Nicholas Carr

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pages: 369 words: 80,355

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

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

Yet, it’s worth noting that it always seems to be “those other folks” who are being made stupid by the Net. Most of us feel, as we’re Googling around, that the Net is making us smarter—better informed (with more answers at our literal fingertips), better able to explore a topic, better able to find the points of view that explain and contextualize that which we don’t yet understand. Not Nicholas Carr. He thinks the Net is making all of us stupider, including himself, but more or less for the opposite reason that Sunstein worries about. Carr notes at the beginning of his wonderfully titled book The Shallows that he realized in 2007 that his own cognitive processes were changing because of the Net, and not for the better.

Whether or not the Web tends to make us more insular, we know that human beings have a tendency toward homophily; we prefer to be with people who are like us. All the participants in this debate agree that excessive homophily is a bad thing. All the participants agree that we should be bending our efforts to work against our homophilitic tendencies. And no participants—not Cass Sunstein, not Nicholas Carr—are suggesting that we roll the Net back up and throw it away as a bad idea. So, why so many years of debate and with such passion? Because something else is at stake. Unsettled Discourses Al Gore published The Assault on Reason39 in 2007 in the middle of George Bush’s second term,40 so it’s understandable that he felt some despair.

(Thank you blogosphere! Thank you commenters!) Still, not only is the irony/hypocrisy of this book inescapable, it is so familiar in this time of transition that I wish someone would write a boilerplate paragraph that all authors of nonpessimistic books about the Internet could just insert and be done with. Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows escapes the irony because it maintains that long-form books are the crucial and distinctive way civilization develops ideas. If there’s any irony at all, it’s that Carr’s long-form book aims to convince us that the Internet is reshaping our brains so that we can no longer follow long-form arguments—since The Shallows is indeed a coherent, 220-page argument.


pages: 361 words: 81,068

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

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

Economist, January 18 , 2014. 20 Martin Wolf, “If Robots Divide Us, They Will Conquer,” Financial Times, February 4, 2014. 21 Tim Harford, “The Robots Are Coming and Will Terminate Your Jobs,” Financial Times, December 28–29, 2013. 22 Ibid. 23 Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (New York: Norton, 2008), p. 113. 24 Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (New York: Norton, 2014), p. 198. 25 Carole Cadwallader, “Are the Robots About to Rise? Google’s New Director of Engineering Thinks So . . .” Guardian, February 22, 2014. 26 Samuel Gibbs, “What Is Boston Dynamics and Why Does Google Want Robots?

See, for example, his latest book: Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age (New York: Riverhead, 2012). 36 Tom Standage, Writing on the Wall: Social Media—The First 2,000 Years (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). 37 Ibid., epilogue, pp. 240–51. 38 Williams, “The Agony of Instagram.” 39 Rhiannon Lucy Coslett and Holly Baxter, “Smug Shots and Selfies: The Rise of Internet Self-Obsession,” Guardian, December 6, 2013. 40 Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” Atlantic, July/August 2008. Also see Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York; Norton, 2011). 41 Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You (Penguin, 2011). See also my June 2011 TechCrunchTV interview with Eli Pariser: Andrew Keen, “Keen On . . .

Harford suspects 2014 might be the year that computers finally become self-aware, a prospect that he understandably finds “sobering” because of its “negative impact of . . . on the job market.”22 He is particularly concerned with how increasingly intelligent technology is hollowing out middle-income jobs such as typists, clerks, travel agents, and bank tellers. Equally sobering is the involvement of dominant Internet companies like Google and Amazon in a robot-controlled society that the technology writer Nicholas Carr foresees in his 2014 book about “automation and us,” The Glass Cage. Carr’s earlier 2008 work, The Big Switch, made the important argument that, with the increasingly ubiquity of cloud computing, the network has indeed become a giant computer, with the World Wide Web thus being “The World Wide Computer.”23 And with automation, Carr warns in The Glass Cage, the World Wide Computer is now designing a society that threatens to discard human beings.


pages: 283 words: 85,824

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

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

Tom Rosenstiel, “Five Myths About the Future of Journalism,” Washington Post, April 7, 2011. 6. Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), 49. 7. Lacy, Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good, 92–93. 8. The term “digital sharecropping” was coined by Nicholas Carr. Nicholas Carr, “Sharecropping the Long Tail,” Rough Type (blog), December 19, 2006, http://www.roughtype.com/?p=634. 9. Nick Bilton, “Disruptions: Facebook Users Ask, ‘Where’s Our Cut?’ ” NYTimes.com, February 5, 2012, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/disruptions-facebook-users-ask-wheres-our-cut/. 10.

Art and culture are the stuff that ads are sold around, the bait that causes users to divulge their preferences by clicking so their data can be mined. The profits made by many online ventures, from social networks to search engines to news sites, are “tied directly to the velocity of people’s information intake,” as Nicholas Carr explained in The Shallows in an analysis of Google’s business model, though his insights can be broadly applied. The faster we surf across the surface of the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google gains to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements.

For more on the false division of real and virtual life see Nathan Jurgenson, “The IRL Fetish,” New Inquiry, June 28, 2012. 2. Since I began working on this book, a number of interesting books critical of techno-utopianism were published, including but not limited to Douglas Rushkoff’s (New York: Or Books, 2011); Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010); Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Knopf, 2010) and Who Owns the Future? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013); Kate Losse’s The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network (New York: Free Press, 2012); Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011) and To Save Everything Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013); Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You (New York: Penguin Press, 2011); Robert McChesney’s Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy (New York: The New Press, 2013); and Siva Vaidhyanathan’s The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 3.


pages: 259 words: 73,193

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

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

The flip side of all this, though, is that young brains, immersed in a dozen hours of screen time a day, may be more equipped to deal with digital reality than with the decidedly less flashy reality reality that makes up our dirty, sometimes boring, often quiet, material world. In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr describes how the Internet fundamentally works on our plastic minds to make them more capable of “shallow” thinking and less capable of “deep” thinking. After enough time in front of our screens, we learn to absorb more information less effectively, skip the bottom half of paragraphs, shift focus constantly; “the brighter the software, the dimmer the user,” he suggests at one point.

When Google delivers your search results, its algorithm (mimicking an academic tradition) assumes that work that receives more citations has a greater authority. Google, then, privileges search results that are linked to more Web pages and shuttles more popular (that is, relevant) results to page one of the 142 million results for “Glee,” for example. Nicholas Carr tells a fascinating story in The Shallows that illustrates where this approach can go drastically wrong: James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, compiled a database of thirty-four million scholarly articles published in journals from 1945 to 2005, in order to assess the number and variety of citations that were used.

Now, haltingly, I place other things in that void. A book. A walk through Shaughnessy to monitor the construction of various McMansions I have my eye on. But, of course, nothing—nothing—is as enthralling as the lovely, comforting, absence-destroying Internet. You can’t really revert to a prior state of mind because (as Nicholas Carr points out) our brains may be changeable and plastic, but they aren’t necessarily elastic. My online mind waits angrily for its food. August 23 My tolerance toward interruption has plummeted. (Good sign? Bad sign?) During a chat at the pub, or on the seawall, my interlocutor will raise a finger (pressing an invisible hold button in the air between us) and answer an incoming text message with a sort of blithe assumption that my own attention will immediately flit somewhere else in the meantime.


pages: 281 words: 95,852

The Googlization of Everything: by Siva Vaidhyanathan

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

Reagle, “Do as I Do: Authorial Leadership in Wikipedia,” Proceedings of the 2007 International Symposium on Wikis (Montreal: ACM, 2007), 143–56. NOT ES TO PAGES 63–69 231 31. Andrew Famiglietti, “Wikipedia and Search: Some Quick Numbers,” Hackers, Cyborgs, and Wikipedians, blog, March 4, 2009, http://blogs.bgsu .edu/afamigl. 32. Nicholas Carr, “All Hail the Information Triumvirate!” Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog, January 23, 2009, www.roughtype.com. 33. See Siva Vaidhyanathan, “The Digital Wisdom of Richard Sennett,” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 23, 2008. If you skim the past ten years or so of Wired magazine in search of the names of the intellectuals who have influenced digital culture, you would encounter many notables: Sherry Turkle, Mark Granovetter, Lawrence Lessig, Clay Shirky, Pamela Samuelson, and, of course, the patron saint of digital media theory, Marshall McLuhan.

To deal with these changes, Internet scholar Viktor Mayer-Schönberger suggests we engage in a significant reengineering or reimagining of the default habits of our species: to record, retain, and release as much information as possible. Because we have for centuries struggled against the inertia of forgetting, we can’t easily comprehend the momentum and risks of remembering.6 MAYBE ME MORY I S NOT T H E P RO B LEM In the summer of 2007, the technology writer Nicholas Carr contributed a provocative cover article to the Atlantic called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” In it, Carr made the case that persistent dependence on the Web for intellectual resources and activity is fundamentally rewiring the minds of many people—his own included. “And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” Carr wrote.

Such historical and anthropological taxonomy has about as much validity as astrology. The plasticity of the human mind, a welldocumented phenomenon, means that human brains not only alter over time and with experience but can keep on changing. So if you worry, THE GOOGL I ZAT I ON OF ME MORY 181 with Nicholas Carr, that the Web is short-circuiting your capacities to think, you can just retrain your mind to think better. Training, though, is different from Lamarckian adaptation. Overusing or abusing any tool or technique can leave you numb or foggy. So it’s not surprising that people report increased distraction in their lives after adopting technologies that have raised our cultural metabolism.


pages: 308 words: 84,713

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us by Nicholas Carr

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

., 49 Westinghouse, 175 Whitehead, Alfred North, 65–67, 83, 84 Wiener, Norbert, 37–40, 117, 158, 161 WifiSlam, 136 Wilde, Oscar, 25, 66, 224, 225 Williams, Serena, 82 Williams, William Carlos, xi Wilson, Timothy, 15 Winner, Langdon, 209, 224 Wired, 136, 153, 225 Woods, David, 162 word-processing programs, 101 Wordsworth, William, 137 work, 14–27, 213–14 paradox of, 14–16 standardization of, 107–8, 114 transfer of, 17–18, 66 see also jobs; labor world, 121, 123–24, 133, 216–20, 232 World War I, 58 World War II, 35–36, 41, 49, 157, 158, 174 Wright, Orville, 61, 168, 215 Wright, Wilbur, 60, 61, 168, 215 Xerox, 117 Xerox PARC, 194, 195, 202 x-rays, 70, 99 Yerkes, Robert M., 87–88 Yerkes-Dodson law and curve, 89–91, 165 Young, Mark, 90–91 Zaha Hadid, 141 Ziegler, Bernard, 170 Zuckerberg, Mark, 181, 203, 206 ALSO BY NICHOLAS CARR THE SHALLOWS: WHAT THE INTERNET IS DOING TO OUR BRAINS THE BIG SWITCH: REWIRING THE WORLD, FROM EDISON TO GOOGLE DOES IT MATTER? INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND THE CORROSION OF COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE THE DIGITAL ENTERPRISE (editor) Copyright © 2014 by Nicholas Carr All rights reserved First Edition For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact W.

