Joi Ito

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Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Gox’s Missing Bitcoins,” Computerworld, December 31, 2014, http://www.computerworld.com/article/2863167/police-blame-fraud-for-most-of-mt-goxs-missing-bitcoins.html. 24 “MtGox Bitcoin Chief Mark Karpeles Charged in Japan,” BBC News, September 11, 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34217495. 25 Adrian Chen, “The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable,” Gawker, June 1, 2011, http://gawker.com/the-underground-website-where-you-can-buy-any-drug-imag-30818160. 26 Sarah Jeong, “The DHS Agent Who Infiltrated Silk Road to Take Down Its Kingpin,” Forbes, January 14, 2015, http://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahjeong/2015/01/14/the-dhs-agent-who-infiltrated-silk-road-to-take-down-its-kingpin/#6250111369dd. 27 Andy Greenberg, “Silk Road Mastermind Ross Ulbricht Convicted of All 7 Charges,” WIRED, February 4, 2015, https://www.wired.com/2015/02/silk-road-ross-ulbricht-verdict/. 28 Riley Snyder, “California Investor Wins Federal Government’s Bitcoin Auction,” Los Angeles Times, July 2, 2014, http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-bitcoin-auction-20140702-story.html. 29 John Biggs, “US Marshals to Sell 44,000 BTC at Auction in November,” TechCrunch, October 5, 2015, http://social.techcrunch.com/2015/10/05/us-marshals-to-sell-44000-btc-at-auction-in-november/. 30 “FAQ—Bitcoin,” Bitcoin.org, accessed May 29, 2016, https://bitcoin.org/en/faq. 31 Eric Hughes, “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, March 9, 1993, https://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Crypto/Crypto_misc/cypherpunk.manifesto. 32 Joichi Ito, “Shenzhen Trip Report—Visiting the World’s Manufacturing Ecosystem,” Joi Ito’s Web, September 1, 2014, http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2014/09/01/shenzhen-trip-r.html. 33 “Phantom Series—Intelligent Drones,” DJI, http://www.dji.com/products/phantom. 34 “The World’s First and Largest Hardware Accelerator,” HAX, https://hax.co/. Chapter 5: Disobedience over Compliance 1 David A. Hounshell and John Kenly Smith, Science and Corporate Strategy: Du Pont R and D, 1902–1980 (Cambridge University Press, 1988). 2 Pap Ndiaye, Nylon and Bombs: DuPont and the March of Modern America (Baltimore: JHU Press, 2007). 3 Hounshell and Smith, Science and Corporate Strategy. 4 Ibid. 5 Gerard Colby, Du Pont: Behind the Nylon Curtain (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall [1974], 1974). 6 Hounshell and Smith, Science and Corporate Strategy. 7 “Wallace Carothers and the Development of Nylon: National Historic Chemical Landmark,” American Chemical Society, n.d., http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/carotherspolymers.html. 8 Thomas S.

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When I was interviewing Iyad for the faculty position he now holds, he said that he was inspired by both the success and failure of the emergent democracy movement, and remains committed to building the tools for scalable cooperation to advance new forms of democracy. I look forward to working with Iyad and others in a concerted effort to push the pendulum back in the other direction and show that the arc of the Internet can indeed bend toward justice. —Joi Ito 2 Pull over Push The Pacific Plate is something of a sprinter, as far as geological bodies go. Every year it moves three and a half inches in a northwesterly direction. About a hundred miles off the coast of Japan, this giant slab of oceanic crust rams into the far slower Okhotsk Plate, sliding beneath it in a process geologists call subduction.

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You need a portfolio of interests and the ability to quickly respond to both opportunities and threats as they emerge. Focusing too much on the past—or the future—narrows your vision and makes you less able to respond to changes, opportunities, and threats. In many ways, it is like Zen or martial arts training that requires dedication and an open mind. —Joi Ito 3 Compasses over Maps Zach, a boy living in the suburbs of New York City, views algorithms as a kind of compass. His ability to see the hidden patterns that make the world work is a talent he picked up a few years ago, a talent that has become one of the organizing principles of the twenty-first century: A great many of the objects in our life, exceptional and mundane, obey a precise set of instructions that determine their behavior.

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel Iii, John Seely Brown

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, future of work, game design, George Gilder, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Benioff, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Network effects, old-boy network, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart transportation, software as a service, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, TSMC, Yochai Benkler

But they are, on the other hand, more frequent than face-to-face interactions, and the combination of photo sharing (of our children, perhaps, or our motorcycle vacation through the Smoky Mountains), link publishing (to that new article in The Atlantic or to the YouTube video of that presentation you gave at last week’s conference), e-mail, and chat is a far richer, more efficient way of keeping up with friends, acquaintances, and colleagues than previously less-integrated digital methods such as e-mail and instant messaging (IM), which were silo’d and one-to-one rather than one-to-many. Relative to nondigital technology like pen and paper, and to related networks like the postal or telephone system, maintaining social relationships with these new technologies is far easier. The story of how Joi Ito united a diverse group of technologists and human rights advocates, all of whom he knew personally, indicates just how useful and efficient these digitally integrated methods can be—as, indeed, does the use of Twitter by Iranian citizens to organize themselves in the face of oppression. As the number of people we can connect with expands, our ability to pull from that network the resources and people we require to address unexpected needs expands along with it.

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Search engines are rapidly deepening their capabilities, and knowing how to narrow the search with key terms can help. Meanwhile, we can supplement these broad search capabilities with our own social networks to find what we need when we need it. This is the first level of pull, as shown in the diagram on the next page. Joi Ito experienced this principle firsthand not long ago while traveling. Joi, as it happens, is about as experienced a traveler as they come. In his multiple roles as successful entrepreneur, adviser to big companies, angel investor, gamer, guild leader, and CEO of Creative Commons, Joi is rarely in one place for more than three days at a time.

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People were born in a specific geography and, with few exceptions, lived there throughout their lives. As transportation costs and travel times steadily declined, people began to move more freely, and today many of us live in a number of different places over the course of our lives. Some of us, such as Yossi Vardi and Joi Ito, have become perpetual nomads, moving restlessly from one city to the next, rarely stopping long enough to catch our breath, much less settle in. In an interesting reversal, an increasing number of people appear to be reverting to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of our distant ancestors. Only this time, rather than limiting themselves to one forest or even continent, this new generation of hunter-gatherers operates on a global scale.

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

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

Only enterprises that plan for this new reality will have a chance at long-term success. Now that we have finished describing the characteristics of ExOs and their implications, we can look at the how an ExO maps onto other constructs. The following table compares ExO Attributes with Joi Ito’s MIT Media Lab Principles and the heuristics in Nassim Taleb’s Anti-Fragile theory. Joi Ito (MIT Medialab) Nassim Taleb (Anti-Fragile Theory) MTP Pull over push Compasses over maps Focus on the long term, not just the financials and short term Staff on Demand Resilience over strength Stay small and flexible Community & Crowd Systems (ecosystems) over objects Resilience over strength Build in options Stay small and flexible Algorithms - Build in stressors > Simplify and Automate Heuristics (skin in the game, orthogonal) Leased Assets Resilience over strength Reduce dependency and IT; stay small and flexible Invest in R&D Invest in data and social infrastructure Engagement (IC, gamify) Pull over push Build in options Heuristics: skin in the game Interfaces - Simplify and Automate Overcome cognitive biases Dashboard Learning over financial Simplify and Automate Short feedback loops Rewards only after project completion Experimentation Practice over theory Risk over safety Learning over education Diversify Build in hacking and stressors by yourself (fail fast and often; Netflix case w/ Chaos Monkey), especially in good times Build in options Risk over safety (not risk insensitivity) Avoid too much focus on efficiency, control and optimization Autonomy Emergence over authority Disobedience over compliance Decentralization Do not overregulate Challenge senior management Compartmentalize Share ownership within ExO on the edges (skin in the game) Social Technologies Emergence (peer-to-peer learning) over authority Build in stressors How Exponential is Your Organization?

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Until recently, however, incentive programs have rarely been used to motivate creativity and productivity within communities and crowds. Another positive side effect of engagement, particularly when it comes to gamification, is training. The complexity of some of today’s games provides an excellent education in leadership and teamwork skills. In fact, Joi Ito has observed that becoming an effective World of Warcraft guild master is tantamount to a total-immersion course in leadership. Indeed, what might seem like the least serious tool in a company’s user and employee engagement program often proves to be one of its most powerful in terms of finding and training the individuals it needs to reach the next level.

