the Long Half-Life of Ugly,” Motoramic, Yahoo Autos, August 1, 2013. 11. Lutz, Car Guys vs. Bean Counters, 73. 12. Robert D. Atkinson and Stephen J. Ezell, Innovation Economics: The Race for Global Advantage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 22. 13. Gary Rivlin and John Markoff, “Tossing Out a Chief Executive,” New York Times, February 14, 2005. 14. Kimberly D. Elsbach, Ileana Stigliani, and Amy Stroud, “The Building of Employee Distrust: A Case Study of Hewlett-Packard from 1995 to 2010,” Organizational Dynamics 41, no. 3 (2012): 254–63. 15. Alfred Sloan, My Years with General Motors, reissue ed.


Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration by Kent E. Calder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, air freight, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, geopolitical risk, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, interest rate swap, intermodal, Internet of things, invention of movable type, inventory management, John Markoff, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart grid, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, trade route, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, zero-sum game

See Nancy Huang, Joie Ma, and Kyle Sullivan, “Economic Development Policies for Central and Western China,” China Business Review, November 10, 2010, www​.chinabusinessreview​.com/​economic​-development​-policies​-for​ -central​-and​-western​-china/; and “Rich Province, Poor Province,” The Economist, October 1, 2016, https://​www​.economist​.com/​news/​china/​21707964​-government​-struggling​ -spread​-wealth​-more​-evenly​-rich​-province​-poor​-province. 28. See, for example, John Markoff and Matthew Rosenberg, “China’s Intelligent Weaponry Gets Smarter,” New York Times, February 3, 2017, https://​www​.nytimes​.com/​ 2017/​02/​03/​technology/​artificial​-intelligence​-china​-united​-states​.html. Also Ankit Panda, “China’s First Domestically Manufactured Carrier Launches. What’s Next for the PLAN?”


Virtual Competition by Ariel Ezrachi, Maurice E. Stucke

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Arthur D. Levinson, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, cloud computing, collaborative economy, commoditize, confounding variable, corporate governance, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, deep learning, demand response, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, electricity market, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental economics, Firefox, framing effect, Google Chrome, independent contractor, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, light touch regulation, linked data, loss aversion, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, Milgram experiment, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, nowcasting, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, power law, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search costs, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, yield management

Another form of refusal to supply that is objectionable occurs when a dominant party controls the provision of an essential infrastructure, uses that essential facility, but refuses other companies access to that facility, Notes to Pages 153–156 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 311 with no objective justification for doing so. In other cases a refusal to supply may involve a refusal to license intellectual property rights. For relevant cases see Ariel Ezrachi, EU Competition Law—An Analytical Guide to the Leading Cases, 4th ed. (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2014), 252. John Markoff, “Toyota Invests $1 Billion in Artificial Intelligence in U.S.,” New York Times, November 6, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/06 /technology/toyota-silicon-valley-artificial-intelligence-research-center.html ?_r = 0; Mui, “Google Is Millions of Miles Ahead of Apple in Driverless Cars.” See, e.g., Markoff, “Toyota Invests $1 Billion in Artificial Intelligence in U.S.”


The Unicorn's Secret by Steven Levy

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Buckminster Fuller, card file, East Village, financial independence, Future Shock, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, index card, John Markoff, Marshall McLuhan, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog

In addition, several other journalists who had done work on the Einhorn case shared their labors or impressions with me, including Howard Shapiro, Don DeMaio, Claude Lewis, Bernie McCormick, Gaeton Fonzi, and especially Al Robbins. During my travels I benefited from the hospitality of Steve Fried, Jane Friedman, Katie Hafner, Bill and Susan Mandel, John Mark-off, and Eileen Wise. Diane Ayres performed some research work and Wendy Scheir cheerfully undertook the monstrous task of transcribing hundreds of hours of tapes. Alan Halpern provided wisdom and assistance at a key point. The good offices of Glenn Horowitz provided a port in a clerical storm. My agent Pat Berens helped get the project underway and Flip Brophy adopted it with equal enthusiasm.


pages: 519 words: 142,646

Track Changes by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

active measures, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, corporate governance, David Brooks, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, forensic accounting, future of work, Future Shock, Google Earth, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, HyperCard, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, machine readable, machine translation, mail merge, Marshall McLuhan, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, popular electronics, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social web, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, text mining, thinkpad, Turing complete, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, Year of Magical Thinking

See Gary Snyder, “Why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh,” IT Times 6, no. 4 (January 1998), http://ittimes.ucdavis.edu/v6n4jan98/snyder.html. The poem originally appeared in Turn-Around Times in March 1988. At that time Snyder worked on a Macintosh Plus, and he has been a loyal Apple user ever since. See also John Markoff, “Digital Muse for Beat Poet,” New York Times, January 22, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/technology/personaltech/22sfbriefs.html), which reports on Snyder’s looking forward to receiving an iPad—and incorrectly states that the “Macintosh” poem is previously unpublished. 4. See Charles Bukowski, The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), for numerous examples. 5.