Freeman, 1976), 20. 11.Mark Weiser, “The Computer for the 21st Century,” Scientific American, September 1991. 12.Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown, “The Coming Age of Calm Technology,” in P. J. Denning and R. M. Metcalfe, eds., Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing (New York: Springer, 1997), 75–86. 13.M. Weiser et al., “The Origins of Ubiquitous Computing Research at PARC in the Late 1980s,” IBM Systems Journal 38, no. 4 (1999): 693–696. 14.See Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008). 15.Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 140. 16.W. Brian Arthur, “The Second Economy,” McKinsey Quarterly, October 2011. 17.Ibid. 18.Bill Gates, Business @ the Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System (New York: Warner Books, 1999), 37. 19.Arthur C.

Dreyfus’s commentary “The Current Relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Embodiment,” Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy 4 (Spring 1996), ejap.louisiana.edu/ejap/1996.spring/dreyfus.1996.spring.html. 10.Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics (London: Penguin, 1996), 44. 11.John Edward Huth, “Losing Our Way in the World,” New York Times, July 21, 2013. See also Huth’s enlightening book The Lost Art of Finding Our Way (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013). 12.Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 148. 13.Ibid., 261. 14.See Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010). 15.Pascal Ravassard et al., “Multisensory Control of Hippocampal Spatiotemporal Selectivity,” Science 340, no. 6138 (2013): 1342–1346. 16.Anonymous, “Living in The Matrix Requires Less Brain Power,” Science Now, May 2, 2013, news.sciencemag.org/physics/2013/05/living-matrix-requires-less-brain-power. 17.Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, 5th ed.


pages: 476 words: 125,219

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

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

When I describe my college years in the early 1970s, they have trouble grasping how people managed to communicate, how anything could get done, how limited the options seemed to be, how life could even be led. It would be akin to my great-grandparents from 1860 Nova Scotia or eastern Kentucky returning to describe their youth to me when I was growing up in suburban Cleveland in the 1960s. “For society as a whole the Net has become the communication and information medium of choice,” Nicholas Carr writes. “The scope of its use is unprecedented, even by the standards of the mass media of the twentieth century. The scope of its influence is equally broad.”8 Consider this: in 1995 the Internet had 10 million users, still disproportionately at U.S. universities, and it was all the rage. By 2011 the Internet had 2 billion users and was growing by leaps and bounds.

“Many people tell me they hope that as Siri, the digital assistant on Apple’s iPhone, becomes more advanced, ‘she’ will be more and more like a best friend—one who will listen when others won’t.” Turkle concludes, “Even when they are with friends, partners, children, everyone is on their own devices.”45 The idea that the Internet is transforming people unwittingly in ways that may be less than desirable is best developed in The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. While acknowledging all the benefits of the Internet, and his own addiction to it, Carr argues that the advantages “come at a price,” specifically by reshaping the way our brains work. Carr draws from the recent surge in brain science research demonstrating that brains are “massively plastic” and can be changed dramatically by their environment and how they are used and not used.

The dominant media technology defines a society, he said, changing the very way we think and the way that human societies operate.11 His work was very influential on innumerable thinkers, including Neil Postman, who argued that television had an innate bias toward superficiality.12 “Every intellectual technology,” as Nicholas Carr puts it, “embodies an intellectual ethic, a set of assumptions about how the human mind works or should work.” These technologies “have the greatest and most lasting power over what and how we think.”13 Without a political economic context, this approach can smack of media technological determinism, but with the PEC this approach highlights that media technologies have significant impact, an extra-large helping of what sociologists term “relative autonomy.”14 Innis did not only focus upon the importance of communication technologies; he was also a sharp critic of corporate media and media commercialization.15 The same was true of Postman, who termed the United States a technopoly, “a system in which technology of every kind is cheerfully granted sovereignty over social institutions and national life, and becomes self-justifying, self-perpetuating, and omnipresent.”


pages: 407 words: 103,501

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

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

Even though we have upscale users and it’s a new study testing new sites, most of the findings are the same as we’ve seen year after year after year. Usability guidelines remain remarkably constant over time, because basic human characteristics stay the same. < Nicholas Carr > is google making us stupid? Originally published in The Atlantic (July/August 2008). NICHOLAS CARR is the author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (2010) and The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (2008). He has been a columnist for The Guardian and executive editor of Harvard Business Review, and has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, The Times (London), and The New Republic.

Even accepting that these new behaviors are happening and that new kinds of media are providing the means for them, we still have to explain why. New tools get used only if they help people do things they want to do; what is motivating The People Formerly Known as the Audience to start participating? credits Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in Atlantic Monthly (July/August 2008). Copyright © 2008 by Nicholas Carr. Reproduced by permission of the author. Cathy Davidson, “We Can’t Ignore the Influence of Digital Technologies,” in The Chronicle of Higher Education (March 23, 2007). Copyright © 2007 by Cathy Davidson. Reproduced by permission from the author.

Tim O’Reilly’s “What Is Web 2.0” (2005), for instance, helped solidify a fundamental recognition of the Web as a dynamic, collaborative application, not just a source of information and a desktop tool. Marc Prensky’s “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants,” published 2001, coined terms that have had a tactical and widespread use among educators. Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic Monthly essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (2008) was one of the most discussed essays of the year. Taken together, the selections form a far-reaching body of opinion about a rushing cataclysm that has upset centuries of social and intellectual practice. We do well to retain it. One of the dangers of the Digital Age is that technology changes so rapidly that it clouds our memory of things as they existed but a few years past.


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

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

Flu database row escalates. The Great Beyond (blog), September 14, 2009. http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2009/09/flu_database_row_ escalates.html. [33] Robert H. Carlson. Biology Is Technology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. [34] Nicholas Carr. Is Google making us stupid? Atlantic Monthly, July/August, 2008. [35] Nicholas Carr. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. [36] Henry William Chesbrough. Opennovation: The new Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology. Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2006. [37] Chess Base.

Our main interest will be in scientific problem-solving, and of course it’s problems at the limit of human problem-solving ability that scientists most dearly want to solve, and whose solution will bring the greatestnefit. Superficially, the idea that online tools can make us collectively smarter contradicts the idea, currently fashionable in some circles, that the internet is reducing our intelligence. For example, in 2010 the author Nicholas Carr published a book entitled The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, arguing that the internet is reducing our ability to concentrate and contemplate. Carr’s book and other similar works make many good points, and have been widely discussed. But new technologies seldom have just a single impact, and there’s no contradiction in believing that online tools can both enhance and reduce intelligence.

Other influential works on related subjects include Hutchins’s detailed anthropological analysis of collective intelligence in the navigation of a ship [95], Lévy’s book on collective intelligence [124], and the stimulating collection of essays on collective intelligence recently assembled by Mark Tovey [224]. Writing from a very different point of view, David Easley and Jon Kleinberg have written a great textbook, Networks, Crowds, and Markets [59], which summarizes much of the mathematical and quantitative research on networks. Finally, I recommend Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows [35]. It asks the fundamental question, how are online tools changing the way we (individually) think? I believe Carr’s answer is incomplete, but it’s a stimulating exploration of this important question. Open source: The best way to get informed about open source is to participate in some open source projects.


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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

“It’s important to figure that out because this blended world of machines and humans is already upon us and it’s going to accelerate.”16 So what, exactly, are humans good for? Especially when compared with the smart machines that, according to Pew’s Lee Rainie, are “eating humans’ jobs.”17 I pose this question to Nicholas Carr, among America’s most respected writers on the human costs of the digital revolution, the author of the Pulitzer Prize–nominated The Shallows and several other powerful books about technology. Over a dinner of Central Asian food at a funky Tajikistani teahouse in Boulder, Colorado, where Carr now lives, he talks metaphysics to me.

Carr’s focus is on what Matthew Crawford, another popular American writer, describes as “shop class as soulcraft.”18 Carr is suggesting, like Thomas More, that the uniquely human value of a trade lies in its practice. Education, then, Carr argues, sounding not unlike Maria Montessori, shouldn’t just be about knowing; it’s also about doing. So that, according to Nicholas Carr, is what humans are good for in an age of increasingly smart machines. The challenge (and opportunity) for educators, then, is to teach everything that can’t be replicated by a robot or an algorithm. For Carr, with his vision of the profound limitations of computers, that includes the nurturing of intuition, ambiguity, and self-awareness.

The development of the “will”—meaning nurturing the determination, self-control, and commitment of the individual child—is central in Waldorf pedagogy. To say that Waldorf schools are teaching More’s Law might be a slight exaggeration. But certainly the kind of duty-bound humanism that Thomas More preached in Utopia wouldn’t be out of place in a Waldorf school. At my dinner with Nicholas Carr in Colorado, I ask him if he thinks alternative educational traditions like Waldorf can help kids manage their online behavior more responsibly. Although digital media isn’t the technological version of fat or sugar, he answers, echoing the arguments of the New York University psychologist Adam Alter in Irresistible, kids are finding it increasingly difficult to control their internet consumption.


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Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deneen

classic study, David Brooks, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, intentional community, Lewis Mumford, mortgage debt, Nicholas Carr, plutocrats, price mechanism, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, Steven Levy, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

A paramount example today may be found in anxious descriptions of how the internet and social media are inescapably changing us, mainly for the worse. Several recent books and studies describing the measurable baleful effects of these technologies have found a ready audience well beyond the usual academic circles. For instance, in his widely discussed book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr describes how the internet is literally changing us, transforming our brains into different organs from those of the preinternet world. Appealing to developments in studies of brain plasticity, Carr describes how persistent occupation with the internet is leading to physiological changes to our brains, and hence to the ways we think, learn, and act.

From a response essay to David Brooks “Organization Kid,” by a member of Notre Dame class of 2018, in my course Political Philosophy and Education, August 29, 2016. Paper in author’s possession. 4. Wendell Berry, “Agriculture from the Roots Up,” in The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays (Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker and Hoard, 2005), 107–8. 5. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: Norton, 2010). 6. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic, 2011). 7. Lee Silver, Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning Will Transform the Family (New York: HarperPerennial, 1998); Mark Shiffman, “Humanity 4.5,” First Things, November 2015.