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The Branson group now consists of more than four hundred companies, all operating independently. Collectively, they are worth $24 billion. As Peter Diamandis has often noted, one key advantage of a small team is that it can take on much bigger risks than a large one can. This can be seen clearly in the graph below—courtesy of Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab—which shows how startups are characterized by high upside potential and low downside, while large organizations are characterized by just the opposite. In healthcare, we currently have no solution for the new strains of antibiotic-resistant superbugs showing up in hospitals, which the World Health Organization considers an existential threat as we enter the post-antibiotic era.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky

Andrew Keen, Andy Carvin, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, bioinformatics, Brewster Kahle, c2.com, Charles Lindbergh, commons-based peer production, crowdsourcing, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, hiring and firing, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Kuiper Belt, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Merlin Mann, Metcalfe’s law, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Picturephone, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, prediction markets, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, Yochai Benkler, Yogi Berra

Perhaps the most significant effect of our new tools, though, lies in the increased leverage they give the most connected people. The tightness of a large social network comes less from increasing the number of connections that the average member of the network can support than from increasing the number of connections that the most connected people can support. Bridging Capital, 24/7 Joi Ito is variously an investor, a writer, a hardcore gamer, and a member of the board of scores of companies and nonprofits. His address book contains several thousand names. He is on the road constantly; in 2005 he traveled so much that his average speed was fifty miles per hour for that year. Ito is also an inveterate adopter of new technologies; he tries a remarkable number of social and organizational tools every year and sticks with the ones that make sense to him.

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In 2004, Ito set up an IRC channel called #joiito, where his friends and contacts could congregate and talk. It was meant to be, as he puts it, “not my place, but a semipublic place, where I could be a host.” He used his name both because he is recognized in so many communities (this isn’t vanity, just observation—a Web search for “Joi Ito” brings up nearly a million results) and because he wanted to be able to exert some sort of moral suasion over the proceedings. If the IRC channel bore his name, he had a better chance of enforcing civil behavior. The channel quickly grew to have a hundred or so people logged in at the same time.

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The existence of the channel allows Joi to create a persistent environment where people who know him can meet one another, even if he is not present. Once the channel achieved a kind of social stability, he logged in less and less often; there are people on #joiito around the clock and around the world who do not need a lot of Joi Ito to make it happen. (Dodgeball similarly relies on its users’ social capital to help broker introductions without requiring that they be present.) In this way #joiito is an instantiation of Joi’s role as a connector; if everyone were to start their own IRC channel, no one would ever talk to anyone else, as they’d all be in their own solo spaces.

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

"Susan Fowler" uber, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, Dennis Ritchie, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, life extension, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Saturday Night Live, school choice, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, the High Line, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture , yottabyte

However, it would not lead to an economic payday. The hope of a big payout is behind a great deal of the hype behind self-driving cars. Few investors are willing to give up this hope. The economics of self-driving cars may come down to public perception. In a 2016 conversation between President Barack Obama and MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito, which was published in Wired, the two men talked about the future of autonomous vehicles.25 “The technology is essentially here,” Obama said. We have machines that can make a bunch of quick decisions that could drastically reduce traffic fatalities, drastically improve the efficiency of our transportation grid, and help solve things like carbon emissions that are causing the warming of the planet.

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The Fairness and Transparency in Machine Learning conference and community is a leader in this area.5 Meanwhile, Harvard professor Latanya Sweeney’s Data Privacy Lab at the Harvard University Institute for Quantitative Social Science is doing groundbreaking work in understanding potential violations of privacy in large data sets, especially medical data. The lab’s goal is to create technology and policy “with guarantees of privacy protection while allowing society to collect and share private (or sensitive) information for many worthy purposes.”6 Also in Cambridge, the MIT Media Lab under director Joi Ito is doing admirable work to change the narrative about racial and ethnic diversity in computer science and to start interrogating systems. Prompted by MIT graduate student Karthik Dinakar’s work on human-in-the-loop systems, MIT Media Lab professor Iyad Rahwan has begun working on what he calls society-in-the-loop machine learning, which he hopes to use to explicitly articulate moral concerns (like the trolley problem) in AI.

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“Artificial Intelligence’s White Guy Problem.” New York Times, June 26, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/opinion/sunday/artificial-intelligences-white-guy-problem.html. Dadich, Scott. “Barack Obama Talks AI, Robo Cars, and the Future of the World.” Wired, November 2016. https://www.wired.com/2016/10/president-obama-mit-joi-ito-interview/. Daniel, Anna, and Terry Flew. “The Guardian Reportage of the UK MP Expenses Scandal: A Case Study of Computational Journalism.” In Communications Policy and Research Forum 2010, November 15–16, 2010. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279424256_The_Guardian_Reportage_of_the_UK_MP_Expenses_Scandal_A_Case_Study_of_Computational_Journalism.

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

R Dutton, 1986); John Nathan, Sony: The Private Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999); Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Jones, High Mackay, and Keith Negus, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (London: Sage Publications, 1997); and Lincoln Caplan, "The Walkman," The New Yorker, September 21,1981. 115 "The shirt-pocket-portable": Michael Brian Schiffer, The Portable Radio in American Life (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991). 120 "/ remember my first Walkman": Joi Ito, "My First Sony Walkman," Joi Ito Web, November 20,2004. 121 "intensely insular": Vincent Jackson, "Menace II Society," included in du Gay et al.. Doing Cultural Studies. 121 cooperating in a sociological study: Michael Bull, Sounding Out the City (Oxford: Berg, 2000). 121 "the ultimate musical means in mediating the media": Iain Chambers, "A Miniature History of the Walkman," in du Gay et al., Doing Cultural Studies.

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Despite Moritas wishful thinking, and in spite of a raft of television commercials that showed people from disparate walks of life cozily sharing their music with dual earphones, when offered the chance to keep their music to themselves, they grabbed it. The Walkman was not about sharing, it was about not sharing. It was a me machine, an object of empowerment and liberation. "I remember my first Walkman," the venture capitalist Joi Ito wrote on his blog in 2005 (the memory was inspired by his iPod use). "It was the Sony TPS-L2.1 was in 9th grade. I had just moved to Tokyo. The Walkman was part of the coming of age,' becoming independent, asking a girl out for the first time and becoming Japanese part of my life. I remember the feeling of having music thundering in The Perfect Thing 120 my head as I walked to school.

A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas by Warren Berger

Airbnb, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, food desert, Google X / Alphabet X, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Toyota Production System, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Overall, there’s more darkness into which we can shine that “question flashlight.” Another way to think of it is that as we increasingly find ourselves surrounded by the new, the unfamiliar, and the unknown, we’re experiencing something not unlike early childhood. Everywhere we turn, there’s something to wonder and inquire about. MIT’s Joi Ito says that as we try to come to terms with a new reality that requires us to be lifelong learners (instead of just early-life learners), we must try to maintain or rekindle the curiosity, sense of wonder, inclination to try new things, and ability to adapt and absorb that served us so well in childhood.

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As the children’s neurologist Stewart Mostofsky4 puts it, they have not yet developed “mental models” to categorize things, so part of what they’re doing when questioning is asking adults to help them with this huge job of categorizing what they experience around them, labeling it, putting it in the proper file drawers of the brain. When innovators talk about the virtues of beginner’s mind or neoteny, to use the term favored by MIT Media Lab’s Joi Ito, one of the desirable things they’re referring to is that state where you see things without labels, without categorization. Because once things have been labeled and filed, they become known quantities—and we don’t think about them, may not even notice them. Somewhere between ages four and five, children are ideally suited for questioning: They have gained the language skills to ask, their brains are still in an expansive, highly connective mode, and they’re seeing things without labels or assumptions.

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When you take a look at how adults in innovative environments work, they tend to operate much like the kids in the marshmallow test. At IDEO, the firm’s designers quickly move from coming up with ideas to building and testing those ideas. The same is true at MIT Media Lab, where, as the director Joi Ito explains, the researchers and students don’t spend a lot of time wondering about the questions they’re pursuing, or debating how best to proceed. They quickly start doing what you’re supposed to do in a lab—experimenting. As Ito puts it, “These days it’s easier and less expensive to just try out your ideas than to figure out if you should try them out.”

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Blythe Masters, business process, buy and hold, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, circular economy, cloud computing, computer age, computerized trading, conceptual framework, content marketing, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, informal economy, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, linked data, litecoin, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, market clearing, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, off grid, pets.com, post-truth, prediction markets, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Project Xanadu, ransomware, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, social web, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, the market place, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, web of trust, work culture , zero-sum game

These were important signals. With a blank canvas but also the daunting task of designing a new operating system for the global digital economy, it was vital that a group like this encourage open innovation, so that potentially disruptive new ideas weren’t constrained by threatened gatekeepers. As MIT Media Lab’s Joi Ito puts it, the online economy was not won by the closed-loop “intranets” of the early networking business—not by France Telecom’s Minitel system, or by the internal networks of AOL or Prodigy—but by the fully accessible Internet made possible by the TCP/IP pair of open protocols. The Internet’s open constitution has since been protected by an alphabet soup of global, not-for-profit bodies—albeit with some concern about their excessive power.