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

Bradley Hope, ‘Lawsuit Against Exchanges Over “Unfair Advantage” for High-Frequency Traders Dismissed’, Wall Street Journal, 29 April 2015, accessed 6 October 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/lawsuit-against-exchanges-over-unfair-advantage-for-high-frequency-traders-dismissed-1430326045; David Levine, ‘High-Frequency Trading Machines Favored Over Humans by CME Group, Lawsuit Claims’, Huffington Post, 26 June 2012, accessed 6 October 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/26/high-frequency-trading-lawsuit_n_1625648.html; Lu Wang, Whitney Kisling and Eric Lam, ‘Fake Post Erasing $136 Billion Shows Markets Need Humans’, Bloomberg, 23 April 2013, accessed 22 December 2014, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-23/fake-report-erasing-136-billion-shows-market-s-fragility.html; Matthew Philips, ‘How the Robots Lost: High-Frequency Trading’s Rise and Fall’, Bloomberg Businessweek, 6 June 2013, accessed 22 December 2014, http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/123468-how-the-robots-lost-high-frequency-tradings-rise-and-fall; Steiner, Automate This, 2–5, 11–52; Luke Dormehl, The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems – And Create More (London: Penguin, 2014), 223. 6. Jordan Weissmann, ‘iLawyer: What Happens when Computers Replace Attorneys?’, Atlantic, 19 June 2012, accessed 22 December 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/ilawyer-what-happens-when-computers-replace-attorneys/258688; John Markoff, ‘Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software’, New York Times, 4 March 2011, accessed 22 December 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/science/05legal.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0; Adi Narayan, ‘The fMRI Brain Scan: A Better Lie Detector?’, Time, 20 July 2009, accessed 22 December 2014, http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1911546-2,00.html; Elena Rusconi and Timothy Mitchener-Nissen, ‘Prospects of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging as Lie Detector’, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7:54 (2013); Steiner, Automate This, 217; Dormehl, The Formula, 229. 7.


pages: 523 words: 148,929

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asilomar, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, blue-collar work, British Empire, Brownian motion, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, delayed gratification, digital divide, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, friendly AI, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hydrogen economy, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mass immigration, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, telepresence, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing machine, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize

Scientific American, November 2008, pp. 56–61. ­ ­5 “It’s like being an astronomer”: Jeff Wise, “Thought Police: How Brain Scans Could Invade Your Private Life,” Popular Mechanics, October 15, 2007, www.­popularmechanics.­com/­science/­health/­neuroscience/­4226614. ­ ­6 “possible to identify, from a large set of completely novel natural images”: New Scientist, October 15, 2008, issue 2678. ­ ­7 “Can we tap into the thoughts of others”: David Baltimore, “How Biology Became Information Science,” in Denning, pp. 53–54. ­ ­8 “I am told”: Ibid., p. 54. ­ ­9 “Perhaps something like the Star Trek tricorder”: Bernhard Blümich, “The Incredible Shrinking Scanner: MRI-like Machine Becomes Portable,” Scientific American, November 2008, p. 68. 2. FUTURE OF AI: RISE OF THE MACHINES ­ ­1 “Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man”: John Markoff, New York Times, July 25, 2009, p. A1, www.­nytimes.­com/­2009/­07/­26/­science/­26robot.­html­?scp=1&­sq=Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man&­st=cse. ­ ­2 “Technologists are providing”: Ibid. ­ ­3 “just at the stage where they’re robust”: Kaku, p. 75. ­ ­4 “Machines will be capable, within twenty years”: Crevier, p. 109. ­ ­5 “It’s as though a group of people”: Paul W.


pages: 205 words: 18,208

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

A number of books have explored this netherworld at the edge of both technology and the law—for example, The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling, At Large by David Freedman and Charles Mann, and Masters of Deception by Michelle Slatalla and Josh Quittner. Some writers take pains to distinguish “cyberjocks” who cruise the dataways in a spirit of fun-loving curiosity, careful to avoid doing harm, from others who aim to steal, vandalize, or demonstrate a sense of power and superiority, labeling the latter “crackers.” John Markoff of The New York Times used the terms “Hacker A” and “Hacker B” to make a similar distinction. A clumsy but brutal example of the second type, showing that threats donʼt always come from a techno-elite, was described by Dixie Baker, chief scientist with Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC).


pages: 548 words: 147,919

How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales From the Pentagon by Rosa Brooks

airport security, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, big-box store, clean water, cognitive dissonance, continuation of politics by other means, different worldview, disruptive innovation, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, failed state, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, John Markoff, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, technological determinism, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, unemployed young men, Valery Gerasimov, Wall-E, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