“No Longer the Heart of the Home, the Piano Industry Quietly Declines,” New York Public Radio, January 6, 2015, http://www.thetakeaway.org/story/despite-gradual-decline-piano-industry-stays-alive/. CHAPTER 4. TECHNOLOGY AND THE LOSS OF LIBERTY 1. Brett T. Robinson, Appletopia (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2013). 2. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to our Brains (New York: Norton, 2010). 3. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic, 2011). 4. Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1993). 5.


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

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

Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 52 “the Protestant Reformation makes for good allegory”: ibid., 65. 52 “explain a political, technical, legal situation”: ibid., 72. 52 The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 52 Nicholas Carr draws on Eisenstein’s work in The Shallows: Nicholas Carr, The Shallows (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), 70, 75. 53 “from her sources those facts and statements”: Anthony T. Grafton, “The Importance of Being Printed,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 11, no. 2 (October 1, 1980): 265–286. 53 “the extent to which any text could circulate”: ibid., 273. 53 “No hard fact of technology dictates”: Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 53 “we know what we mean”: ibid., 7. 54 “Politics and human agency disappear”: ibid., 6. 54 “[Eisenstein’s] press is something ‘sui generis’”: Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 19. 54 “identifies as significant only the clearest instances of fixity”: ibid., 19. 55 “there is no intellectually coherent conservative position”: Shirky, “Tools and Transformations.” 56 “How to Acknowledge a Revolution”: Adrian Johns, “How to Acknowledge a Revolution,” The American Historical Review 107, no. 1 (2002): 106–125. 56 “[Johns] accuses. . .

Their theory stands in stark contrast to their practice—a common modern dissonance that they prefer not to dwell on. “The Internet” is also a way to shift the debate away from more concrete and specific issues, essentially burying it in obscure and unproductive McLuhanism that seeks to discover some nonexistent inner truths about each and every medium under the sun. Consider how Nicholas Carr, one of today’s most vocal Internet skeptics, frames the discussion about the impact that digital technologies have on our ability to think deep thoughts and concentrate. In his best-selling book The Shallows, Carr worries that “the Internet” is making his brain demand “to be fed the way the Net fed it—and the more it was fed, the hungrier it became.”

Without understanding the limitations of Eisenstein’s highly disputed account of the “revolution” that followed the invention of the printing press, it’s impossible to make sense of contemporary claims for the significance of “the Internet,” not least because the stability that her account lends to “the Internet” makes her a favorite source of Internet optimists and pessimists alike (Nicholas Carr draws on Eisenstein’s work in The Shallows). Much like with rational-choice theory, what many fellow scholars believe to be rather problematic scholarship is presented as universally admired and entirely uncontroversial. To use Eisenstein as our guide to “the Internet” is to commit to a very particular way of thinking about digital matters.


pages: 532 words: 139,706

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

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

They presented some calculations to describe how they approximated “a page’s importance or quality.” Page and Brin’s paper was attempting to advance a belief that both their fathers had passed on to them: artificial intelligence (AI) was the next scientific frontier. The search engine would supplement the limited human brain. “Brin and Page,” Nicholas Carr would write years later, “are expressing a desire that has long been a hallmark of the mathematicians and computer scientists who have devoted themselves to the creation of artificial intelligence.” They were following the lead of René Descartes, the French philosopher/mathematician who four centuries ago argued that “the body is always a hindrance to the mind in its thinking,” and mathematical formulas were the preferred route to “pure understanding.”

Craig Silverstein, Google employee number 1, said a thinking machine is probably “hundreds of years away” Marc Andreessen suggests that it is a pipe dream. “We are no closer to a computer that thinks like a person than we were fifty years ago,” he said. Sometimes lost in the excitement over the wonders of ever more relevant search is the potential social cost. In his provocative book The Big Switch, Nicholas Carr notes that Google’s goal is to store 100 percent of each individual’s data, what Google calls “transparent personalization.” This would allow Google to “choose which information to show you,” reducing inefficiencies. “A company run by mathematicians and engineers, Google seems oblivious to the possible social costs of transparent personalization,” Carr wrote.

Bressler, September 26, 2008. 3 Short and pugnacious: Ken Auletta, “The Invisible Manager,” The New Yorker, July 27, 1998. 4 Google’s private books revealed: from August 2004 Google IPO registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission. 4 Karmazin’s destination: description of 2400 Bayshore Parkway offices from visit by author, April 18, 2008; author interviews with David Krane, April 18, 2008, and with Marissa Mayer, September 18, 2008; and from Google video of headquarters, provided by Google. 6 25.2 billion Web pages: WorldWideWebSize.com, February 2, 2009. 7 It was Google’s ambition: Schmidt and Page speech at Stanford on May 1, 2002, as seen on YouTube. 7 several hundred million daily searches: Schmidt and Page speech at Stanford on May 1, 2002, as seen on YouTube. 7 the number of daily searches is now 3 billion: internal Google documents. 7 “our business is highly measurable”: author interview with Eric Schmidt, September 15, 2008. 8 $3 million spent: Advertising Age, September 11, 2008. 8 $172 billion spent in the United States on advertising, and the additional $227 billion spent on marketing: Zenith OptimediaReport, April 2009. 9 Mayer ... remembered the meeting vividly: author interview with Marissa Mayer, September 18, 2008. 9 “If Google makes”: author interview with Eric Schmidt, April 16, 2008. 9 “the long tail”: Chris Anderson, the Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, Hyperion, 2006. 10 “aggregate content”: author interview with Larry Page, March 25, 2008. 10 from a peak daily newspaper circulation: Nicholas Carr, Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google, Norton; and The Project for Excellence in Journalism, “State of the News Media Report,” March 2007. 10 those networks... attract about 46 percent of viewers: Nielsen data on the 2008-9 season, May 2009. 12. “The innovator’s dilemma”: Clayton M.


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

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

The comment thread is also extraordinary (accessed January 8, 2010). 50 Whether this revolution in the reading habits of the American public: Quoted in Kenneth Davis and Joann Giusto-Davis, Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America (New York and Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984): 68. 57 The writer Nicholas Carr has dubbed this pattern digital sharecropping: Nicholas Carr writes at his blog, Rough Type. “Sharecropping the Long Tail” is from December 19, 2006, http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/12/sharecropping_t.php (accessed January 8, 2010). 59 sued AOL on behalf of the ten thousand or so other volunteers: Lisa Napoli covered the AOL lawsuit for The New York Times: “Former Volunteers Sue AOL, Seeking Back Pay for Work,” The New York Times, March 26, 1999, http://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/26/nyregion/former-volunteers-sue-aolseeking-back-pay-for-work.html?

At least traditional media outlets pay their contributors; with the new services, which enable amateurs to share work, the revenue goes not to the content creators but to the owners of the platform that enables the sharing, leading to the obvious question: why are all these people working for free? The writer Nicholas Carr has dubbed this pattern digital sharecropping, after the post- Civil War sharecroppers who worked the land but didn’t own it or the food they grew on it. With digital sharecropping, the platform owners get the money and the creators of the content don’t, a situation Carr regards as manifestly unfair.


pages: 236 words: 77,098

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

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

WWW 2010 (2010); Gilad Lotan, “ReTweet Revolution,” ReTweet Revolution, June 2009, http://giladlotan.org/viz/iranelection/index.html; Personal interview with Gilad Lotan, Microsoft Research Labs. 7 Young people tended to share political news: Brian Stelter, “Finding Political News Online, the Young Pass It On,” New York Times, March 27, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/world/americas/27iht-27voters.11460487.html. Chapter 5: when surgeons play video games 1 “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”: Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic July–August, 2008, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/. Also Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, New York: W.W. Norton, 2010. 2 A number of books: Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (or, Don’t Trust Anyone under 30), New York: Jeremy P.

Instead, trusted anchoring communities will help you filter and navigate a bigger world in an eye-opening way that has never been possible before. You just have to get your brain around the possibilities. 5 when surgeons play video games our changing brains Men were twice as likely [as women] to tweet or post status updates after sex. This Time, We’re Really Going to Hell In the summer of 2008, Nicholas Carr, an author and writer for The Atlantic magazine, felt his brain slipping ever so slightly from its moorings. In the past, he wrote, “Immersing myself in a book or lengthy article used to be easy.” Not anymore. “Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do,” he said.


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

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

Some people panic that our brains are being deformed on a physiological level by today’s technology: spend too much time flipping between windows and skimming text instead of reading a book, or interrupting your conversations to read text messages, and pretty soon you won’t be able to concentrate on anything—and if you can’t concentrate on it, you can’t understand it either. In his book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr eloquently raised this alarm, arguing that the quality of our thought, as a species, rose in tandem with the ascendance of slow-moving, linear print and began declining with the arrival of the zingy, flighty Internet. “I’m not thinking the way I used to think,” he worried. I’m certain that many of these fears are warranted.

When informatics professor Gloria Mark studied office employees for one thousand hours, she found that they could concentrate for only eleven minutes at a time on a project before being interrupted or switching to another task—and once they’d been interrupted, it took an average of twenty-five minutes to return to their original work. Other research has confirmed that rapid task switching makes it harder to manage our attention and to retain what we read. In one experiment, students who watched lectures while sending text messages did roughly 19 percent worse on a test than nontexting students. We develop what Nicholas Carr dubbed the “juggler’s brain,” a mind that can’t learn things because it doesn’t stand still long enough. Of course, task switching isn’t always bad. Certain kinds of work actually require and reward it. One survey of 197 businesses found that those with top management who were heavy multitaskers got 130 percent better financial results than companies that worked in a more “monochronic” fashion.

That includes Tricia Wang, An Xiao Mina, Debbie Chachra, Liz Lawley, Zeynep Tufekci, Clay Shirky, Brooke Gladstone, Tom Igoe, Max Whitney, Terri Senft, Misha Tepper, Fred Kaplan, Howard Rheingold, danah boyd, Liz Lawley, Nick Bilton, Gary Marcus, Heidi Siwak, Ann Blair, Eli Pariser, Ethan Zuckerman, Ian Bogost, Fred Benenson, Heather Gold, Douglas Rushkoff, Rebecca MacKinnon, Cory Menscher, Mark Belinsky, Quinn Norton, Anil Dash, Cathy Marshall, Elizabeth Stock, Philip Howard, Denise Hand, Robin Sloan, Tim Carmody, Don Tapscott, Steven Johnson, Kevin Kelly, Nina Khosla, Laura Fitton, Jillian York, Hilary Mason, Craig Mod, Bre Pettis, Glenn Kelman, Susan Cain, Noah Schachtman, Irin Carmon, Matthew Battles, Cathy Davidson, Linda Stone, Jess Kimball, Phil Libin, Kati London, Jim Marggraff, Dan Zalewski, Sasha Nemecek, Laura Miller, Brian McNely, Duncan Watts, Kenyatta Cheese, Nora Abousteit, Deanna Zandt, David Wallis, Nick Denton, Alissa Quart, Stan James, Andrew Hearst, Gary Stager, Evan Selinger, Steven Demmler, and Vint Cerf. I’m grateful to Nicholas Carr for pushing forward my thinking about memory and creativity in The Shallows. More than a decade ago, Carl Goodman and Rochelle Slovin from the American Museum of the Moving Image first inspired me to think about the role of moving image in our thought. My apologies to the many colleagues I’ve inadvertently left out here; human memory being, as I’ve written, rather fragile, this is a necessarily incomplete list.