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Among those deserving particular thanks are Tim’s assistant, Alice Pfeifer, who has been tremendously helpful in guiding us as we prepared the manuscript for production; Managing Editor Alan Bradshaw, who kept us on schedule; copy editor Jennifer Simington for her meticulous work; Associate Publisher Laura Clark, who has championed both of our books with SMP; and last but certainly not least, the one-two punch of publicist Katie Bassel and marketer Jason Prince. Michael My colleagues at MIT are a constant source of inspiration. They shaped much of the thinking behind this book, probably without knowing it. Special thanks go to Media Lab Director Joi Ito, Digital Currency Initiative Director Neha Narula, and my Sloan School co-lecturer Simon Johnson, as well as to Robleh Ali, Mark Weber, Tadge Dryja, Chelsea Barabas, Prema Shrikrishna, Alin Dragos, James Lovejoy, Sandy Pentland, Dazza Greenwood, Harvey Michaels, David Birnbach, and Christian Catalini.

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This is one reason why researchers at the BOE speculated: John Barrdear and Michael Kumhoff, “Staff Working Paper No. 605: The Macroeconomics of Central Bank Issued Digital Currencies,” Bank of England, July 2016, http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/research/Documents/workingpapers/2016/swp605.pdf. Describing the technology as “an operating system for marketplaces…”: http://hyperledger.org/about. As MIT Media Lab’s Joi Ito: Ito has frequently made the comparison, including during remarks to MIT Technology Review’s “Business of Blockchain” conference, April 18, 2017. “Signing off on the press release was the easy part…”: Remarks at DTCC’s offices, Jersey City, NJ, January 28, 2016. At that same January 2016 meeting: “IBM Delivers Blockchain-as-a-Service for Developers; Commits to Making Blockchain Ready for Business,” IBM, February 16, 2016, https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/49029.wss.

The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha

Airbnb, Andy Kessler, Apollo 13, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, business intelligence, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, follow your passion, future of work, game design, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, late fees, lateral thinking, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, out of africa, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, recommendation engine, Richard Bolles, risk tolerance, rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the strength of weak ties, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

Often it’s when you come in contact with challenges other people find hard but you find easy that you know you’re in possession of a valuable soft asset.3 Usually, however, single assets in isolation don’t have much value. A competitive edge emerges when you combine different skills, experiences, and connections. For example, Joi Ito, a friend and head of the MIT Media Lab, was born in Japan but raised in Michigan. In his mid-twenties he moved back to Japan and set up one of the first commercial Internet service providers there. He also kept developing connections in the United States, investing in Silicon Valley start-ups like Flickr and Twitter, establishing the Japanese subsidiary for the early American blogging company Six Apart, and more recently helping to establish LinkedIn Japan.

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You’ll also be able to connect with other professionals, also in permanent beta, who will help you move from ideas to action, from knowledge to implementation. Some of the exclusive online content includes: 1. A free PDF with advanced techniques for using LinkedIn to implement some of the strategies in this book. 2. Video interviews with Sheryl Sandberg, Mark Pincus, Joi Ito, and other top executives from different fields reflecting on their careers and sharing lessons learned. 3. An executive summary of The Start-Up of You—all the key points summarized and formatted in a way that’s easily shareable. (It makes a good “small gift” to someone in your network!) On Twitter, you can find us at @startupofyou.

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

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

The technology watches what you listen to, “scrobbling” (meaning sending the name of the song you’re listening to) to an engine that then learns more about you 80706 i-xxiv 001-328 r4nk.indd 199 8/12/08 1:55:43 AM REMI X 200 (and people like you). That engine then enables individuals to be linked with others. But not just anonymously. Instead, the technology helps individuals link their own user pages with others, both friends and those within their musical “neighborhood.” As Japanese venture capitalist (and Last.fm investor) Joi Ito described it to me, The Last.fm community originally was, and may still be, revolving around the cleaning up of the data. So if you have titles of songs that are misspelled, or if you have an artist whose name is written differently in Japanese, there’s a whole community of people who go in and fix those ambiguities and fix the data.

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It’s just one more window . . . and it’s not usually my best one.58 Second Life is of course not the only virtual place in which people build this sort of community. Many (perhaps most) of the most interesting virtual games have this component built in. Japanese entrepreneur and venture capitalist (and gamer) Joi Ito describes the community in perhaps the Net’s most popular game, World of Warcraft: “[T]he game emphasizes the necessity for a group. As an individual, you realize that the only way that you could create a group is by sharing and by being friendly.” This is a lesson especially important for kids. So a lot of times when young kids start playing World of Warcraft, in the beginning they’re very greedy.

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I had a very different conception of the story this book tells, for example, until Tim O’Reilly shifted my view fundamentally. Likewise, though in differing degrees, with the other interviewees who appear throughout the book: Brian Behlendorf, Marc Brandon, Candice Breitz, Stewart Butterfield, Steve Chen, Gregg Gillis, Mark Hosier, Joi Ito, Mimi Ito, Don Joyce, Brewster Kahle, Heather Lawver, Declan McCullagh, Dave Marglin, Craig Newmark, Silvia Ochoa, Tim O’Reilly, Philip Rosedale, Mark Shuttleworth, Johan Söderberg, Victor Stone, Jimmy Wales, Jerry Yang, and Robert Young. I have learned a great deal from all of them, and I hope I have fairly evinced some of that understanding here.

Free Ride by Robert Levine

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

That’s one reason the group’s contributors include Google, Microsoft, eBay, Best Buy, and the Consumer Electronics Association. Several of the fourteen members of Creative Commons’ board of directors have ties to businesses that would benefit from having more work free from copyright restrictions online. Glenn Otis Brown is the music business development manager at YouTube, and Caterina Fake and the chief executive, Joi Ito, were, respectively, a cofounder and an investor in Flickr, a photo-sharing start-up that used Creative Commons licenses. Esther Wojcicki, Sergey Brin’s mother-in-law, who served as the board’s chair for a year and a half before becoming vice-chair in September 2010, may not benefit directly from Google’s success, but her relative lack of experience in law and nonprofit management makes her an odd choice for the job.

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Traffic, and income from advertising, rose accordingly. In March 2005, when Flickr was acquired by Yahoo!, reportedly for more than $30 million, the photographers received nothing.74 Most of them didn’t mind: they got free photo storage and a chance to show off their work. But it’s worth noting that Joi Ito, who runs Creative Commons, sometimes seems more excited about the investment opportunities provided by free content than about helping artists. “I think that Creative Commons will also mark an explosion of innovation that will happen on the content level,” he said in July 2010. “As an investor, for instance, I can’t invest in many of the music companies because of the risk of copyright litigation.”75 This is true enough.

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The Digital Millennium Copyright Act doesn’t cover ad networks, and some of the sites in question aren’t in the United States. 70. Ellen Seidler, “Google-Go-Round, Profits from Pirates,” blog at PopUpPirates.com. 71. Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. et al. v. Triton Media, LLC, No. CV-10-6318 (C.D. Cal. filed Aug. 24, 2010). 72. Ito responded to questions via e-mail. 73. Joi Ito, Hal Abelson, and Laurie Racine are on the boards of both Creative Commons and Public Knowledge. Creative Commons also has close ties with both Stanford and the Berkman Center at Harvard; of the group’s board members, Glenn Otis Brown, now at YouTube, went to Harvard Law School and taught a class with Lessig at Stanford; Eric Saltzman is the Berkman Center’s former executive director; and Molly Shaffer Van Houweling has been a fellow at both Stanford Law School and the Berkman Center. 74.

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

Try Paying More,” Bloomberg Opinion, September 8, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-09-08/having-trouble-hiring-try-paying-more; Thijs van Rens, “Paying Skilled Workers More Would Create More Skilled Workers,” Harvard Business Review, May 19, 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/05/paying-skilled-workers-more-would-create-more-skilled-workers. 83. See, for example, Swiss Business Hub Japan, Healthcare Tech in Japan: A Booming Market, 2018, https://swissbiz.jp/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/sge_healthcaretech_japan_infographic.pdf. 84. Joi Ito, “Why Westerners Fear Robots and the Japanese Do Not,” Wired, July 30, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/ideas-joi-ito-robot-overlords. 85. “Japan Is Both Obsessed With and Resistant to Robots,” Economist, November, 2018, https://www.economist.com/asia/2018/11/08/japan-is-both-obsessed-with-and-resistant-to-robots. 86. Selina Cheng, “ ‘An Insult to Life Itself’: Hayao Miyazaki Critiques an Animation Made by Artificial Intelligence,” Quartz, December 10, 2016, https://qz.com/859454/the-director-of-spirited-away-says-animation-made-by-artificial-intelligence-is-an-insult-to-life-itself/. 87.

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There is no universal prescription here. Japanese leaders have been particularly enthusiastic about deploying technology in health care settings.83 Several commentators have argued that Shinto and Buddhist traditions make Japanese citizens more accepting of robotics and allied technology. Former MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito, for instance, discerned a deep connection between forms of animism and acceptance of robots.84 Japanese culture, however, is not monolithic, and its pluralism includes voices expressing caution about the spread of AI.85 For example, in a vivid exchange, animator Hayao Miyazaki dismissed an AI animation of a grotesquely humanoid figure: I am utterly disgusted.