“Call to Action,” Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, accessed January 23, 2016, www.stopkillerrobots.org/call-to-action/. 8. “Seize the Opportunity for Action,” Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, accessed January 23, 2016, www.stopkillerrobots.org/2013/11/seize-the-opportunity-for-action/; www.stopkillerrobots.org/. 9. John Markoff, “Planes Without Pilots,” New York Times, April 6, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/04/07/science/planes-without-pilots.html; Rachel Nuwer, “Computers Can Tell if You’re Really in Pain—Even Better than People Can,” Smithsonian, April 30, 2014, www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/computers-are-better-people-differentiating-between-real-and-faked-expressions-pain-180951263/?


pages: 538 words: 147,612

All the Money in the World by Peter W. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, book value, call centre, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency peg, David Brooks, Donald Trump, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, George Gilder, high net worth, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Maui Hawaii, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Norman Mailer, PageRank, Peter Singer: altruism, pez dispenser, popular electronics, Quicken Loans, Renaissance Technologies, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, school vouchers, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech baron, tech billionaire, Teledyne, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traveling salesman, urban planning, wealth creators, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

Much of the information on the history of Silicon Valley comes from Saxenian’s book. 22. They had become friends: Kaplan, The Silicon Boys, p. 34. 23. Later he encouraged the duo: Saxenian, Regional Advantage, p. 20. 24. Hewlett and Packard are the iconic models: The information on Hewlett and Packard’s early days in Silicon Valley comes mainly from John Markoff, “William Hewlett Dies at 87: A Pioneer of Silicon Valley,” obituary, New York Times, Jan. 13, 2001. 25. In a 1983 Esquire article: Tom Wolfe, “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce: How the Sun Rose on the Silicon Valley,” Esquire, Dec. 1983. 26. At Fairchild, Noyce designed: Kaplan, The Silicon Boys, p. 56. 27.


pages: 559 words: 157,112

Dealers of Lightning by Michael A. Hiltzik

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Boeing 747, business cycle, Charles Babbage, computer age, creative destruction, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, index card, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, L Peter Deutsch, luminiferous ether, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, oil shock, popular electronics, reality distortion field, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology. New York: Basic Books, 1998. Gleick, James. Genius: The Life and Science of Richard I. Feynmann. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992. Goldberg, Adele, ed. A History of Personal Workstations. Reading, Mass.: ACM Press, 1988. Hafner, Katie, and John Markoff. Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. Hafner, Katie, and Matthew Lyon. Where Wizards Stay up Late: The Origins of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Hodges, Andrew. Alan Turing: The Enigma. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983. Jackson, Tim.


pages: 496 words: 154,363

I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 by Douglas Edwards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, book scanning, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business intelligence, call centre, commoditize, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, Googley, gravity well, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John Markoff, Kickstarter, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, microcredit, music of the spheres, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, performance metric, pets.com, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, second-price auction, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, stem cell, Superbowl ad, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, The Turner Diaries, Y2K

The source for the stories turned out to be a low-level administrator feeding information to an outsider. She was asked to leave. In January 2004, though, long after that first small leak had been plugged, a much bigger crack appeared in our wall of secrecy. The same month we hired our first corporate security manager, John Markoff from the New York Times wrote a series of articles in which he reported details of products in development and the results of an internal audit conducted in preparation for a possible IPO. The information had been extremely confidential and closely held. The leak was ultimately traced to a senior manager who had known Markoff for years.


pages: 569 words: 156,139

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gigafactory, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, NSO Group, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, private spaceflight, quantitative hedge fund, remote working, rent stabilization, RFID, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, two-pizza team, Uber for X, union organizing, warehouse robotics, WeWork

CHAPTER 2: A NAME TOO BORING TO NOTICE “Only if we can have a truly differentiated idea… we would love to”: Jeff Bezos interviewed by Charlie Rose, Charlie Rose, 34:40, November 16, 2012, https://charlierose.com/videos/17252 (January 19, 2021). an article in the New York Times that… recognize cats: John Markoff, “How Many Computers to Identify a Cat? 16,000,” New York Times, June 25, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/technology/in-a-big-network-of-computers-evidence-of-machine-learning.html (January 19, 2021). used a pole with a camera attached to it to peek inside: Jacob Demmitt, “Amazon’s Bookstore Revealed?


Active Measures by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, 4chan, active measures, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, continuation of politics by other means, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, East Village, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, guest worker program, information security, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Julian Assange, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, operational security, peer-to-peer, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

Pete Earley, Comrade J: The Untold Secrets of Russia’s Master Spy in America after the End of the Cold War (New York: Penguin, 2007), p. 195. 12.  Eneken Tikk, Kadri Kaska, and Liis Vihul, International Cyber Incidents (Tallinn: CCDCOE, 2010), p. 17. 13.  Joshua Davis, “Hackers Take Down the Most Wired Country in Europe,” Wired, August 21, 2007. 14.  Mark Landler and John Markoff, “In Estonia, What May Be the First War in Cyberspace,” The New York Times, May 28, 2007. 15.  “Adventures of Mr. Hudson in Russia,” Informacia, July 8, 2009; and “British Diplomat in Russia Resigns after Prostitute Video and Sex Allegations,” Metro, July 9, 2009. 16.  John Bingham, “British Diplomat James Hudson Resigns over Russian ‘Brothel’ Video,” The Daily Telegraph, July 10, 2009. 17.  