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The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, circular economy, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, conceptual framework, continuous integration, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, global value chain, Google Glasses, hype cycle, income inequality, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, life extension, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, Narrative Science, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear taboo, OpenAI, personalized medicine, precariat, precision agriculture, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, reshoring, RFID, rising living standards, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social contagion, software as a service, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Turkle refers to studies showing that, when two people are talking, the mere presence of a phone on the table between them or in their peripheral vision changes both what they talk about and their degree of connectedness.65 This does not mean we give up our phones but rather that we use them “with greater intention”. Other experts express related concerns. Technology and culture writer Nicholas Carr states that the more time we spend immersed in digital waters, the shallower our cognitive capabilities become due to the fact that we cease exercising control over our attention: “The Net is by design an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention. Frequent interruptions scatter our thoughts, weaken our memory, and make us tense and anxious.

Personality and Social Psychology Review (2010). 64 Quoted in: Simon Kuper, “Log out, switch off, join in”, FT Magazine, 2 October 2015. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/fc76fce2-67b3-11e5-97d0-1456a776a4f5.html 65 Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, Penguin, 2015. 66 Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: How the Internet is changing the way we think, read and remember, Atlantic Books, 2010. 67 Pico Iyer, The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere, Simon and Schuster, 2014. 68 Quoted in: Elizabeth Segran, “The Ethical Quandaries You Should Think About the Next Time You Look at Your Phone”, Fast Company, 5 October 2015.


pages: 144 words: 43,356

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

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

ENDNOTES (1) The term economic singularity was first used (as far as I can tell) by the economist Robin Hanson: http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/fastgrow.html (2) http://arxiv.org/pdf/0712.3329v1.pdf (3) http://skyview.vansd.org/lschmidt/Projects/The%20Nine%20Types%20of%20Intelligence.html (4) The term AGI has been popularised by AI researcher Ben Goertzel, although he gives credit for its invention to Shane Legg and others: http://wp.goertzel.org/who-coined-the-term-agi/ (5) The Shape of Automation for Men and Management by Herbert Simon, 1965 (6) Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines by Marvin Minsky, 1967 (7) http://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/ (8) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading (9) The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr (p 212) (10) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Liberation_Army#Third_Department (11) The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr (p 212) (12) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Skfw282fJak (13) The Economist, December 4, 2003 (14) Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt (15) http://www.wired.com/2014/10/future-of-artificial-intelligence/ (16) http://lazooz.org/ (17) https://www.hrw.org/reports/2012/11/19/losing-humanity (18) http://www.ifr.org/industrial-robots/statistics/ (19) “Economic possibilities for our grandchildren”: http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf (20) https://www.youtube.com/watch?


pages: 307 words: 17,123

Behind the cloud: the untold story of how Salesforce.com went from idea to billion-dollar company--and revolutionized an industry by Marc Benioff, Carlye Adler

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, business continuity plan, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, digital divide, iterative process, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, Maui Hawaii, Nicholas Carr, platform as a service, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business

This model made software similar to a utility, akin to paying a monthly electric bill. Why couldn’t customers pay a monthly bill for a service that would run business applications whenever and wherever? This delivery model seems so obvious now. Today we call it on-demand, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), multitenant (shared infrastructure), or cloud computing. In fact, Nicholas Carr, former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review and one of the most influential thinkers in the IT industry, has since written two best-selling books validating this idea. Carr has even suggested that ‘‘utility-supplied’’ computing will have economic and social impacts as profound as the ones that took place one hundred years ago, when companies ‘‘stopped generating their own power with steam engines and dynamos and plugged into the newly built electric grid.’’1 The industry has come a long way, but consider that when we started, we didn’t have these industry supporters, or even these words, to describe the computing revolution we believed was beginning.

If something happens that I can leverage, I immediately send a journalist an e-mail with my comments or ‘‘leak’’ an internal memo. I also like to forward related articles and other people’s ideas that help establish our point. For instance, we often referenced Clayton M. Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma and Nicholas Carr’s The Big Switch, two thought-provoking books that validated our crusade. It is essential to spend time learning about what is happening in your industry to leverage these opportunities as well as to prevent being caught off guard. Using industry news to our advantage has served us very well. For example, when Microsoft made an announcement that it was planning to buy Great Plains, a competitor of salesforce.com, I sent a memo to our staff and forwarded my comments to journalists.

Life grows relative to one’s 259 BEHIND THE CLOUD investment in it. I promise you that by considering everyone’s success, you will see the return. I wish you great success. I look forward to hearing about the future you predict—and living in the one you create. Aloha, Marc 260 Notes Part 1 1. Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, New York: Norton, 2008, http://www .nicholasgcarr.com/bigswitch/. 2. The Yankee Group. ‘‘Mid-Market CRM Total Cost of Ownership: Noodling the Numbers,’’ Customer Relationship Strategies, Vol. 3, No. 6, June 2001. 3. Gartner, Inc., ‘‘SaaS at the Forefront of the Consumerization of IT,’’ May 8, 2007, http://www.gartner.com/Display Document?


pages: 280 words: 85,091

The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success by Kevin Dutton

Asperger Syndrome, Bernie Madoff, business climate, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, dark triade / dark tetrad, delayed gratification, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, G4S, impulse control, iterative process, John Nash: game theory, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, Philippa Foot, place-making, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, trolley problem, ultimatum game

News, “Today’s College Students More Likely to Lack Empathy.” 17 “People haven’t had the same exposure to traditional values …” See Thomas Harding, “Army Should Provide Moral Education for Troops to Stop Outrages,” The Telegraph, February 22, 2011, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/8341030/Army-should-provide-moral-education-for-troops-to-stop-outrages.html. 18 But the beginnings of an even more fundamental answer may lie … See Nicole K. Speer, Jeremy R. Reynolds, Khena M. Swallow, and Jeffrey M. Zacks, “Reading Stories Activates Neural Representations of Perceptual and Motor Experiences,” Psychological Science 20, no, 8 (2009): 989–99. 19 Makes us, as Nicholas Carr puts it in his recent essay … Nicholas Carr’s “The Dreams of Readers” appears in Mark Haddon (ed.), Stop What You’re Doing and Read This! (London: Vintage, 2011), a collection of essays about the transformative power of reading. 20 The quicksilver virtual world … Christina Clark, Jane Woodley, and Fiona Lewis, The Gift of Reading in 2011: Children and Young People’s Access to Books and Attitudes Towards Reading—see www.literacytrust.org.uk/assets/0001/1303/The_Gift_of_Reading_in_2011.pdf. 21 … we’ve been talking about the emergence of neurolaw … For an excellent introduction to the emerging subdiscipline of neurolaw, see David Eagleman, “The Brain on Trial,” The Atlantic., July/August 2011, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2011/07/the-brain-on-trial/8520/. 22 The watershed study was published in 2002 … See Avshalom Caspi, Joseph McClay, Terrie E.

Our brains then interweave these newly encountered situations with knowledge and experience gleaned from our own lives, to create an organic mosaic of dynamic mental syntheses. Reading a book carves brand new neural pathways into the ancient cortical bedrock of our brains. It transforms the way we see the world. Makes us, as Nicholas Carr puts it in his recent essay “The Dreams of Readers,” “more alert to the inner lives of others.” We become vampires without being bitten—in other words, more empathic. Books make us see in a way that casual immersion in the Internet, and the quicksilver virtual world it offers, doesn’t.2 Guilty, But Not to Blame Back in Montreal, Bob Hare and I down another whiskey.


pages: 297 words: 84,009

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero by Tyler Cowen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Google Glasses, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

And they say that its supposedly free offerings come at the cost of our privacy and vulnerability to the surveillance state. (By the way, since often I am referring to the slightly distant past, most of the time I will use the word “Google” to refer to what is now Google and its parent company Alphabet combined, with Google as a subsidiary of Alphabet since 2015.) Coming from another direction, Nicholas Carr wrote a book arguing that Google is partly responsible for the decline in our memories—why remember facts when you can just search for them? He asserted outright that Google makes us stupider. More recently, social media companies have been blamed for the ascent of Donald Trump, the renaissance of racism, “fake news,” and the collapse of appropriate democratic discourse.

Overall, I am astonished at just how varied the innovations of the major tech companies have been. It seems they have a core capacity for assembling, motivating, and coordinating human talent above and beyond the particular business lines where they won their earliest victories. DOES TECH MAKE US STUPID? Another criticism of the tech companies comes from thinkers such as Nicholas Carr, who has referred to the internet as “the shallows” and who has argued that Google is making us stupid. This criticism strikes me as a bit outside the focus of this book, as it pinpoints broader social and technological forces rather than the tech companies qua companies. Still, one feature of the current intellectual environment is that if a criticism of companies can be made, it will to some extent stick.

Scott did find that nine other of the supported companies might count as “silly,” and of course not all of those listed will succeed, but overall is that such a bad record? Keep in mind that as you look forward, it is not always easy to tell which “silly” innovation might, every now and then, prove to be pathbreaking.11 In any case, I wonder how much the internet critics really believe their own words. I recall one time debating Nicholas Carr in a television studio on whether Google makes us stupider. The first question I asked him was whether, in preparing for the debate, he had used Google to research who I am. I thought I had won right then and there. I also suspect that a book as intellectual as his sold a disproportionate share of its copies online rather than in physical stores.


pages: 170 words: 49,193

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

Sam Altman, for example, in a 2016 discussion on the subject, said that it would be affordable in the future because of huge increases in productivity and a reduction in the cost of necessities. I doubt this would be a strong enough basis to persuade most policy-makers in government). ‘It strains credulity,’ writes tech critic Nicholas Carr, ‘to imagine today’s technology moguls, with their libertarian leanings and impatience with government, agreeing to the kind of vast wealth distribution scheme that would be necessary.’13 Certainly their behaviour to date does not bode well. I asked Sam what felt to me like a very simple question: would people really be happy living in a society in which there are a small number of very rich people, and everyone else is given money to keep them occupied.