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

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

What Friedman euphemistically dubs a “mismatch” between technology and humanity is, he says, “at the center of much of the turmoil roiling politics and society in both developed and developing countries today . . . [and] now constitutes probably the most important governance challenge across the globe.”7 As Joi Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab, warns, when everything is moving quickly except us, the consequence is a social, cultural, and economic “whiplash.”8 Few people have given this asymmetry more thought than the philosopher whom Thomas Friedman acknowledges as his “teacher” in these matters, Dov Seidman, author of How and the CEO of LRN, which advises companies on ethical behavior, culture, and leadership.9, 10 Seidman reminds us that “there’s no Moore’s Law for human progress” and that “technology can’t solve moral problems.”

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Gordon Moore didn’t himself call it Moore’s Law when he wrote his 1965 paper. His friend Carver Mead was the first to call it that, in 1975. 6. Thomas L. Friedman, Thanks You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Acceleration (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 27. 7. Ibid., 28. 8. Joi Ito and Jeff Howe, Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future (Grand Central Publishing, 2016). 9. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late, 4. 10. Dov Seidman, “From the Knowledge Economy to the Human Economy,” Harvard Review, November 12, 2014. 11. “2017 Edelman TRUST BAROMETER Reveals Global Implosion of Trust,” Edelman.com, January 15, 2017. 12.

Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era by Tony Wagner, Ted Dintersmith

affirmative action, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, David Brooks, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, immigration reform, income inequality, index card, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, new economy, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, school choice, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steven Pinker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the scientific method, two and twenty, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Y Combinator

A teacher who can hold the attention of students for a class period, let alone a school year, is performing a minor miracle. It’s of modest academic interest to debate whether a student is better off being lectured by a real person, by an online video, or by a blend. The real question is whether any form of lecture-based education makes sense in today’s world. And the evidence says it doesn’t. On the face of it, Joi Ito might seem an odd choice to head MIT’s Media Lab, one of our university system’s crown jewels. Ito didn’t graduate from college. He dropped out. Twice. He started at Tufts, and concluded that the way computer science was taught made no sense. He rebooted at the University of Chicago, studied physics, but concluded that the coursework was largely about memorizing formulas.

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“College is worth it, but only if we make the most of it,” Gallup, Opinion Pages, August 14, 2014. http://www.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/176507/college-worth.aspx. 72 Busteed, Brandon. (Executive Director of Gallup Education) in discussion with the author, October 23, 2014. Chapter 6. Teaching, Learning, and Assessing 1 Ito, Joi. “A week of a student’s electrodermal activity,” Ito’s blog, April 30, 2012. http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2012/04/30/a-week-of-a-stu.html (accessed Decmber 8, 2014). 2 Khan, Salman. The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2012). Kindle Edition. 1985–1989. 3 “Enough with the lecturing,” National Science Foundation Press Release 14-064, May 12, 2014. http://nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?

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

They could teach from an early age what it takes to forge an effective human–machine partnership, which has each partner effectively complementing the strengths and weaknesses of the other. Such offerings could be the contemporary version of “shop class,” in which boys learned to cut wood and metal. Our otherwise well-educated kids did not experience this in their own educations, which is unfortunate. Something Joi Ito, who heads the MIT Media Lab, said in a recent TED Talk connects well to this thought. Talking about education, he wondered why teachers continue to insist that students be able to perform certain tasks with no technological support when, in the real world for which they are being prepared, all those supports exist (primarily on the Internet or as smartphone apps).

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An example Wenger cites is crowdfunding, which enables creative people whose ideas do not offer enough value-creation potential to make them exciting to venture capitalists, to raise funds in the form of many small contributions from ordinary folk who would just like to see their ideas realized. It’s a completely new mechanism for funding projects, and Wenger points out that it constitutes an important social innovation that was wholly conceived and built outside the government’s purview. Joi Ito of MIT mentions another one, now called Safecast, in the TED Talk we referred to earlier in this chapter—a bottom-up, volunteer-based approach to mapping the spread of radiation in Japan after the 2011 tsunami. Online education is another one, given the social benefits of having education easily accessible for free or at a very low cost that previously would have cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, AltaVista, Apple II, Apple Newton, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business cycle, business process, Byte Shop, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, don't be evil, eat what you kill, fake news, fear of failure, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, game design, General Magic , Googley, Hacker News, HyperCard, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Larry Wall, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, nuclear winter, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, proprietary trading, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, software patent, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine, web application, Y Combinator

Like everyone else, we thought very highly of Google, and we said, “Let’s talk about it.” Four months later, we were sitting in Google. Mind you, it wasn’t an easy decision. I struggled hard deciding if going to Google was the right thing to do. We weren’t desperate. We actually had a term sheet on the table for $1 million in investment from Joi Ito’s Neoteny (who ended up investing in Six Apart). And after 4 years of pouring my heart into Blogger, I saw a lot of risk in giving up control. Eventually I decided Google was right. I really thought we could do huge things at this point, and Google had done bigger things than most, so I wanted to get in there and learn and get those resources.

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Trott’s personal blog, Dollarshort, was growing in popularity, and she was dissatisfied with the blogging software available at the time. So she and Ben decided to develop their own and share it with some friends. Movable Type became popular almost immediately on its launch in October 2001. In April 2003, Six Apart received funding from Joi Ito’s Neoteny. They launched their hosted service, TypePad, later that fall. In January 2005, the company announced the acquisition of Danga Interactive, the makers of LiveJournal. Six Apart launched Vox (formerly known as Comet), a hosted blogging platform with a social networking component, in 2006.

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I actually sent those emails out with their keys up until probably January of 2004. It was a really long time. I felt that they were giving money, so I wanted to honor that and thank them. Livingston: So you’re taking donations, it’s paying the rent and keeping things moving. Did you then try to seek out VC money? 408 Founders at Work Trott: No. We never sought out money. Joi Ito contacted us because he was using the product, and he was interested. He was actually probably more interested in just talking to us about what we were doing. And then he said, “If you’re ever interested . . .” We kind of ignored him because we didn’t know what to do. We didn’t have any desire to take money.

The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet by Justin Peters

4chan, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Alan Greenspan, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Bayesian statistics, Brewster Kahle, buy low sell high, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, Free Software Foundation, global village, Hacker Ethic, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Lean Startup, machine readable, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Open Library, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, profit motive, RAND corporation, Republic of Letters, Richard Stallman, selection bias, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, social web, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

They hoped that a sympathetic public statement from the school might dissuade the US attorneys from bringing a case. At the least, such a statement would hamper the prosecutors’ efforts to argue in court that Swartz had caused grave harm to any of the parties involved. On June 13, 2011, Robert Swartz asked Joi Ito, the incoming director of the MIT Media Lab, if he would be willing to intervene on Aaron’s behalf with the MIT administration. Ito obliged. “I wonder if there is any way that MIT might consider this a ‘family matter’ and consider helping to try to limit the extent of the punishment and at least prevent Aaron from going to prison on a felony charge,” Ito wrote to the school’s Office of the General Counsel.

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Between May and August 2012, Swartz’s attorneys contacted the institute’s outside counsel thirteen separate times to request a meeting with MIT officials, in hopes of convincing them to issue a public statement that could be used on Swartz’s behalf. MIT officials did not respond.7 With official communications blocked, Swartz’s father decided once again to convene a meeting with MIT executives through informal channels. With the help of Media Lab director Joi Ito, Robert Swartz sent a letter to MIT’s president and chancellor on August 10, 2012. “We think there are both legal and non-legal issues that you are not aware of and urgently ask for a meeting,” he wrote. “The urgency of the meeting is due to the fact that the prosecutor has given us a deadline of Wednesday [August 15] to resolve the case or go to trial and we have a meeting Monday with the head of the criminal division that requires hard decisions.”8 The letter was an epistolary kowtow.

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

As a consequence of the power of embedded computing, we will see “billions of smart, connected ‘things’ ” joining a global neural network in the cloud that “will encompass every aspect of our lives.” While the “old” Internet allowed desktops, laptops, and servers to share information, the “new” Internet will make it possible to remotely control any object on earth. As Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab, explains, there is a “phenomenon of convergence, where bits from the digital realm are fusing with atoms here in the physical world.” Every object will have an identity and a life in both the physical and the virtual worlds, and when this happens, the difference between online and off-line, previously a meaningful distinction, goes away.

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Robots are computers, automated systems that can reach beyond the purely two-dimensional digital plane of their ancestors in order to touch, influence, and interact with the corporeal world that surrounds them. Most can be remotely controlled over the Internet and via smart-phone apps, leading to legions of robots joining the Internet of Things. The implications are momentous. As Joi Ito, director of MIT’s Media Lab, has observed, we are living in a period of convergence, a time “where bits from the digital realm are fusing with atoms here in the physical world.” Robots are entering our three-dimensional space—space that they will share with us. Like all objects connected to the IoT, robots are subject to hacking, though the consequences may be much more far-reaching.