Spies, Lies, and Algorithms by Amy B. Zegart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, air gap, airport security, Apollo 13, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Chelsea Manning, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, failed state, feminist movement, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Gene Kranz, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, index card, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, job automation, John Markoff, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, Network effects, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, operational security, Parler "social media", post-truth, power law, principal–agent problem, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, uber lyft, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

David Sanger and William Broad, “Trump Inherits a Secret Cyberwar against North Korean Missiles,” New York Times, March 4, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/04/world/asia/north-korea-missile-program-sabotage.html. 134. Robert McMillan, “Hackers Lurked in SolarWinds Email System for at Least 9 Months, CEO Says,” Wall Street Journal, February 2, 2021. 135. Herbert Lin, “The existential threat from cyber-enabled info warfare,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 74, no. 4 (July 2019). 136. John Markoff, “Chip Error Continuing to Dog Officials at Intel,” New York Times, December 6, 1994, https://www.nytimes.com/1994/12/06/business/chip-error-continuing-to-dog-officials-at-intel.html. 137. David Manners, “How much will the flaws cost Intel,” Electronics Weekly, January 8, 2018, https://www.electronicsweekly.com/blogs/mannerisms/shenanigans/much-will-flaws-cost-intel-2018-01/; Desire Athow, “Pentium, FDIV: The Processor Bug that Shook the World,” TechRadar, October 30, 2014, https://www.techradar.com/news/computing-components/processors/pentium-fdiv-the-processor-bug-that-shook-the-world-1270773. 138.


pages: 592 words: 161,798

The Future of War by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Boeing 747, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Markoff, long peace, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, open economy, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, systematic bias, the scientific method, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, Valery Gerasimov, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, zero day

These two paragraphs draw upon Mary L. Cummings, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Warfare, Research Paper (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, Jan. 2017). 21. ‘Flight of the Drones: Why the Future of Air Power Belongs to Unmanned Systems’, The Economist, 8 Oct. 2011. Matthew Rosenberg and John Markoff, ‘At Heart of U.S. Strategy, Weapons That Can Think’, New York Times, 26 October 2016. A Terminator-like machine was said to be a decade away. 22. Thomas G. Mahnken, Technology and the American Way of War Since 1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 23. Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum, The Future of Violence–Robots and Germs, Hackers and Drones: Confronting the New Age of Threat (New York: Basic Books, 2015). 24.


pages: 542 words: 161,731

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

., The Inner History of Devices (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 2-29. 2 Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (1984; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 2. 3 Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 13. 4 Roger Entner, “Under-aged Texting: Usage and Actual Cost,” Nielsen.com, January 27, 2010, http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/under-aged-texting-usage-and-actual-cost (accessed May 30, 2010). INTRODUCTION: ALONE TOGETHER 1 See “What Is Second Life,” Second Life, http://secondlife.com/whatis (accessed June 13, 2010). 2 Benedict Carey and John Markoff, “Students, Meet Your New Teacher, Mr. Robot,” New York Times, July 10, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/science/11robots.html (accessed July 10, 2010); Anne Tergeson and Miho Inada, “It’s Not a Stuffed Animal, It’s a $6,000 Medical Device,” Wall Street Journal, June 21, 2010, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704463504575301051844937276.html (accessed August 10, 2010); Jonathan Fildes, “‘Virtual Human’ Milo Comes Out to Play at TED in Oxford,” BBC News, July 13, 2010, www.bbc.co.uk/news/10623423 (accessed July 13, 2010); Amy Harmon, “A Soft Spot for Circuitry: Robot Machines as Companions,” New York Times, July 4, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/07/05/science/05robot.html?


pages: 580 words: 168,476

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, declining real wages, deskilling, electricity market, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Flash crash, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jobless men, John Bogle, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, lone genius, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, obamacare, offshore financial centre, paper trading, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, Phillips curve, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

One of Netscape’s founders, Marc Andreessen, was part of the team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that developed Mosaic, the first widely used web browser, which was a project of the university’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (one of the original sites of the National Science Foundation’s Supercomputer Centers Program). See the website of the NCSA, http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/Projects/mosaic.html (accessed March 3, 2012); and John Markoff, “New Venture in Cyberspace by Silicon Graphics Founder,” New York Times, May 7, 1994, available at http://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/07/business/new-venture-in-cyberspace-by-silicon-graphics-founder.html?ref=marcandreessen (accessed March 3, 2012). 36. For an overview of the Microsoft case, see Geisst, Monopolies in America. 37.


Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM by Paul Carroll

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, Gary Kildall, John Markoff, Mitch Kapor, popular electronics, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software patent, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, thinkpad, traveling salesman

Although Microsoft’s growth rates seemed to finally be leveling to a merely impressive rate, all the new projects prompted Steve Ballmer, Gates’ forceful lieutenant, to say, “It’s a great time to be us.” Finally, marking the end of an era at IBM, former chief executive Tom Watson died at age 79 following complications from a stroke. NOTES PREFACE 1. John Markoff, “Campuses Are Hurt by Computer Giant s W oes,” The New York Times, January 13, 1993, B6. 2. Bureau o f Labor Statistics. 1 1. Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews, Gates (N ew York: Doubleday, 1993), 18. 2. Ibid., 21. 3. Ibid., 24. 16. J. Greenwald, “The Colossus that Works,” Time, July 11, 1983, 44. 17.


pages: 614 words: 174,226

The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society by Binyamin Appelbaum

90 percent rule, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, flag carrier, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, greed is good, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now

.: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 110. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 113. 6. Theodore W. Schultz, “Human Wealth and Economic Growth,” The Humanist, no. 2 (1959): 71–81. 7. Valdés, Pinochet’s Economists, 88. 8. Verónica Montecinos, “Economics: The Chilean Story,” in Economists in the Americas, ed. Verónica Montecinos and John Markoff (Cheltenham, Eng.: Edward Elgar, 2009), 167–68. 9. Valdés, Pinochet’s Economists, 116. 10. The world’s largest deposits of sodium nitrate, also known as Chile saltpeter, are found in northern Chile. It was a key ingredient in both fertilizer and explosives until Germany began to produce synthetic saltpeter in commercial quantities during World War I.


pages: 505 words: 161,581

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, book value, business logic, butterfly effect, call centre, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, COVID-19, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, digital map, disinformation, disintermediation, drop ship, dumpster diving, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed income, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global pandemic, income inequality, index card, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kwajalein Atoll, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, money market fund, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Potemkin village, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, SoftBank, software as a service, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, technoutopianism, the payments system, transaction costs, Turing test, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Y2K

“I can’t tell you”: Author interview with Steve Armstrong, January 29, 2021. “A friend and I”: Email from Maye Musk to Elon Musk, January 21, 2000. “There were a ton of bugs”: Author interview with Elon Musk, January 19, 2019. “He was the nicest guy”: Author interview with Branden Spikes, April 25, 2019. “Security Flaw Discovered at Online Bank”… “banking system”: John Markoff, “Security Flaw Discovered at Online Bank,” New York Times, January 28, 2000. “They ought to go”…“business anyway”: Kevin Featherly. “Online Banking Breach Sparks Strong Concerns,” Newsbytes PM, Washington Post, January 28, 2000. “The name X.com”: John Engen, “X.com Tries to Stare Down the Naysayers,” US Banker, March 2000, 11, 3.


The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley by Leslie Berlin

Apple II, Bob Noyce, book value, business cycle, California energy crisis, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, computer age, data science, Fairchild Semiconductor, George Gilder, Henry Singleton, informal economy, John Markoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, open economy, prudent man rule, Richard Feynman, rolling blackouts, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, Teledyne, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, vertical integration, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Andrew Goldstein and William Aspray, 35–74. New Brunswick: IEEE Press, 1997. Semiconductor Industry Association 1979 Yearbook and Directory. Cupertino, Calif.: SIA, 1979. Sideris, George. “The Intel 1103: The MOS Memory that Defied Cores.” Electronics, 26 April 1973, 108. Siegel, Leonard M., and John Markoff. The High Cost of High Tech. New York: Harper and Rowe, 1985. “The Silicon Valley Economy,” FRBSF [Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco] Weekly Newsletter, Number 92–22, 29 May 1992. Slater, Robert. Portraits in Silicon. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987. Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America.


pages: 613 words: 181,605

Circle of Greed: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Lawyer Who Brought Corporate America to Its Knees by Patrick Dillon, Carl M. Cannon

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, collective bargaining, Columbine, company town, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, desegregation, energy security, estate planning, Exxon Valdez, fear of failure, fixed income, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, illegal immigration, index fund, John Markoff, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, margin call, Maui Hawaii, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, Michael Milken, money market fund, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, power law, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, the High Line, the market place, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

a fund-raising dinner in Sunnyvale: Alison Mitchell, “Building a Bulging War Chest: How Clinton Financed His Run,” New York Times, December 27, 1996. 245 “Clinton wants to nail down”: Quoted in Birnbaum and Novak, “Corporate Dole.” “I’ve learned in politics”: Quoted in Miles, Hack a Party Line, p. 34. “When we brought up ‘securities’”: Jonathan W. Cuneo, interview by CMC, January 9, 2009. “They’d been warned about”: Bill Carrick, interview by CMC, February 11, 2009. the anti-Lerach brain trust gathered: John Markoff, “A Political Fight Marks a Coming of Age for a Silicon Valley Titan,” New York Times, October 21, 1996. “We are looking at the loss”: Ibid. a survey of its members: “Forty-Seven Percent of High-Tech Public Member Companies Would Consider Leaving California if Prop 211 Passes, American Electronics Association Survey Shows; 61,000 Jobs, Continued Economic Growth at Risk,” Business Wire, October 3, 1996.