‘The World’s 8 Richest Men Are Now as Wealthy as Half the World’s Population’, www.fortune.com, 16 January 2017. 9 David Madland, ‘Growth and the Middle Class’ (Spring 2011), Democracy Journal, 20. 10 Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level (Penguin, 2009). 11 Wilkinson & Pickett, The Spirit Level, pp.272-273. 12 Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay. 13 Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage (Bodley Head, 2015). Chapter 5: The Everything Monopoly 1 Douglas Rushkoff, one of the more self-aware of these people come close to an apology for his previous work in his recent book Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus (Penguin, 2016). 2 Before he become Google’s Chief Economist, Hal Varian wrote a book called Information Rules (Harvard Business Review Press, 1998), where he summed this all up very well: ‘positive feedback makes the strong get stronger and the weak get weaker, leading to extreme outcomes.’ 3 This, according to data available through Nielsen SoundScan, cited in Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus by Douglas Rushkoff. 4 Duncan Robinson, ‘Google heads queue to lobby Brussels’, Financial Times, 24 June 2015.


pages: 222 words: 53,317

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension by Samuel Arbesman

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

The Works, The Heights, and The Way to Go by Kate Ascher examine how cities, skyscrapers, and our transportation networks, respectively, actually work. Beautifully rendered and fascinating books. The Second Machine Age by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee examines the rapid technological change we are experiencing and can come to expect, and how it will affect our economy, as well as how to handle this change. The Glass Cage by Nicholas Carr is about the perils of automation and the related technological complexity around us. Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford explores the importance of getting close to our technologies again, as part of the virtue of manual labor. Summa Technologiae by Stanisław Lem (translated by Joanna Zylinska) is a wide-ranging exploration from the 1960s by a science fiction writer of the future of technology, with an emphasis on the limits of humanity’s powers of understanding.

tools that, in Gingold’s words: Chaim Gingold, Miniature Gardens and Magic Crayons: Games, Spaces, and Worlds, master’s thesis, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2003, 62, http://levitylab.com/cog/writing/Games-Spaces-Worlds.pdf. systems are so completely automated: For further reading, see Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014). “concealed electronic complexity”: Winner, Autonomous Technology, 285. component of the telephone system: Eytan Adar et al., “Benevolent Deception in Human Computer Interaction,” CHI ’13: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Paris, France, April 27–May 2, 2013 (New York: ACM Digital Library, 2013): 1863–72.


pages: 484 words: 104,873

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

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

Computers, networks, and the Internet are now irretrievably integrated into our economic, social, and financial systems. IT is everywhere, and it’s difficult to even imagine life without it. Many observers have compared information technology to electricity, the other transformative general-purpose technology that came into widespread use in the first half of the twentieth century. Nicholas Carr makes an especially compelling argument for viewing IT as an electricity-like utility in his 2008 book The Big Switch. While many of these comparisons are apt, the truth is that electricity is a tough act to follow. Electrification transformed businesses, the overall economy, social institutions, and individual lives to an astonishing degree—and it did so in ways that were overwhelmingly positive.

The Anti-Automation View Another often-proffered solution is simply to try to put a stop to this relentless progression toward ever more automation. At its most blunt, this might take the form of a union resisting the installation of new machinery in a factory, warehouse, or supermarket. There is also a more nuanced intellectual argument which says that too much automation is simply bad for us—and quite possibly dangerous. Nicholas Carr is perhaps the best-known proponent of this view. In his 2010 book The Shallows, Carr argues that the Internet may be having a negative impact on our ability to think. In a 2013 article for The Atlantic, entitled “All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines,” he makes a similar argument about the impact of automation.

Labor Market,” Economic Policy Institute, April 24, 2013, http://www.epi.org/publication/bp359-guestworkers-high-skill-labor-market-analysis/. 6. Steven Brint, “The Educational Lottery,” Los Angeles Review of Books, November 15, 2011, http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/the-educational-lottery. 7. Nicholas Carr, “Transparency Through Opacity” (blog), Rough Type, May 5, 2014, http://www.roughtype.com/?p=4496. 8. Erik Brynjolfsson, “Race Against the Machine,” presentation to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), May 3, 2013, http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/PCAST/PCAST_May3_Erik%20Brynjolfsson.pdf, p. 28. 9.


pages: 379 words: 109,612

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

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

IS THE INTERNET CHANGING THE WAY YOU THINK? The Net’s Impact on Our Minds and Future Edited by John Brockman To KHM Contents Cover Title Page Preface: The Edge Question Introduction: The Dawn of Entanglement: W. Daniel Hillis The Bookless Library: Nicholas Carr The Invisible College: Clay Shirky Net Gain: Richard Dawkins Let Us Calculate: Frank Wilczek The Waking Dream: Kevin Kelly To Dream the Waking Dream in New Ways: Richard Saul Wurman Tweet Me Nice: Ian Gold and Joel Gold The Dazed State: Richard Foreman What’s Missing Here?

Now we are attending to a financial crisis caused by the banking system having miscomputed risks, and to a debate on global warming in which experts argue not so much about the data as about what the computers predict from the data. We have linked our destinies not only to one another across the globe but also to our technology. If the theme of the Enlightenment was independence, ours is interdependence. We are now all connected, humans and machines. Welcome to the dawn of the Entanglement. The Bookless Library Nicholas Carr Author, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains As the school year began last September, Cushing Academy, an elite Massachusetts prep school that has been around since Civil War days, announced that it was emptying its library of books. In place of the thousands of volumes that had once crowded the building’s shelves, the school was installing, it said, “state-of-the-art computers with high-definition screens for research and reading,” as well as “monitors that provide students with real-time interactive data and news feeds from around the world.”

I don’t even especially worry about where I am, either, considering myself not unlike a packet being routed—not from client machine to router to server to backhaul to peer to machine to client machine, but instead from house to car to plane to car to hotel to car to office or conference to car to hotel to car to plane to car to home, with jet lag my only friend and my laptop my source of entertaining books (Neutron Star), movies (Good Bye Lenin!), games (Fallout), or music (Orbital, Meat to Munich), with cellular data, headphones, and circuits. Some would equate this sort of information pruning to a kind of reinforced and embraced ignorance or evidence of an empty life. Nicholas Carr, writing in the Atlantic, enjoyed some attention in 2008 with his article titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The author, reacting to (or justifying) his own reduced attention span, accuses Google (my employer) of trying to do away with deep thinking, while indulging in what comes off as an absurd nostalgia for making knowledge difficult to find and obtain.


pages: 552 words: 168,518

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

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

Adam Pagnucco, “Why MPW Turned Down the Washington Post,” Maryland Politics Watch (April 20, 2010). 13. Laura M. Holson, “Tell-All Generation Learns to Keep Things Offline,” The New York Times (May 8, 2010). 14. Don Tapscott, Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing Your World (McGraw-Hill, 2008). 15. Ibid. 16. Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, The Atlantic (July/August 2008). 17. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (Atlantic Books, 2010). 18. James Harkin, Lost in Cyburbia: How Life on the Net Has Created a Life of Its Own (Knopf Doubleday, 2009). 19. Evgeny Morozov, “Think Again: The Internet,” Foreign Policy (May/June 2010). 20.

In a 2010 study, the Pew Internet Project has found that people in their twenties exert more control over their digital reputations than older adults, more vigorously deleting unwanted posts and limiting information about themselves.13 This supports our findings and those of others who have argued that young people who have grown up digital are confronted with the privacy issue at an earlier age and naturally come to grips with it earlier.14 Helen Nissenbaum, an NYU professor of culture, media, and communication, came to the same conclusion in her book Privacy in Context, explaining that teenagers naturally learn to be protective of their privacy as they navigate the path to adulthood.15 Managing the Dark Side The list of concerns goes on and the skeptics are ascendant. Media critic Nicholas Carr posed the question “Is Google making us stupid?” in an Atlantic Monthly cover story16 and followed it up with a book called The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. His conclusion is that the Web is taking us from the depths of thought to the shallows of distraction, fostering ignorance and changing the very conception of ourselves.17 Writer James Harkin says social networking is killing human relationships: we’ve all ended up in “Cyburbia: a peculiar no man’s land, populated by people who don’t really know each other, gossiping, having illicit encounters and endlessly twitching their curtains.”18 One thing is for sure.

They design business models, structures, and business processes to ensure that work systems best serve the organization and maximize collaboration and the effectiveness of its people. But on the personal front, most of us muddle through this new networked and open world, stumbling from decision to decision or crisis to crisis without an overarching strategy. There is some truth to Nicholas Carr’s assertion that with the myriad technologies interrupting us, it’s tougher to focus deeply on a task or to read and analyze a long piece of text. Do we rely too much on Google to remember things for us? Sure, our kids are able to perform multiple tasks, including light homework, at once, but do we ensure that they have balance in their lives?


pages: 397 words: 112,034

What's Next?: Unconventional Wisdom on the Future of the World Economy by David Hale, Lyric Hughes Hale

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversification, energy security, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, global village, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, payday loans, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precautionary principle, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yield curve

Most investors are confident that they do not need the advice offered by neuroeconomists, but Malleret thinks that one of the legacies of the recent crisis could be a greater willingness to listen to them. Mark Roeder analyzes the role of information in the modern economy. Roeder notes that the spread of the Internet has changed how people absorb and use information. He quotes Nicholas Carr, who asserts that the Internet is impeding people’s ability to concentrate and contemplate. He believes that technology is encouraging us to be shallow and never dwell on one subject for long. The Internet can also cause us to become excessively narrow because we can choose to see only the information we want to see, whereas an ordinary newspaper could expose us to many topics.

This behavior is facilitated by a dazzling array of new gadgets, such as Apple’s iPad, which provide simple and instantaneous access to the Net. How Skimming Is Hurting Our Ability to Think Although it may appear that skimming is simply the Internet version of “speed reading,” this would be to underestimate its influence on the way we process information. Nicholas Carr, writing in the Atlantic, says: What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

In the meantime, until these commercial and quality issues are sorted out, the cumulative effect of the trends outlined in this chapter will be to create a “diminishing law of returns of the Information Age” for both consumers and media companies. Indeed, this is the great paradox of our world today. Never before have we had access to so much information, yet so little understanding of how to manage it. Notes 1. Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2008, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/. See also Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan, iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind (New York: Harper Collins, 2008). See also Sharon Begley, Train Your Mind: Change Your Brain (New York: Ballantine Books, 2007). 2.


pages: 244 words: 66,977

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

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

Financial analysts argued that the software industry should be viewed as an area of “discretionary” spending that businesses would seek to minimize if the economy took another southward turn. The title of a 2003 Harvard Business Review article summed up the prevailing mood at the time: “IT Doesn’t Matter.” Its author, Nicholas Carr, basically called the entire sector a bunch of glorified plumbers: “By now, the core functions of IT—data storage, data processing, and data transport—have become available and affordable to all. Their very power and presence have begun to transform them from potentially strategic resources into commodity factors of production.