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The legendary geneticist, molecular engineer, and Harvard professor George Church has concluded that “about four grams of DNA theoretically could store the digital data humankind creates in one year.” Not only do such storage techniques vastly outlast magnetic media by a few hundred thousand years (we can still read dinosaur DNA), but they are more than a million times denser than today’s electronic storage technologies. As a result, Joi Ito of MIT’s Media Lab has predicted that our technological universe will expand beyond the Internet of Things to include an Internet of microbes, networks of biological things that can communicate with each other and with us. Indeed, synbio promises a host of tremendous breakthroughs and benefits for our society, and the work is only just beginning.

Distrust That Particular Flavor by William Gibson

AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, edge city, Future Shock, imposter syndrome, informal economy, Joi Ito, means of production, megastructure, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, pattern recognition, proxy bid, restrictive zoning, Snow Crash, space junk, technological determinism, telepresence, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog

I actually feel I shouldn’t have to. It’s like being asked to explain why London fascinates me. Who asks a question like that? Were Japanese girls the first power texters? They were the first I encountered. I saw my first fax machine in Tokyo. Katsuhiro Otomo had several in his house, when he was making Akira. Joi Ito and his friends, in Tokyo, were the first people I saw using those tiny little newfangled cellphones to coordinate smoothly frenetic urban evenings. A fashionably dressed man in Floral Street, outside Paul Smith, was the first headset-equipped cellphone user I ever mistook for a talkative madman.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

The Internet is a case in point, contrasting these two views on the nature of technological innovation. In the 1970s, telecommunications companies and academic computer scientists battled over the design of the future Internet. Industry engineers backed X.25, a complex scheme for routing data across computer networks. The computer scientists favored a simpler, collaborative, ad hoc approach. As Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab, describes it: The battle between X.25 and the Internet was the battle between heavily funded, government backed experts and a loosely organized group of researchers and entrepreneurs. The X.25 people were trying to plan and anticipate every possible problem and application.

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., Patrick Geddes in India, 11. 32Quoted in Welter, Biopolis, 18. 33Nicolai Ouroussoff, “Outgrowing Jane Jacobs and Her New York, New York Times, April 30, 2006, http://www,nytimes.com/2006/04/30/weekinreview/30jacobs.html. 34Campanella, “Jane Jacobs and the Death and Life of American Planning.” 35Fareed Zakaria, “Special Address: At the Intersection of Globalization and Urbanization,” SmarterCities Forum, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, November 9, 2011. 36Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better (New York: Dutton, 2011), Kindle edition, location 93. 37“Hal Varian on How the Web Challenges Managers,” video interview with James Manyika, McKinsey & Co., last modified January 2009, http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Hal_Varian_on_how_the_Web_challenges_ managers_2286. 38Joi Ito, “The Internet, innovation and learning,” last modified December 5, 2011, http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2011/12/05/the-internet-in.html. 39Ito, “The Internet, innovation and learning.” 40Michael Hiltzik, “So, who really did invent the Internet?” Los Angeles Times, last modified July 23, 2012, http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-mo-who-invented-internet-20120723,0,5052169.story. 41Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture Without Architects (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987). 42Gary Wolf, “Exploring the Unmaterial World,” Wired, 2000, 306–19. 43Gene Becker, “Prada Epicenter Revisited,” Fred’s House, blog, last modified April 4, 2004, http://www.fredshouse.net/archive/000159.html. 44Adam Greenfield, Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing (Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2006), 179. 45M.

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

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

That is a future worth looking forward to. Now is the time to invent it. Acknowledgments Appropriately enough, this book is itself the product of a peer network of support and collaboration that extends back more than a decade. Shortly after my 2001 book Emergence was published, my friend Joi Ito posted a few open-ended musings online about what the decentralized networks of emergence might mean for the future of politics and democracy—sparking a conversation that ultimately produced a book of essays called Extreme Democracy. At the same time, my friend Kurt Andersen remarked that he wished Emergence had explored the social and economic implications of the theories I was describing.

The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing by Lisa Gansky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, bike sharing, business logic, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, diversification, Firefox, fixed income, Google Earth, impact investing, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, late fees, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, planned obsolescence, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, social web, software as a service, TaskRabbit, the built environment, the long tail, vertical integration, walkable city, yield management, young professional, Zipcar

I so appreciate your time, candor, curiosity, friendship, and openness. Luis Sota, Todd Lash, Peter Schwartz, Eamonn Kelly, Maria Guidice, Nancy Murphy, Chris Anderson, Sunny Bates, Christie Dames, Kevin O’Malley, Juan Enriquez, Jacqueline Novogratz, Ethan Beard, Joel Makower, Laurie Coots, Shawn Gensch, Mitchell Baker, Chris Beard, John Lilly, Joi Ito, Denise Caruso, and Lisa Minucci all contributed to my thinking, reshaping, and concern for sharing The Mesh effectively and well. Thank you for your time, insights, and support. To my team at Portfolio, you are, as A.Z. would say, “the bomb”! Thanks for the dedication, alacrity, vision, tenacity, and partnership.

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World by Yancey Strickler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, Adam Curtis, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dutch auction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, global supply chain, Hacker News, housing crisis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Nash: game theory, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, Mr. Money Mustache, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, offshore financial centre, Parker Conrad, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, white flight, Zenefits

Thank you to the rest of my New York family, including Kendel and Adam Shore, Bridget and Charles Best, Laurence Carty and Paola Antonelli, Lena Iwamura, Agnieszka Kurant, Michal Rosen, Anthony Volodkin, Josh Stylman, Peter Hershberg, Alan Del Rio Ortiz, CJ Anderson, Pete Fritz, Ed Coleman, Greg Costello, Maureen Hoban, Jamin Warren, Jess Phelps, Jesse Ball, Qanta Shimizu, Doug Sherrard, and Liz Cook. Also thanks to Jerry Colonna, Chad Dickerson, Patrick Collison, Ev Williams, Andy Baio, Sunny Bates, Tina Roth Eisenberg, Lance Ivy, Hope Hall, Jeff Hammerbacher, Tim O’Reilly, Jess Search, Jennifer Pahlka, Joi Ito, Karin Chien, Keri Putnam, Luis Von Ahn, Max Temkin, Deray McKeesson, Lawrence Lessig, Daryl Morey, Tyler Cowen, and Thaniya Keerepart. To my Echo Park family, Trish and Tony Unruh, Lucien Unruh, Rohan Ali, Alexa Meade, Anna Bulbrook, and Sadye Henson, thank you for making us feel so at home. To the 29 Palms Inn, thank you for always being a place of inspiration and solace.

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Brian Christian

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, butterfly effect, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, effective altruism, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Frances Oldham Kelsey, game design, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, Goodhart's law, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hedonic treadmill, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, Internet Archive, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kenneth Arrow, language acquisition, longitudinal study, machine translation, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, multi-armed bandit, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, premature optimization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, sparse data, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, Steve Jobs, strong AI, the map is not the territory, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

See New York Consolidated Laws, Executive Law – EXC § 259-c: “State board of parole; functions, powers and duties.” 16. “New York’s Broken Parole System.” 17. “A Chance to Fix Parole in New York.” 18. Smith, “In Wisconsin, a Backlash Against Using Data to Foretell Defendants’ Futures.” 19. “Quantifying Forgiveness: MLTalks with Julia Angwin and Joi Ito,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjmkTGfu9Lk. Regarding Steve Jobs, see Eric Johnson, “It May Be ‘Data Journalism,’ but Julia Angwin’s New Site the Markup Is Nothing Like FiveThirtyEight,” https://www.recode.net/2018/9/27/17908798/julia-angwin-markup-jeff-larson-craig-newmark-data-investigative-journalism-peter-kafka-podcast. 20.

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“Learning with Augmented Class by Exploiting Unlabeled Data.” In Twenty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1760–66, 2014. Dabkowski, Piotr, and Yarin Gal. “Real Time Image Saliency for Black Box Classifiers.” In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 6967–76, 2017. Dadich, Scott, Joi Ito, and Barack Obama. “Barack Obama, Neural Nets, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of the World.” Wired, October 12, 2016. Dana, Jason, and Robyn M. Dawes. “The Superiority of Simple Alternatives to Regression for Social Science Predictions.” Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics 29, no. 3 (2004): 317–31.

Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, From Atoms to Economies by Cesar Hidalgo

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, assortative mating, business cycle, Claude Shannon: information theory, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Ford Model T, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, New Economic Geography, Norbert Wiener, p-value, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, price mechanism, Richard Florida, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, working-age population

PART III The Quantization of Knowhow In 2013 Josep Guardiola, the former coach of Barcelona and current coach of Bayern Munich, visited the MIT Media Lab. Guardiola—or Pep, as he is informally known—had accepted an invitation to visit MIT from his friend and MIT’s treasurer, Israel Ruiz. After some emails involving Israel, Joi Ito, and me, I was put in charge of preparing for Pep’s visit, a responsibility that I accepted happily. Pep’s visit was easy to organize. Students from my group and other groups at the Media Lab were excited to present their work to the soccer celebrity. Yet, since students from other departments also wanted to meet him, I decided to organize a short Q&A session.