pages: 598 words: 183,531

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition by Steven Levy

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, air freight, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, corporate governance, Donald Knuth, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, Free Software Foundation, game design, Gary Kildall, Hacker Ethic, hacker house, Haight Ashbury, John Conway, John Markoff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, Multics, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, Paul Graham, popular electronics, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, software patent, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, value engineering, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

On my travels to California and Cambridge, I benefited from the hospitality of Phyllis Coven, Art Kleiner, Bill Mandel, and John Williams. Lori Carney and others typed up thousands of pages of transcripts. Viera Morse’s exacting copy editing kept me linguistically honest. Magazine editors David Rosenthal and Rich Friedman gave me work that kept me going. Good advice was given by fellow computer scribes Doug Garr, John Markoff, Deborah Wise, and members of the Lunch Group. Support and cheerleading came from my parents, my sister Diane Levy, friends Larry Barth, Bruce Buschel, Ed Kaplan, William Mooney, Randall Rothenberg, David Weinberg, and many others—they know who they are—who will have to accept this insufficient mention.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population


pages: 772 words: 203,182

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right by George R. Tyler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Black Swan, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Bolshevik threat, bonus culture, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lake wobegon effect, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, pension reform, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, pirate software, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Steven Greenhouse, “GE to Add Two New US Plants as Unions Agree on Cost Controls.” 29 Peter G. Peterson, “The Morning After,” Atlantic Monthly, October 1987. 30 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 529. 31 Alan Tonelson, “Up From Globalism.” 32 “Staying Put,” Economist, Jan. 19, 2013, special report p. 8. 33 John Markoff, “Google Taking a Retro Route: Made in US,” New York Times, June 28, 2012. 34 “OECD Economic Surveys: United States 2012,” Paris, OECD. See also: L. Branstetter, “Are Knowledge Spillovers International or Intranational in Scope? Macroeconomic evidence from the US and Japan,” Journal of International Economics 53, 55–79 (2001); M.


The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier by Ian Urbina

9 dash line, Airbnb, British Empire, clean water, Costa Concordia, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Filipino sailors, forensic accounting, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, global value chain, Global Witness, illegal immigration, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, Jones Act, Julian Assange, Malacca Straits, Maui Hawaii, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, standardized shipping container, statistical arbitrage, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

They strap lead weights: David Epstein, “The Descent,” New York Times, June 20, 2014. CHAPTER 3 A RUSTY KINGDOM On Christmas Eve 1966: Jack Gould, “Radio: British Commercial Broadcasters Are at Sea,” New York Times, March 25, 1966; Felix Kessler, “The Rusty Principality of Sealand Relishes Hard-Earned Freedom,” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 15, 1969; John Markoff, “Rebel Outpost on the Fringes of Cyberspace,” New York Times, June 4, 2000; Declan McCullagh, “A Data Sanctuary Is Born,” Wired, June 4, 2000; Steve Boggan, “Americans Turn a Tin-Pot State off the Essex Coast into World Capital of Computer Anarchy,” Independent, June 5, 2000; Declan McCullagh, “Sealand: Come to Data,” Wired, June 5, 2000; David Cohen, “Offshore Haven: Cold Water Poured on Sealand Security,” Guardian, June 6, 2000; Carlos Grande, “Island Fortress’s ‘Data Haven’ to Confront E-trade Regulation,” Financial Times, June 6, 2000; “Man Starts Own Country off Coast of Britain,” World News Tonight, ABC, June 6, 2000; Tom Mintier, “Sealand Evolves from Offshore Platform to High-Tech Haven,” Worldview, CNN, June 12, 2000; Anne Cornelius, “Legal Issues Online Firms Set to Take Refuge in Offshore Fortress,” Scotsman, June 15, 2000; David Canton, “Creating a Country to Avoid Jurisdiction,” London Free Press, June 16, 2000; “Internet Exiles,” New Scientist, June 17, 2000; Theo Mullen, “A Haven for Net Lawbreakers?


pages: 562 words: 201,502

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

Saving Tesla: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Alan Salzman, Kimbal Musk, Ira Ehrenpreis, Deepak Ahuja, Ari Emanuel. 32. The Model S: Author’s interviews with Henrik Pfister, Elon Musk, JB Straubel, Martin Eberhard, Nick Kalayjian, Franz von Holzhausen, Dave Morris, Lars Moravy, Drew Baglino. John Markoff, “Tesla Motors Files Suit against Competitor over Design Ideas,” New York Times, Apr. 15, 2008; Chris Anderson, “The Shared Genius of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs,” Fortune, Nov. 27, 2013; Charles Duhigg, “Dr. Elon & Mr. Musk,” Wired, Dec. 13, 2018; Chuck Squatriglia, “First Look at Tesla’s Stunning Model S,” Wired, Mar. 26, 2009; Dan Neil, “Tesla S: A Model Citizen,” Los Angeles Times, Apr. 29, 2009; Dan Neil, “To Elon Musk and the Model S: Congratulations,” Wall Street Journal, June 29, 2012; Higgins, Power Play. 33.