According to the St. Louis Fed, since the Great Recession ended, jobs in the tech sector have been growing by 20 percent, compared with 11 percent growth in the rest of the private sector. In 2015, tech sector employment exceeded 4.6 million workers, passing its 2000 peak. I don’t think that was a given. I think Nicholas Carr could have easily been right—thanks to rampant commodification, the tech industry could have been relegated to a steady if underwhelming sector of the global economy. Until 1996 most of the jobs in the tech industry were in manufacturing—you went to work at a fabrication plant, not a hip start-up office.


pages: 242 words: 67,233

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality by Ronald Purser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, British Empire, capitalist realism, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, impulse control, job satisfaction, liberation theology, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, placebo effect, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, publication bias, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, source of truth, stealth mode startup, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, work culture

Like workplace wellness, happiness, resilience, and the positive psychology of flourishing, mindfulness sees the minds and bodies of employees as sources of economic value. Docile Subjects It’s ironic that while Google boasts about its mindful quest to “make the world a better place through the ‘technology’ of meditation,” its managers are, as Nicholas Carr puts it in The Shallows, “quite literally in the business of distraction.”14 In some ways, the two are connected. Corporate mindfulness works very subtly to train good employees to serve their employers — and the broader system that supports them. It’s not an industrial form of brainwashing, as defensive mindfulness teachers think critics are saying.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015. 10 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html 11 Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. Bloomsbury, 2011. 12 https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/why-your-work-place-might-be-killing-you 13 David Gelles, Mindful Work. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015. p.97 14 Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brain. W.W. Norton, 2011. 15 http://www.academyanalyticarts.org/rose-power-subjectivity 16 Nikolas Rose, Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood. Cambridge University Press, 1998. p.114 17 https://rkpayne.wordpress.com/2014/02/18/corporatist-spirituality/ 18 Frederwick Winslow Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management.


pages: 394 words: 118,929

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

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

They provide solutions for problems that beset their industry today but can’t offer much help when the next wave of problems crashes down, which is why each new decade seems to bring a new bundle of methodologies. But there is one set of circumstances under which methodologies really are The Answer. This is the scenario presented by a business thinker named Nicholas Carr in a notorious May 2003 article in the Harvard Business Review titled “IT Doesn’t Matter.” Carr infuriated legions of Silicon Valley visionaries and technology executives by suggesting that their products—the entire corpus of information technology, or IT—had become irrelevant. Like Francis Fukuyama, the Hegelian philosopher who famously declared “the end of history” when the Berlin wall fell and the Soviet Union imploded, Carr argued, essentially, that software history is over, done.

To believe that we already know all the possible uses for software is to assume that the programs we already possess satisfy all our needs and that people are going to stop seeking something better. Irate critics of software flaws like The Software Conspiracy’s Mark Minasi and skeptical analysts of the software business like Nicholas Carr share these end-of-history blinders. If you believe that we already know everything we want from software, then it’s natural to believe that with enough hard work and planning, we can perfect it—and that’s where we should place our energies. Don’t even think about new features and novel ideas; focus everyone’s energies on whittling down every product’s bug list until we can say, for the first time in history, that most software is in great shape.

The Joel Test: Joel Spolsky posting from August 9, 2000, at http://www.joelon software.com/articles/fog0000000043.htm, and also in Joel on Software, p. 17. 37 Signals presented more on its philosophy in a 2006 PDF book, Getting Real, at https://gettingreal.37signals.com/. Google’s software development methods are outlined in Quentin Hardy, “Google Thinks Small,” Forbes, November 14, 2005, at http://www.forbes.com/global/2005/1114/054A_ print.htm. Nicholas Carr, “IT Doesn’t Matter,” Harvard Business Review, May 2003, at http://www.nicholasgcarr.com/articles/matter.htm. CHAPTER 10 ENGINEERS AND ARTISTS All quotes are from the 1968 NATO software engineering conference report: P. Naur and B. Randell, eds., “Software Engineering: Report of a Conference Sponsored by the NATO Science Committee,” Garmisch, Germany, October 7–11, 1968 (Scientific Affairs Division, NATO, 1969).


pages: 313 words: 84,312

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

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

We have another fifty years of change of this kind to come and the scale of the upheavals may be even greater as the technology becomes widely adopted and gains momentum. A third small but vociferous group are people who say the web is already having a big impact on society and it is mainly bad for us. The chief proponents of this view are the polemicist Andrew Keen in his book The Cult of the Amateur, Nicholas Carr in his thoughtful The Big Switch, Larry Sanger, one of the co-creators of Wikipedia and the brain scientist Susan Greenfield. These critics worry the web is uprooting the authority of experts, professionals and institutions which help us to sort truth from falsehood, knowledge from supposition, fact from gossip.

This scepticism is echoed by many professions who feel threatened by the web: journalists, teachers, academics and librarians among them. The boulders might have been cumbersome but they filtered the good from the bad before it was published. In web world things get published first and then filtered afterwards, depending on people’s reactions to them. A related worry, articulated by Nicholas Carr and Susan Greenfield, is that our dependence on the web and computers is eroding our ability for independent thought. ‘Google is making us stupid,’ is Carr’s catchphrase. We accept the answers the search engines supply without really analysing what they mean or where they came from. Screens make our thinking dependent on stimulation, according to Greenfield.


pages: 294 words: 81,292

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

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

And when we’re upgrading components of our own brains, instead of updating Microsoft Office or buying a few chips of RAM, it’ll be a much more delicate procedure than anything we’ve experienced before, at least at first. Yet Kurzweil claims that in this century we’ll experience 200,000 years of technological progress in a hundred calendar years. Could we tolerate so much progress coming so fast? Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, argues that smart phones and computers are lowering the quality of our thoughts, and changing the shape of our brains. In his book, Virtually You, psychiatrist Elias Aboujaoude warns that social networking and role-playing games encourage a swarm of maladies, including narcissism and egocentricity.

The next step for intelligence augmentation is to put all the enhancement contained in a smart phone inside us—to connect it to our brains. Right now we interface with our computers with our ears and eyes, but in the future imagine implanted devices that permit our brains to connect wirelessly to a cloud, from anywhere. According to Nicholas Carr, author of the Big Switch, that’s what Google’s cofounder Larry Page has in mind for the search engine’s future. “The idea is that you no longer have to sit down at a keyboard to locate information,” said Carr. “It becomes automatic, a sort of machine-mind meld. Larry Page has discussed a scenario where you merely think of a question, and Google whispers the answer into your ear through your cell phone.”


pages: 324 words: 92,805

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

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

Although personal capabilities grow more miraculous by the week, there is mounting evidence that these greater levels of personalization aren’t necessarily making us any more enlightened—about our own self-interest or the interests of the broader society. At the outset of this book, we saw how software designers keep online gamers glued to their screens—and thus evermore detached from the real world. But that dynamic, it turns out, isn’t confined to gaming. As journalist Nicholas Carr demonstrated in his sharp and depressing account The Shallows, everyone who regularly partakes of the digital realm is exposed to the same patterns. The problem, as Carr documents, lies in the very elements of the digital environment that so willingly conform to our preferences. The online environment is naturally organized like a gigantic game, with endless opportunities for what psychologists call positive reinforcement.

Cited in Tom Murphy, “An Angel and a Brute: Self-Interest and Individualism in Tocqueville’s America,” essay for preceptorial on Democracy in America, St. John’s College, Santa Fe, NM, http://www.brtom.org/sjc/sjc4.html. 6. Michio Kaku, “The Next 20 Years: Interacting with Computers, Telecom, and AI in the Future,” keynote address, RSA Conference 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watchv=Y6kmb16zSOY. 7. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), p. 117. 8. Kent Gibbons, “Advanced Advertising: Obama Campaign Showed Valueof Targeting Viewers,” MultichannelNews, Nov. 13, 2012, http://www.multichannel.com/mcnbc-events/advanced-advertising-obama-campaign-showed-value-targeting-viewers/140262. 9.


pages: 542 words: 161,731

Alone Together by Sherry Turkle

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

When you give a rat a minuscule dose of sugar, it engenders “a panting appetite,” Berridge says—a powerful and not necessarily pleasant state. See Emily Yoffe, “Seeking How the Brain Hard-Wires Us to Love Google, Twitter, and Texting. And Why That’s Dangerous,” Slate, August 12, 2009, www.slate.com/id/2224932/pagenum/all/#p2 (accessed September 25, 2009). See also Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic, July-August 2008, www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google (accessed November 20, 2009), and Kent C. Berridge and Terry E. Robinson, “What Is the Role of Dopamine in Reward: Hedonic Impact, Reward Learning, or Incentive Salience?” Brain Research Reviews 28 (1998): 309-369.

In particular I acknowledge the adolescent psychiatrist John Hamilton and the panels on “Adolescence in Cyberspace” on which we have collaborated at the Annual Meetings of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in October 2004 and October 2008; the participants in the MIT working group, “Whither Psychoanalysis in Digital Culture” Initiative on Technology and Self, 2003-2004; and participants at the Washington Institute for Psychoanalysis’s “New Directions” Conference, April 30, 2010. 31 Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (New York: Prometheus, 2008). 32 Matt Richtel, “Hooked on Gadgets and Paying a Mental Price,” New York Times, July 7, 2010, http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brain.html?sort=oldest&offset=2 (accessed July 7, 2010). 33 Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2010). Here, the argument is that online activities—surfing, searching, jumping from e-mail to text—actually change the nature of the brain. The more time we spend online, the more we are incapable of quiet reverie, not because of habits of mind but because of a rewiring of our circuitry.

Bell and Gemmell admit that despite all problems, “for us the excitement outweighs the fear.” See Bell and Gemmell, “A Digital Life.” 8 Indeed, with far less “remembrance technology,” many of us wonder if Google is “making us stupid” because it is always easier to search than remember. The originator of this memorable phrase is Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic, July/August 2008, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/ (accessed August 12, 2010). 9 Thompson, “A Head for Detail.” 10 Thompson, “A Head for Detail.” 11 Obama himself fought hard and famously to keep his BlackBerry, arguing that he counts on this digital device to make sure that the “bubble” of his office does not separate him from the “real” world.


pages: 360 words: 101,038

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

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

The challenge, according to Vega, was to undo the classic assembly-line mentality most of the workers had grown up with, and make them understand that they were an active and dynamic part of the manufacturing process. The term economists have used for this is reskilling, which is the antidote to the phenomenon of deskilling that has been a natural consequence of automating workflow. In his excellent book on the cost of automation, The Glass Cage, Nicholas Carr defines deskilling: “As more skills are built into the machine, it assumes more control over the work, and the worker’s opportunity to engage in and develop deeper talents, such as those involved in interpretation and judgment, dwindles. When automation reaches its highest level, when it takes command of the job, the worker, skill wise, has nowhere to go but down.”