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

We may enter a time in which—as a reaction to too much remembering, with too strict and unforgiving a link to our past—some may opt for the extreme and ignore the past altogether for the present, deciding to live just in the moment. This may sound more far-fetched than it actually is. Take the culture of short messaging (SMSing). Most of the messages sent back and forth (much like one’s status on Facebook) are, as Internet entrepreneur Joi Ito reminded me, not intended to communicate something about the past or the future, but are solely about the present: this is where I am; this is what I do. These messages are intentionally ephemeral, capturing the fleeting moment that is now, nothing beyond. At least to some extent this may be how the digital generation responds to digital remembering.

The New Nomads: How the Migration Revolution Is Making the World a Better Place by Felix Marquardt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, digital nomad, Donald Trump, George Floyd, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joi Ito, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, out of africa, phenotype, place-making, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sustainable-tourism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Yogi Berra, young professional

I would also like to extend my sincere thanks to the nomads I met and interviewed in the process of researching this book, many of them at length, for their precious time and invaluable insights: Habib Kazdaghli; Alhaji Siraj Bah; Farzad Ban; Alia Wingstedt; Max Karlsson; Niall Saville; Emmanuella Zandi; Ankit Desai; Tania Beard; Paola Audrey; Ciku Kimeria; Jan H. Christiansen; Miguel Jonsson; Catherine Mayer; Alok Alström; Arnaud Castaignet; Gwamaka Kifukwe; Karoli Hindriks; Aida Hadžialic; Ibrahima Tounkara; Ben Sock; Yeb Saño; Greta Thunberg; Vic Barrett; Sani Tahir; Vybarr Cregan-Reid; presidents Kersti Kaljulaid and José Ramos-Horta; Joi Ito; Guyonne de Montjou; Max Ajl; Lu Gigliotti; Ramazan Nanayev; Julien Rochedy; Sigurlína Ingvarsdóttir, Peter Smith, Nic Cary and Xen Herd; Kevin Anderson and Keri Facer; Nasita Fofana; Ays¸em Mert; Gareth Dale; Anjuli Pandit; Silja Voolma; Philippe Douste-Blazy; Lauren Proctor; Phoebe Tickell; Lennart Olsson; Stan Cox, Bryan Thompson, Pheonah Nabukalu and Fred Iutzi at the Land Institute; Sohnia van der Puye; Ilse van der Velden; Ben Anderson; Spencer Wells; Glenn Chisholm; Beta Grétarsdóttir; Eva Vlaardingerbroek; Efua Oyofo; Muyabwa Moza; Harper Reed; Anna-Hope Kabongo; Karim Sy and Keita Stephenson; Niki Jaiswal; Sophia Rashad; Matt Yanchyshyn; Matteo De Vos; Patrick Chadwick; Monika Karapetian; Nour Sharara; Gordon Cyrus; Paul da Silva; Asad Hussein; Assa Traoré; Noura Berrouba; Rabbi Stephen Berkowitz; and last but not least Franco Rivas.

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income by Guy Standing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-fragile, bank run, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, collective bargaining, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, labour market flexibility, land value tax, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, open economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, precariat, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Salesforce, Sam Altman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, The Future of Employment, universal basic income, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator, Zipcar

, New York Times, Sunday Review, 20 March. 7. H. Koch and J. Quoos (2017), ‘Schwab: “Gewinner müssen mit Verlierern solidarisch sein” ’, Hamburger Abendblatt, 9 January. 8. S. Dadich (2016), ‘Barack Obama, neural nets, self-driving cars and the future of the world’, Wired, October. https://www.wired.com/2016/10/president-obama-mit-joi-ito-interview/. 9. The best general treatment is Caputo, Basic Income Guarantee and Politics. 10. V. Taylor et al. (2002), Report of the Commission on the Comprehensive Reform of Social Security. Cape Town: Department of Social Development, Government of South Africa. M. Samson and G. Standing (eds.) (2003), A Basic Income Grant for South Africa.

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, DeepMind, Didi Chuxing, discounted cash flows, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, fulfillment center, Future Shock, George Gilder, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, high-speed rail, hockey-stick growth, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, initial coin offering, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, late fees, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Quicken Loans, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , Y Combinator, yellow journalism

Many of the stories in the book come from the guests who appeared in Season 1 and Season 2, including Aneel Bhusri, Sara Blakely, Stewart Butterfield, Barry Diller, John Elkann, Caterina Fake, Tim Ferriss, Payal Kadakia, Nancy Lublin, Mark Pincus, Linda Rottenberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Howard Schultz, Peter Thiel, Tristan Walker, Ev Williams, and Mark Zuckerberg. Thanks also to those who made a cameo on those episodes, including Umber Ahmad, Dominique Ansel, Greg Baldwin, Alexa Christon, Paulette Mae Cole, Chris Costa, Lisa Curtis, Susan Danziger, Angela Duckworth, Kara Goldin, Natasha Hastings, Margaret Heffernan, Drew Houston, Joi Ito, Leila Janah, Daniel Kahneman, Cheryl Kellond, Dara Khosrowshahi, Josh Kopelman, Omid Kordestani, Michelle Lee, Tim Lefler, Kristen Marhaver, Kathryn Minshew, Andrew Ng, Aubrie Pagano, Hadi Partovi, Robert Pasin, Juliana Rotich, Andrés Ruzo, Dick Stockton, Tony Tjan, Yossi Vardi, and Darryl Woodson.

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

World of Warcraft was designed to be social and participative. Many tasks are too complex to be undertaken alone, putting a premium on collaboration among characters with complementary abilities. Soon after the game was launched, guilds started to form. Some, like the one founded by the Japanese Internet venture capitalist Joi Ito, have thousands of members and are like mini-societies with their own websites and private lore. Others have only a handful of casual members. Yet World of Warcraft is not a collaboration of altruistic hackers. The 8 million players pay a monthly subscription of $14.99. Extensions to the game have to be bought: the first to be released, World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, sold 2.4 million copies in the first 24 hours.

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, Kenneth Cukier

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Swan, book scanning, book value, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, data science, double entry bookkeeping, Eratosthenes, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, hype cycle, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, obamacare, optical character recognition, PageRank, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, post-materialism, random walk, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systematic bias, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

On that note, we reserve our particular thanks to the participants over the years at the Rueschlikon Conference on Information Policy, which Viktor co-organized and where Kenn was the rapporteur. We especially thank Joseph Alhadeff, Bernard Benhamou, John Seely Brown, Herbert Burkert (who introduced us to Commodore Maury), Peter Cullen, Ed Felten, Urs Gasser, Joi Ito, Jeff Jonas, Nicklas Lundblad, Douglas Merrill, Rick Murray, Cory Ondrejka, and Paul Schwartz. VIKTOR MAYER-SCHÖNBERGER KENNETH CUKIER Oxford/London, August 2012 Index abacuses, [>] Accenture, [>], [>] accountability, individual: big data and, [>]–[>], [>] Acxiom, [>], [>] airlines Etzioni analyzes fare pricing patterns, [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>] flight delay predictions, [>]–[>], [>]–[>] AirSage, [>], [>] “algorithmists,” [>]–[>] algorithms, computer, [>]–[>], [>] improvements in, [>]–[>] transparency of, [>] Alta Vista, [>] Amazon, [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>] as big-data company, [>] book reviews at, [>]–[>], [>] collaborative filtering at, [>]–[>], [>] data-reuse by, [>], [>] and e-books, [>]–[>] Amazonia (Marcus), [>] ancient world: record-keeping in, [>]–[>] Anderson, Chris: on “end of theory,” [>]–[>] anonymization: big data defeats, [>]–[>], [>] of data, [>], [>]–[>] privacy and, [>]–[>] antitrust regulation: big data and, [>]–[>] AOL: fails to understand data-reuse, [>] releases personal data, [>]–[>] Apple, [>], [>] and cell phone data, [>] Arabic numerals, [>]–[>] Arnold, Thelma, [>]–[>] artificial intelligence: big data and, [>]–[>] at Google, [>] Asthmapolis, [>] astronomy: big data in, [>] automobiles: anti-theft systems, [>] data-gathering by, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>]–[>] automobiles, electric: big data and, [>]–[>] IBM and, [>]–[>] automobiles, self-driving, [>], [>], [>], [>] Aviva, [>]–[>] Ayres, Ian: Super Crunchers, [>] Bacon, Francis, [>] Banko, Michele, [>], [>] Barabási, Albert-László, [>]–[>] Barnes & Noble, [>]–[>] Basis, [>] Beane, Billy, [>]–[>] Being Digital (Negroponte), [>] Bell Labs, [>] Berners-Lee, Tim, [>] Bezos, Jeff, [>], [>], [>], [>] big data.