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

Feynman), Recession Proof Graduate (Charlie Hoehn), Ogilvy on Advertising (David Ogilvy), The Martian (Andy Weir) Kamkar, Samy: Influence (Robert Cialdini) Kaskade: Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath (Ted Koppel) Kass, Sam: Sapiens (Yuval Noah Harari), The Art of Fielding (Chad Harbach), Plenty; Jerusalem; Plenty More (Yotam Ottolenghi), The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America’s Most Imaginative Chefs (Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg), A History of World Agriculture (Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart) Kelly, Kevin: The Adventures of Johnny Bunko (Daniel Pink), So Good They Can’t Ignore You (Cal Newport), Shantaram (Gregory David Roberts), Future Shock (Alvin Toffler), Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (AnnaLee Saxenian), What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (John Markoff), The Qur’an, The Bible, The Essential Rumi; The Sound of the One Hand: 281 Zen Koans with Answers (Yoel Hoffman), It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff (Peter Walsh) Koppelman, Brian: What Makes Sammy Run? (Budd Schulberg), The Artist’s Way Morning Pages Journal (Julia Cameron), The War of Art (Steven Pressfield) Libin, Phil: The Clock of the Long Now (Stewart Brand), The Alliance (Reid Hoffman), The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins), A Guide to the Good Life (William Irvine) MacAskill, Will: Reasons and Persons (Derek Parfit), Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World (Mark Williams and Danny Penman), The Power of Persuasion (Robert Levine), Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Nick Bostrom) MacKenzie, Brian: Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu), Way of the Peaceful Warrior (Dan Millman) McCarthy, Nicholas: The Life and Loves of a He Devil: A Memoir (Graham Norton), I Put a Spell on You: The Autobiography of Nina Simone (Nina Simone) McChrystal, Stanley: Once an Eagle (Anton Myrer), The Road to Character (David Brooks) McCullough, Michael: The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career (Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha), Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (David Allen), The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change (Stephen R.


pages: 518 words: 170,126

City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco by Chester W. Hartman, Sarah Carnochan

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bay Area Rapid Transit, benefit corporation, big-box store, business climate, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, housing crisis, illegal immigration, John Markoff, Loma Prieta earthquake, manufacturing employment, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Peoples Temple, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, young professional

The political schisms in present-day Chinatown, reflecting international politics and migration streams, are outlined in Nina Wu, “The City’s Two-China Chinatown,” San Francisco Examiner, 31 May 2001. 20. Sabin Russell, “Mayor, 3 Hopefuls Talk Business,” San Francisco Chronicle, 24 April 1987; see also Moira Johnson, “In the Wake of the Takeover Wars,” California Magazine (May 1987): 10–13. 21. John Markoff, “The City by the Bay Holds Its Collective Breath,” New York Times, 15 April 1998. 22. Diana B. Henriques, “Bank of America to Cut up to 6.7% of Work Force, or 10,000 Jobs,” New York Times, 29 July 2000. 23. Les Shipnuck and Dan Feshbach, “Bay Area Council: Regional PowerHouse,” Pacific Research and World Empire Telegram vol. 4, no. 1 (November/December 1972), 3–11. 24.


pages: 843 words: 223,858

The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game


pages: 708 words: 223,211

The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture by Brian Dear

air traffic controllers' union, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple Newton, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairchild Semiconductor, finite state, Future Shock, game design, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, lateral thinking, linear programming, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Palm Treo, Plato's cave, pre–internet, publish or perish, Ralph Nader, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, three-martini lunch, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

I’m also grateful for the kindness and hospitality of Paul Tenczar (who made himself available for numerous interviews over the years) and his wife, Darlene; they let me rummage through a suitcase full of Paul’s photographic slides. Thanks to Andy Hertzfeld, Paul Resch, Bill Galcher, Donald Norman, Dan O’Neill, and Ray Ozzie for reviewing all or portions of the manuscript over the years. Thanks also to writers Steven Levy and John Markoff, whose inspiring writing, support, and encouragement have helped give me the strength to finish this book. Thanks to Ralph Nader and William C. Taylor, authors of The Big Boys: Power and Position in American Business (Pantheon, 1986), who without hesitation gave me two boxes full of all of their research on Control Data Corporation, including raw interview transcripts and handwritten reporter’s notes, which I put to extensive use in Part Three of this book.