Human input will become more valuable, and analog tools and practices–from note taking on whiteboards to translating digital experiences into the real world (such as retail stores)—will separate the leading businesses from the rest of the pack. That is because analog is a tool of productivity. Often the best tool. “We assume that anyone who rejects a new tool in favor of an older one is guilty of nostalgia, of making choices sentimentally rather than rationally,” Nicholas Carr wrote in The Glass Cage. “But the real sentimental fallacy is the assumption that the new thing is always better suited to our purposes and intentions than the old thing. That’s the view of a child, naive and pliable. What makes one tool superior to another has nothing to do with how new it is.


pages: 323 words: 95,939

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff

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

Tommy Christopher, “Van Susteren Explains Why Anti-Fox Clip with Occupy Wall St. Protester Got Cut,” MediaIte.com, October 3, 2011, www.mediaite.com/tv/van-susteren-explains-why-anti-fox-interview-with-occupy-wall-st-protester-got-cut. CHAPTER 2: DIGIPHRENIA: BREAKING UP IS HARD TO DO 1. See Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010) and Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011). 2. Look at Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas for the earliest notions of real time and existence compared with human-defined days and years.

For more on drones and drone pilots, see my PBS documentary on Frontline, Digital Nation, in particular the section on “War by Remote,” www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/blog/2009/10/new-video-fighting-from-afar.html. Also see Phil Stewart, “Overstretched Drone Pilots Face Stress Risk.” Reuters, December 18, 2011. 34. See Nicholas Carr, The Shallows; Sherry Turkle, Alone Together; and Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (New York: Prometheus, 2009). 35. Henry Greely, “Towards Responsible Use of Cognitive-enhancing Drugs by the Healthy,” Nature, December 7, 2008. 36. James G. March, A Primer on Decision Making (New York: Free Press, 1994), 245. 37.


pages: 299 words: 19,560

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

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

The Resurgence of Utopianism 231 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 232 See Ben Hammersley, “Audible Revolution,” The Guardian, February 12, 2004, 27; and James Van Orden, “The History of Podcasting,” http://www.how-to-podcast-tutorial.com/history-of-podcasting. htm. See Claire Cain Miller, “To Win Over Today’s Users, Gadgets Have to Be Touchable,” New York Times, September 1, 2010, B1. But see the critique of e-books by Nicholas Carr, “Schools, Beware the E-Book,” Portland Press Herald, August 15, 2011, A7. See Joseph Galante, Bloomberg News, “Amazon Says It Sells More EBooks than Hardcovers,” Boston Globe, July 20, 2010, B9. See also Julie Bosman, “Pete Hamill, Patriarch of Print, Goes Direct to Digital,” New York Times, August 12, 2010, C6.

See also Josh Quittner, “The Future of Reading,” Fortune, 161 (March 1, 2010), 63–67, regarding publishing’s foolish reliance on simple-minded and ignorant consultants rather than on their foremost reporters to try to grasp the ongoing changes in the industry from the mid-1990s onward. The Resurgence of Utopianism 76 All quotations are from Steven Johnson, “Unboxed: Yes, People Still Read, but Now It’s Social,” Sunday New York Times, Week in Review, June 20, 2010, 3. See also Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Atlantic, 302 (July/August 2008), 56–63. On one couple’s differing preference for conventional versus electronic reading materials, see Matt Richtel and Claire Cain Miller, “Of Two Minds About Books: Print or Pixels?” New York Times, September 2, 2010, B1, B4. See also Nick Bilton, “Personal Tech: Deciding on a Book, and How to Read It,” New York Times, August 11, 2011, B10.


pages: 416 words: 100,130

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Benjamin Mako Hill, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, British Empire, Chris Wanstrath, Columbine, Corn Laws, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, game design, gig economy, hiring and firing, holacracy, hustle culture, IKEA effect, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Snapchat, social web, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

In the distant days of 2006, when Facebook was just a toddler, Benkler got into an argument that would grow into a big bet about the future (and would also sound a little like the title of a Robert Ludlum novel). It became known as the “Carr-Benkler wager.” It all began with some strong words. Nicholas Carr, the technology writer and commentator, posted a somewhat snarky response to Benkler’s then-recent book, The Wealth of Networks, in which Benkler anticipated a wave of “nonmarket-based cooperation and productive collaboration,” which translates roughly as “people creating things together for reasons other than financial reward.”

“amateur activity springing up”: Olivier Silvian, “Contingency and the ‘Networked Information Economy’: A Critique of The Wealth of Networks,” International Journal of Technology, Knowledge, and Society 4 (2008): 7. “We could decide to appoint”: Yochai Benkler, “Carr-Benkler Wager Revisited,” Yochai Benkler’s blog, May 7, 2012. www.blogs.harvard.edu. “Pay Up, Yochai Benkler!”: Nicholas Carr, “Pay Up, Yochai Benkler,” Rough Type (blog), May 1, 2012. www.roughtype.com. “For investors, no less than”: Benkler, “Carr-Benkler Wager Revisited.” The early flourish of something like: Couchsurfing International, July 2017. www.couchsurfing.com. “I’m thrilled that you’re writing”: Yochai Benkler, discussion with authors, December 2, 2016.


pages: 416 words: 106,582

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

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

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein Inference to the Best Explanation Not all explanations are created equal. Emanuel Derman Pragmamorphism Being pragmamorphic sounds equivalent to taking a scientific attitude toward the world, but it easily evolves into dull scientism. Nicholas Carr Cognitive Load When our cognitive load exceeds the capacity of our working memory, our intellectual abilities take a hit. Hans Ulrich Obrist To Curate In our phase of globalization . . . there is a danger of homogenization but at the same time a countermovement, the retreat into one’s own culture.

These debates could be sharpened by bringing to bear on them the rationality-steeped notion of inference to the best explanation, its invocation of the sorts of standards that make some explanations objectively better than others, beginning with Peirce’s enjoinder that extraordinary hypotheses be ranked far away from the best. Cognitive Load Nicholas Carr Science and technology journalist; author, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains You’re sprawled on the couch in your living room, watching a new episode of Justified on the tube, when you think of something you need to do in the kitchen. You get up, take ten quick steps across the carpet, and then just as you reach the kitchen—poof!


pages: 391 words: 105,382

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

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

(Starr), 218 When We Are No More (Rumsey), 325–27 Whitman, Walt, 20, 183, 184 wicks, 229–30 Wiener, Anthony, 315 wiki, as term, 19 “wikinomics,” 84 Wikipedia, xvi, 21, 192 in fact-mongering, 58 hegemony of, 68 ideological split in, 18–20 slipshod quality of, 5–8 wiki-sects, 18 Wilde, Oscar, 174, 308 Williams, Anthony, 84 Wilson, Fred, 11 Windows Home Server, 32 Winer, Dave, 35 wings, human fascination with, 329–30, 335, 340–42 wingsuits, 341–42 Wired, xvii, xxi, 3, 4, 106, 156, 162, 174, 195, 232 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 215 Wolf, Gary, 163 Wolf, Maryanne, 234 Wolfe, Tom, 170 work: as basis for society, 310–11, 313 in contemplative state, 298–99 efficiency in, 165–66, 237–38 job displacement in, 164–65, 174, 310 trivial alternatives to, 64 World Brain (Wells), 267 World Health Organization, 244 World of Warcraft, 59 Wozniac, Steve “Woz,” 32 Wright brothers, 299 writing: archiving of, 325–27 and invention of paper, 286–87 writing skills, changes in, 231–32, 234–35, 240 Xbox, 64, 93, 260 X-Ray Spex, 63 Yahoo, 67, 279–80 Yahoo People Search, 256 Y Combinator Startup School, 172 Yeats, William Butler, 88 Yelp, 31 Yosemite Valley, 341–42 youth culture, 10–11 as apolitical, 294–95 music and, 125 TV viewing in, 80–81 YouTube, 29, 31, 58, 75, 81, 102, 186, 205, 225, 314 technology marketing on, 108–9 Zittrain, Jonathan, 76–77 zombies, 260, 263 Zuckerberg, Mark, xvii, xxii, 53, 115, 155, 158, 215, 225 Facebook Q & A session of, 210–11, 213, 214 imagined as jackal, xv ALSO BY NICHOLAS CARR The Glass Cage The Shallows The Big Switch Does IT Matter? The Digital Enterprise (editor) Copyright © 2016 by Nicholas Carr All rights reserved First Edition For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact W.


pages: 302 words: 82,233

Beautiful security by Andy Oram, John Viega

Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Bletchley Park, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, corporate governance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, defense in depth, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, Firefox, information security, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, market design, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Leeson, Norbert Wiener, operational security, optical character recognition, packet switching, peer-to-peer, performance metric, pirate software, Robert Bork, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, security theater, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, SQL injection, statistical model, Steven Levy, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Upton Sinclair, web application, web of trust, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

This is potentially a major paradigm shift in many of the security technologies we have come to accept, decoupling the content from the delivery mechanism. In the future, thanks to BPM software security, analysts will be able to select the best anti-virus engine and the best analysis feed to fuel it—but they will probably not come from the same vendor. When Nicholas Carr wrote Does IT Matter?,† he argued that technology needs to be realigned to support business instead of driving it. BPM is not rocket science (although it may include rocket science in its future), but it’s doing just that: realigning technology to support the business. In addition to offering radical improvements to information security by opening new markets, BPM can deliver even more powerful changes through its effects on the evolution of the science behind security.