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

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

Thanks to cloud computing, robotics, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, the iPad, and cheap Internet-enabled smartphones, Friedman says, “the world has gone from connected to hyper-connected.”13 Runciman, Lanchester, and Friedman are all describing the same great economic, cultural, and, above all, intellectual transformation. “The Internet,” Joi Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab, notes, “is not a technology; it’s a belief system.”14 Everything and everyone are being connected in a network revolution that is radically disrupting every aspect of today’s world. Education, transportation, health care, finance, retail, and manufacturing are now being reinvented by Internet-based products such as self-driving cars, wearable computing devices, 3-D printers, personal health monitors, massive open online courses (MOOCs), peer-to-peer services like Airbnb and Uber, and currencies like Bitcoin.

The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks by Joshua Cooper Ramo

air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Firefox, Google Chrome, growth hacking, Herman Kahn, income inequality, information security, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, Laura Poitras, machine translation, market bubble, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, Paul Graham, power law, price stability, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social web, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Vernor Vinge, zero day

I am fortunate to have friends who also helped me shape and refine the ideas in the book—through conversation and debate and then through careful reading. Jacob Weisberg’s dissection of an early draft of the book helped me tighten many of my ideas, and feedback from Bob Rubin, Fareed Zakaria, Jim Baker, and Gideon Rose also made me carefully consider any number of problems in the manuscript. Joi Ito and Reid Hoffman, philosophical brothers in arms, impressed their energy and optimism on my thinking. My friend Michelle Kydd Lee offered her sharp mind and warm heart throughout. Devon Spurgeon was a loyal, tireless supporter of the book’s ideas. Alicia Johnson and Hal Wolverton gave me great creative support and ideas.

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

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

I am particularly grateful to Catherine Crump and Harry Surden, who helped direct their research, and to Laura Lynch, who brilliantly managed the army that they assembled, and provided her own critical eye on much of this. Yuko Noguchi helped me to understand the laws of Japan as well as its culture. I am thankful to her, and to the many in Japan who helped me prepare this book: Joi Ito, Takayuki Matsutani, Naoto Misaki, Michihiro Sasaki, Hiromichi Tanaka, Hiroo Yamagata, and Yoshihiro Yonezawa. I am thankful as well as to Professor Nobuhiro Nakayama, and the Tokyo University Business Law Center, for giving me the chance to spend time in Japan, and to Tadashi Shiraishi and Kiyokazu Yamagami for their generous help while I was there.

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

In 1979 my parents took my brother, Cyrus, and me to live in Beijing for two years, enrolling us in a Chinese primary school, so they could conduct research on a book. None of us realized at the time what a gift they had given their children. More than two decades later when I was working as a foreign correspondent in Tokyo, I met Joi Ito, who introduced me to blogs, catalyzing a chain of discoveries and friendships that ultimately propelled me away from conventional journalism and down the winding path I have taken. Adam Greenfield jolted me out of my TV reporter’s mind-set and challenged me to think in new dimensions. My dear friend and colleague Ethan Zuckerman has been a rock since we started collaborating in 2004, providing critical support and substantive advice as this project evolved.

We're Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation by Eric Garcia

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, defund the police, Donald Trump, epigenetics, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, full employment, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, intentional community, Internet Archive, Joi Ito, Lyft, meta-analysis, neurotypical, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, phenotype, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, short selling, Silicon Valley, TED Talk

guest-edited an issue of Wired magazine: “President Obama Guest Edits Wired,” Wired, October 2016, https://www.wired.com/magazine/president-obama-guest-edits-wired/. “They might be on the spectrum”: Scott Dadich, “Barack Obama Talks AI, Robo Cars, and the Future of the World,” Wired, October 12, 2016, https://www.wired.com/2016/10/president-obama-mit-joi-ito-interview/. tweeted his support of Trump: Bob Wright, “Go Donald Trump. The Best Choice for All Republicans and All Americans!,” Twitter, April 18, 2016, https://twitter.com/bobwrightnbc/status/722223562900299778. tried to persuade Wright: Bob Wright and Dianne Mermigas, The Wright Stuff: From NBC to Autism Speaks (New York: Rosetta Books, 2016).

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

Citing the lack of a mechanism for high-value trusted transactions, Charlie adds, “Conversely, from 1995 to the present day there has been almost no impact by the Internet on the financial services or legal industries. The process of performing a wire transfer, opening a bank account, or setting up a will has remained unchanged.” Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab, expands on this idea: “My hunch is that The Blockchain will be to banking, law and accountancy as The Internet was to media, commerce and advertising. It will lower costs, disintermediate many layers of business and reduce friction. As we know, one person’s friction is another person’s revenue.”

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!

I really love the premise and thoughtfulness of the book, and I highly recommend it if you want to understand and make sense of what we are likely to see in the next few years!” —Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder “From the father of collective intelligence, a refreshingly realistic view of how computers will supercharge collective intelligence and how these superminds can help us tackle the most complex problems that face the world today.” —Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab “Thomas Malone was a decade ahead of most of the rest of us in thinking about the future of work. Now—in this fascinating book—he has done it again, looking ahead to a hyperconnected world and introducing us to new vistas of human capability and creativity achievable through collective intelligence.

European Founders at Work by Pedro Gairifo Santos

business intelligence, clean tech, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, deal flow, do what you love, fail fast, fear of failure, full text search, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, information retrieval, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, Multics, natural language processing, pattern recognition, pre–internet, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, technology bubble, TED Talk, web application, Y Combinator

If you can solve a problem by throwing a new server at it or spending, like, a month of programming, it's pretty obvious nowadays that you would just buy a new piece of hardware. But initially, at least, we were very focused on optimizing and making sure we got the most out of every server. Santos: But eventually, you did raise a Series A run from Index Ventures. Jones: We did, yeah. We had some angel investment before that too, from Stefan Glaenzer, Joi Ito and Reid Hoffman. Santos: So when did you decide to raise capital, and what steps did you take? Jones: Well, it was painfully obvious to us that we needed to raise some money, because we wanted to grow the service. The service was growing quickly on its own, naturally. If we just wanted to keep up with that pace, we would've had to have some investment to buy hardware, and data centers, and so on.

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

Jennifer Swearingen is an author’s dream—the best copy editor I have encountered. Bryan Alexander, Timothy Burke, Charles Cameron, Peter Feltham, Gary Jones, Jim Lai, and Michael Wilson were the smartest, best-read, most candid online brain trust I could have hoped for. Joanna Lemola and Alex Nieminen in Helsinki; Mimi Ito, Joi Ito, and Justin Hall in Tokyo; Judith Donath in Cambridge; and Michael Thomsen in Stockholm were invaluable guides to emerging cultures in their parts of the world. Tim Pozar and Robert Heverly tutored me in the complexities of wireless technology and regulation. Lawrence Lessig alerted me to the attempt to enclose the Internet’s innovation commons.

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

See Chris Rhodes, “Manufacturing: Statistics and Policy,” House of Commons Library Brief Paper No. 01942 (November 2018); Chris Payne and Gueorguie Vassilev, “House Satellite Account, UK: 2015 and 2016,” Office for National Statistics (October 2018). GVA of manufacturing sector in 2016 was £176bn; of “household housing services,” “nutrition,” “laundry,” and “child care,” £797.65bn. 66.  Joi Ito and Scott Dadich, “Barack Obama, Neural Nets, Self-Driving Cars, and the Future of the World,” Wired, 12 October 2016. 67.  Alex Moss, “Kellingley Mining Machines Buried in Last Deep Pit,” BBC News, 18 December 2015. 68.  See, for instance, David Goodhart and Eric Kaufmann, “Why Culture Trumps Skills: Public Opinion on Immigration,” Policy Exchange, 28 January 2018. 69.  

Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again by Eric Topol

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, bioinformatics, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital twin, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, fault tolerance, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Santayana, Google Glasses, ImageNet competition, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, move 37, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, post-truth, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, techlash, TED Talk, text mining, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, War on Poverty, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population

By not preparing for current and future technological capabilities, we are setting up the failure of medicine’s future to restore humanism. It makes me think of the recent claim in China that an AI-powered robot—Xiaoyi—passed the national medical licensing examination for the first time. Are we selecting future doctors on a basis that can be simulated or exceeded by an AI bot? I share the view expressed by Joi Ito, who dropped out of college and is now a professor and the head of the MIT Media Lab. Ito said that if there were a system available all of the time that had all the information one needed to memorize to apply for medical school, “maybe there’s an argument to be made that you don’t have to memorize it.”