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The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

Charter Cities represents a plan to introduce new legal frameworks for new or existing cities, turning them into a parallel to Special Economic Zones, here Special Political Zones. New York University economist Paul Romer is a leading advocate for the vision. 6.  See this discussion of Gelernter's influence on the conceptual development of the Cloud: David Gelernter, John Markoff, and Clay Shirky, “Lord of the Cloud,” Edge, April 29, 2009, http://edge.org/conversation/lord-of-the-cloud. For a sense of Gelernter's political conservatism, see http://www.nationalreview.com/author/david-gelernter. 7.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time. 8.  Sun Microsystems’ old tagline, “the network is the computer” has been realized, especially if the definition of network is expanded to include both the physical computing network and the network of users providing content and feedback. 9. 



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Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story by Kurt Eichenwald

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, book value, Burning Man, California energy crisis, computerized trading, corporate raider, currency risk, deal flow, electricity market, estate planning, financial engineering, forensic accounting, intangible asset, Irwin Jacobs, John Markoff, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Michael Milken, Negawatt, new economy, oil shock, price stability, pushing on a string, Ronald Reagan, transaction costs, value at risk, young professional

Details of the early days of the Raptor hedge from Skilling’s Dec. 4, 2001, testimony before the SEC; the notes from Wilmer, Cutler’s Jan. 9, 2002, interview with Wes Colwell; and Causey’s Wilmer, Cutler interview on Dec. 21, 2001. 14. Some details of Lay’s visit with Murdoch from entries in his personal schedule. 15. A copy of the Collins e-mail was obtained by the author. Also see Kurt Eichenwald and John Markoff, “Deception, or Just Disarray, at Enron,” New York Times, June 8, 2003, sec. 3, 1. 16. Some details of the Brown and McMahon episode and McMahon’s subsequent tussle with Fastow from McMahon’s Feb. 7, 2002, congressional testimony and notes from his Jan. 21, 2002, interview with Wilmer, Cutler.


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Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future by Luke Dormehl

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, book scanning, borderless world, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Flash crash, Ford Model T, friendly AI, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, hive mind, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet of things, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, PageRank, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!


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


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


pages: 775 words: 208,604

pages: 791 words: 85,159

pages: 285 words: 86,853

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing by Ed Finn

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Charles Babbage, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, lolcat, Lyft, machine readable, Mother of all demos, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skinner box, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, wage slave



pages: 397 words: 102,910

pages: 561 words: 120,899

Engineering Security by Peter Gutmann

active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business process, call centre, card file, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, combinatorial explosion, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, domain-specific language, Donald Davies, Donald Knuth, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, false flag, fault tolerance, Firefox, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Hacker News, information security, iterative process, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Conway, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, linear programming, litecoin, load shedding, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, Network effects, nocebo, operational security, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, post-materialism, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, random walk, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolling blackouts, Ruby on Rails, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, semantic web, seminal paper, Skype, slashdot, smart meter, social intelligence, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain attack, telemarketer, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, Therac-25, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wayback Machine, web application, web of trust, x509 certificate, Y2K, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

[400] “Risky Business #257 — Exploits for Win8 no mean feat”, Risky Business podcast, 5 October 2012, http://risky.biz/RB257. [401] “Jailbreak”, iSEC Partners, http://www.isecpartners.com/applicationsecurity-tools/jailbreak.html. [402] “NetWitness Discovers Massive ZeuS Compromise”, NetWitness, 18 February 2010, http://www.netwitness.com/resources/pressreleases/feb182010.aspx. [403] “Broad New Hacking Attack Detected”, Siobhan Gorman, The Wall Street Journal, 18 February 2010, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704398804575071103834150536.html. [404] “Malicious Software Infects Computers”, John Markoff, The New York Times, 18 February 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/technology/19cyber.html. [405] “Over 75,000 systems compromised in cyberattack”, Jaikumar Vijayan, ComputerWorld, 18 February 2010, http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9158578/Over_75_000_systems_compromised_in_cyberattack. [406] “Gaming Company Certificates Stolen and Used to Attack Activists, Others”, Kim Zetter, 11 April 2013, http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/04/gaming-company-certs-stolen. [407] “Winnti.


pages: 528 words: 146,459

Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan L. Ensmenger, Jeffrey R. Yost

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, Byte Shop, card file, cashless society, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, deskilling, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Jenner, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, garden city movement, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, Herman Kahn, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, natural language processing, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pirate software, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, Turing machine, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, young professional


pages: 589 words: 147,053

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Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, brain emulation, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, different worldview, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, epigenetics, fear of failure, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hallucination problem, Hans Moravec, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, machine translation, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, nuclear winter, operational security, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, prediction markets, price stability, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, search costs, social graph, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trolley problem, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, World Values Survey, zero-sum game



pages: 1,104 words: 302,176

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management