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream by Nicholas Lemann

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, buy and hold, capital controls, Carl Icahn, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, dematerialisation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snow Crash, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

NETWORK MAN you might well wind up in Silicon Valley: General background and history about Silicon Valley comes from author’s interviews with Arthur Rock, Hal Varian, Laszlo Bock, AnnaLee Saxenian, Bob Metcalfe, Ben Rosen, Reid Hoffman, Thomas Perkins, John Doerr, John Lilly, David Sze, David Hahn, Michael Mandel, Joe Kraus, Josh Kopelman, Nancy Lublin, Joi Ito, Peter Thiel, Simon Rothman, George Arison, David Sanford, Mark Pincus, Jeff Weiner, Premal Shah, James Manyika, Evan Williams, Allen Blue, Ann Miurako, John Etchemendy, Mike Maples, Roy Bahat, Terry Winograd, Ian McCarthy, Jen Pahlka, Tim O’Reilly, Linda Rottenberg, Ben Casnocha, and Dan Portillo.

They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy by Lawrence Lessig

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Columbine, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joi Ito, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Upton Sinclair, Yochai Benkler

Sarbanes “In classic Lessig fashion, this book connects one of society’s biggest challenges—the impact of technology on our society and democracy—to the evolution of our constitution to show how we’ve lost our voice in our system of government. But as the reader descends into a spiral of despair, he pulls them up with the hope of potential interventions that could successfully enact positive change.” —Joi Ito, Director, MIT Media Lab “Lessig eloquently advances his diagnosis of our democratic condition. He then helps us understand how remedies might be possible. A book of lasting importance.” —James Fishkin, author of Democracy When the People Are Thinking Also by Lawrence Lessig Republic, Lost: 2.0: The Corruption of Equality and the Steps to End It Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy Code: Version 2.0 Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace Copyright THEY DON’T REPRESENT US.

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

For the first twenty years of its existence, the MIT Media Lab’s credo was “Demo or Die,” and it was famous for such performances, as all groups housed in the lab were expected to have a demo on hand at all times for funder tours.18 I went on one such tour myself in 2013, as part of the Digital Media and Learning summer institute. Even though the Media Lab had shifted this credo to the more concrete “Deploy or Die” several years earlier under the leadership of Joi Ito, the flashy demonstrations that graduate students readily launched into throughout the lab showed that these were still at the core of the Media Lab visitor experience. One longtime Media Lab denizen joked that even the way Negroponte would take his time flipping through his notebook to “find a slot” for high-powered donors—whether accurate or not—was also charismatically performative, evoking a schedule that was packed with even more important figures.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day

A huge thanks to Gregory Allen, Graham Allison (and the faculty and staff of Harvard’s Belfer Center more widely), Sahar Amer, Anne Applebaum, Julian Baker, Samantha Barber, Gabriella Blum, Nick Bostrom, Ian Bremmer, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ben Buchanan, Sarah Carter, Rewon Child, George Church, Richard Danzig, Jennifer Doudna, Alexandra Eitel, Maria Eitel, Henry Elkus, Kevin Esvelt, Jeremy Fleming, Jack Goldsmith, Al Gore, Tristan Harris, Zaid Hassan, Jordan Hoffman, Joi Ito, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, Danny Kahneman, Angela Kane, Melanie Katzman, Henry Kissinger, Kevin Klyman, Heinrich Küttler, Eric Lander, Sean Legassick, Aitor Lewkowycz, Leon Marshall, Jason Matheny, Andrew McAfee, Greg McKelvey, Dimitri Mehlhorn, David Miliband, Martha Minow, Geoff Mulgan, Aza Raskin, Tobias Rees, Stuart Russell, Jeffrey Sachs, Eric Schmidt, Bruce Schneier, Marilyn Thompson, Mayo Thompson, Thomas Viney, Maria Vogelauer, Mark Walport, Morwenna White, Scott Young, and Jonathan Zittrain.

Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions by Johann Hari

Adam Curtis, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, Berlin Wall, call centre, capitalist realism, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, gig economy, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, open borders, placebo effect, precariat, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Rat Park, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Stephen Fry, sugar pill, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, Tipper Gore, twin studies, universal basic income, urban planning, zero-sum game

the key to a guaranteed income This case is also powerfully made in Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (London: Verso, 2015), 120–1. President Obama said it could happen in the next twenty years. https://www.wired.com/2016/10/president-obama-mit-joi-ito-interview/, as accessed December 12, 2016. He had been raised in a Catholic family in a homophobic culture Andrew describes a lot of this in his totally beautiful book Love Undetectable (London: Vintage, 2014). You don’t need me to fill in this list For a more comprehensive guide to how this works, I recommend two amazing books: Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (London: Canongate, 2016) and Paul Rogat Loeb, Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2010).

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple Newton, bank run, banking crisis, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, carbon footprint, clean water, Cody Wilson, collaborative economy, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Columbine, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, hacker house, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, litecoin, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, The Great Moderation, the market place, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

It occupies a spacious, modern space on the fourth floor of an office building that would be right at home in Silicon Valley, with lots of light, room for talks and presentations, couches and lounge space (including a foosball table), and a coffee bar. It also has work space for the people creating things, those who are driving the growth of Silicon Savannah. The place is wired, literally and figuratively, and filled with young, energetic, bright kids. They have meetups, and “fireside” chats, and attract heavy talent: Joi Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab in Massachusetts, spoke at iHub in May 2014. Google’s Eric Schmidt also visited. The center’s goals are similar to those in Silicon Valley: to foster entrepreneurship, to build a network and get young people and young minds engaged and creating—one can almost hear Steve Jobs saying “magical”—things.

The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible by Simon Winchester

British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, discovery of the americas, distributed generation, Donner party, estate planning, Etonian, Ford Model T, full employment, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, James Watt: steam engine, Joi Ito, Khyber Pass, Menlo Park, off-the-grid, plutocrats, safety bicycle, transcontinental railway, Works Progress Administration

(Courtesy of Stephen White) Nikola Tesla. (pd.) “PWA Rebuilds the Nation” poster. (Courtesy of David Rumsey Map Collection, www.davidrumsey.com) Reginald Fessenden and his transmitter lab. (pd.) Family grouped around a radio receiver. (Courtesy of Stephen White) Johnny Carson. (pd.) Joseph Licklider. (pd.) Vint Cerf. (Courtesy of Joi Ito, 2007) Robert Kahn. (pd.) Google server farm. (Photograph by Connie Zhou; courtesy of Google) AUTHOR’S NOTE On Independence Day, July 4, 2011, I swore a solemn oath before a federal judge on the afterdeck of the warship USS Constitution in Boston Harbor, and by doing so I became, after half a century of dreaming, a naturalized American citizen.

We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, compensation consultant, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, eternal september, fake news, game design, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, Hacker News, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Lean Startup, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Palm Treo, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QR code, r/findbostonbombers, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, uber lyft, Wayback Machine, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

The press was largely loving toward Swartz, the former teenage prodigy, a member of the Internet elite, the crusader for open access online. His friends and allies made glowing statements to journalists, and reiterated, as did his friend David Segal, the director of Demand Progress, that arresting Swartz after the indictment “makes no sense.” MIT Media Lab’s director, Joi Ito, petitioned the university to have Swartz’s case considered a “family matter,” and to remember that MIT’s policy was that anyone on campus could log into JSTOR or other library databases freely and easily. But the measure of indifference with which MIT had treated the entire endeavor of Swartz to this point, and its general culture of permissiveness toward technical pranks and pursuits, mattered little to U.S. attorney Carmen Ortiz.

Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society by Nicholas A. Christakis

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Cass Sunstein, classic study, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, deep learning, different worldview, disruptive innovation, domesticated silver fox, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, epigenetics, experimental economics, experimental subject, Garrett Hardin, intentional community, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, iterative process, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, joint-stock company, land tenure, language acquisition, Laplace demon, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, microbiome, out of africa, overview effect, phenotype, Philippa Foot, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replication crisis, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social intelligence, social web, stem cell, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, ultimatum game, zero-sum game

—Marc Andreessen, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz “In this provocative book, Christakis makes a thorough and compelling case that we are hardwired to value goodness in our societies—and thus innately compelled to participate in building, strengthening, and enhancing the common good. In an era marked by polarization and rising inequality, Christakis marshals science and history into a message of hope.” —Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab “Blueprint is a brilliant and provocative tour de force that could not be more timely. I don’t think I’ve learned this much from a book in a long time. Christakis is the rare author who can combine rigor and erudition with page-turning readability. Filled with fascinating studies, including experiments from his own lab, Blueprint ultimately offers reason for hope grounded in science for our difficult times.”

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

It is interesting to note that the transposition of human labor into simple puzzle solving is taken by some as straightforward market efficiency and not as a transformation of humans into diminished automatons, whereas other Stack technologies that may ultimately allow for greater individual pleasure and safety are seen as affronts to the dignity of Creation. I recently heard Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab say, “Google didn't just design a self-driving car. They designed a driver.” This focuses attention on the hardware-data-Cloud path dynamic that comes into play as the car navigates the City layer, partially or fully autonomous from human passenger intention. Among the most interesting features of what we call today the “driverless car” (“horseless carriage”) is how it decenters the agency and authority of the human pilot from the cockpit and disperses it into ambient networks operating at multiple scales.