Model and Automate Process Security effect: Improve efficiency and reduce cost 4. Understand Operations and Implement Controls Security effect: Improve efficiency and reduce cost Security effect: Fast and accurate compliance and audit data (visibility) 5. Optimize and Improve † Does IT Matter?, Nicholas Carr, Harvard Business School Press, 2004. TOMORROW’S SECURITY COGS AND LEVERS 157 Security effect: Do more with less Security effect: Reduce cost Put another way: if you understand and document your process, metrics, and objectives; model and automate your process; understand and implement your process; and optimize and improve the process, you will implement a structured and effective information security program, understand the success criteria and track effectiveness, improve efficiency and reduce cost, produce fast and accurate compliance, audit data, and ultimately do more with less and reduce the cost of security.


pages: 309 words: 114,984

The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age by Robert Wachter

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cognitive load, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, Google Glasses, human-factors engineering, hype cycle, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lifelogging, Marc Benioff, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, pets.com, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Hendricks, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra

“They eliminated the step of the pharmacist checking on the robot, because the idea is you’re paying so much money because it’s so accurate.” Chapter 18 The Nurse Automation bias occurs when we place too much faith in the accuracy of the information coming through our monitors. Our trust in the software becomes so strong that we ignore or discount other information sources, including our eyes and ears. —Nicholas Carr, writing in the Atlantic, 2013 Brooke Levitt had been on the nursing staff at UCSF for about 10 months when Pablo Garcia was admitted for his colonoscopy. Levitt is in her mid-twenties, with an open face, a ready smile, and an upbeat Southern California vibe that makes her a favorite of kids and their parents.

But then there are the tragic stories of crashes (such as the 2009 crashes of Air France 447 off the coast of Brazil and Colgan Air 3407 near Buffalo) in which the machines failed, and, after they did, it became clear that the pilots did not know how to fly the planes. Experts call this phenomenon deskilling, and preventing it is a major focus of today’s aviation safety efforts. In his 2014 book, The Glass Cage, Nicholas Carr describes the challenge. “How do you measure the expense of an erosion of effort and engagement, or a waning of agency and autonomy, or a subtle deterioration of skill?” he asked. “You can’t. Those are the kinds of shadowy, intangible things that we rarely appreciate until after they’re gone.” In a perverse way, we’ve been lucky that the current state of health IT is so woeful.


pages: 386 words: 113,709

Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road by Matthew B. Crawford

1960s counterculture, Airbus A320, airport security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, British Empire, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, confounding variable, congestion pricing, crony capitalism, data science, David Sedaris, deskilling, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, labour mobility, Lyft, mirror neurons, Network effects, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, security theater, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social graph, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, time dilation, too big to fail, traffic fines, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, Wall-E, Works Progress Administration

As our roads and bridges crumble for lack of investment, it seems a little dicey to hand off control to an internal conversation between your car’s computers and previously compiled GPS maps—suppose there is a new and very large crater in the road? If there is a fight for control, we want whoever is right (the computer or the person behind the wheel) to win that battle, but both are fallible. The human being is more fallible than he was previously, due to the cognitive challenges of partial automation. In The Glass Cage, Nicholas Carr writes, “We all know about the ill effects of information overload. It turns out that information underload can be equally debilitating.” He cites work in human factors research that shows how making things too easy for people can backfire, because our “attentional capacity . . . shrinks to accommodate reductions in mental workload.”

in Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting (San Diego, CA, Sept. 30–Oct. 4) (Santa Monica, CA: Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 2013), pp. 1938–1942, as cited in Casner et al., “The Challenges of Partially Automated Driving.” 25.Thus MacArthur Job, Air Disaster, vol. 3 (Australia: Aerospace Publications, 1998), p. 155. 26.Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (New York: Norton, 2014), pp. 90-91, citing Mark S. Young and Neville A. Stanton, “Attention and Automation: New Perspectives on Mental Overload and Performance,” Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science 3, no. 2 (2002) and a classic work in psychology by Robert M.


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Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect by David Goodhart

active measures, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, computer age, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, deskilling, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shock, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postindustrial economy, precariat, reshoring, Richard Florida, robotic process automation, scientific management, Scientific racism, Skype, social distancing, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thorstein Veblen, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, young professional

Consider the way in which environmental or gender equality concerns have impacted the business plans of big corporations in recent decades. One of the forces driving change is political pressure from voters who don’t share the interests of the cognitive classes. And there are other trends that suggest the Head will soon face a more even contest with Hand and Heart. A dystopian trend was suggested by American journalist Nicholas Carr in his book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, in which he argued that we are all being made dumber by the Internet.13 Carr argued that sustained exposure to the Internet is reordering our synapses in ways that make us crave novelty and struggle to focus. This may bring improvements in some fields, but overall it means significant losses in linguistic facility, memory, and concentration.

Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (2019). 11 Michael Lind, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2020), 16. 12 Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Questions (Penguin, 2019). 13 Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010). 14 Paul Krugman, “White Collar Workers Turn Blue,” New York Times Magazine, September 29, 1996, https://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/BACKWRD2.html. 15 Economist, June 22, 2019, 65. 16 “Woman and Work: Do Attitudes Reflect Policy Shifts?


Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City by Richard Sennett

Anthropocene, Big Tech, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, open borders, place-making, plutocrats, post-truth, Richard Florida, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Yochai Benkler

Among them, the psychologist Sherry Turkle has observed youngsters obsessed with computer games. The sorts of disputes kids have on real playing fields about who plays fair or what should be the rules of play do not occur when they sit down in front of the computer; they are absorbed within the frame of predetermined rules which ensure the game can go forward. Nicholas Carr has argued that multitasking onscreen disables people cognitively, shortening their attention span and so leading them to avoid situations which demand prolonged attention to be understood. Both are saying that certain experiences of technology disable cognition of a sustained and questioning sort.

Paul Merholz, ‘“Frictionless” as an Alternative to “Simplicity” in Design’, Adaptive Path blog, 22 July 2010; http://adaptivepath.org/ideas/friction-as-an-alternative-to-simplicity-in-design/. 13. Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: Smart Machines, Dumb Humans, and the Myth of Technological Perfectionism (New York: Perseus Books, 2013). 14. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011). 15. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2012). 16. Norman J. Slamecka and Peter Graf, ‘The Generation Effect: Delineation of a Phenomenon’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory 4, no. 6 (1978): 592–604. 17.


pages: 436 words: 127,642

When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by Jim Holt

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, computer age, CRISPR, dark matter, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, George Santayana, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, luminiferous ether, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Monty Hall problem, Murray Gell-Mann, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paradox of Choice, Paul Erdős, Peter Singer: altruism, Plato's cave, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantum entanglement, random walk, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, Skype, stakhanovite, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, wage slave

Why couldn’t we simply spend less time in front of the screen and more time doing the things we used to do before computers came along—like burying our noses in novels? Well, it may be that computers are affecting us in a more insidious fashion than we realize. They may be reshaping our brains—and not for the better. That was the drift of “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” a 2008 cover story by Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic. A couple of years later, Carr, a technology writer and former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, elaborated his indictment of digital culture into a book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Carr believes that he was himself an unwitting victim of the computer’s mind-altering powers.

STRANGELOVE MAKES A THINKING MACHINE George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe (Pantheon, 2012). Norman MacRae, John von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered the Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence, and Much More (Pantheon, 1992). 17. SMARTER, HAPPIER, MORE PRODUCTIVE Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (Norton, 2010). Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (Riverhead, 2006). Gary Marcus, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (Houghton Mifflin, 2008). 18.


pages: 158 words: 46,353

Future War: Preparing for the New Global Battlefield by Robert H. Latiff

Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, CRISPR, cyber-physical system, Danny Hillis, defense in depth, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, failed state, friendly fire, Howard Zinn, Internet of things, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, Nicholas Carr, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, post-truth, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, VTOL, Wall-E

More worrisome from a weapons standpoint, rare earth metals are ubiquitous in high-performance aircraft, missiles, and advanced electronics. Without the powerful magnets they make possible, some weapons simply will not work. Ten times stronger than a typical iron magnet, rare earth magnets enable control of the fins on highly maneuverable and very-high-speed missiles. The technology and culture writer Nicholas Carr has said that “the deeper a technology is woven into the patterns of everyday life, the less choice we have about whether and how we use that technology.” Sometimes technical “advancements” make little practical sense and our dependence on them is not much more than wishful thinking. For example, many consider ballistic missile defense technologies essential, thereby justifying the enormous resources spent on them, notwithstanding their somewhat inconsistent operational performance.


pages: 499 words: 144,278

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

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

“But then they were just using a program to basically avoid learning things in the first place,” he says. So Fred got an early exposure to the ethical complexities of software: By making something easy to do, you can change the mental habits of other people. Humans are inherently pretty lazy; as Nicholas Carr notes in The Glass Cage, when someone offers us the ability to take a shortcut, we take it. We only discover later that we may have traded off an ingrained skill—or, in the case of calculus, never learned it in the first place. But it’s incredibly hard to resist because we’re constantly given new tools from programmers who’ve figured out how to remove friction from daily life.

Greek word for “time”: Kah Seng Tay, “What Is the Etymology of ‘Cron’?,” Quora, December 22, 2015, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-etymology-of-cron. do it over and over: Peter Seibel, Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming (New York: Apress, 2009), 77. we take it: Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014). “so many questions about it”: Tom Christiansen, Brian D. Foy, Larry Wall, and Jon Orwant, Programming Perl: Unmatched Power for Text Processing and Scripting (Sebastapol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2012), 387, 1062. “when are you free?”: “As a programmer, what tasks have you automated to make your everyday life easier?


pages: 527 words: 147,690

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

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

As networks begin to understand how we think and feel, they will prompt us for more information or suggest emotional responses, all of which will be machine-readable. They may also allow companies such as Facebook to help us stop self-censoring by pushing us to reconsider deleted updates or to post something when they detect a change in our mood. The writer Nicholas Carr envisions a system that “automates the feels”: “Whenever you write a message or update, the camera in your smartphone or tablet will ‘read’ your eyes and your facial expression, precisely calculate your mood, and append the appropriate emoji. Not only does this speed up the process immensely, but it removes the requirement for subjective self-examination and possible obfuscation.

“App Developers.” beyondverbal.com/join-us/app-developers. 41 “measure psychological traits”: Michal Kosinski, David Stilwell, and Thor Graepel. “Private Traits and Attributes Are Predictable from Digital Records of Human Behavior.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. March 11, 2013, 110(15), 5802-5. pnas.org/content/early/2013/03/06/1218772110. 42 “a win-win-win”: Nicholas Carr. “Automating the Feels.” Rough Type. Aug. 20, 2013. roughtype.com/?p=3693. 42 “The more proactive”: Betsy Morais. “Can Humans Fall in Love with Bots?” New Yorker. Nov. 19, 2013. newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/11/her-film-spike-jonze-can-humans-fall-in-love-with-bots.html. 42 Suggest responses: BBC News.


pages: 550 words: 154,725

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, business climate, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, complexity theory, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Ritchie, Edward Thorp, Fairchild Semiconductor, Henry Singleton, horn antenna, Hush-A-Phone, information retrieval, invention of the telephone, James Watt: steam engine, Karl Jansky, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Metcalfe’s law, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Picturephone, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Russell Ohl, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, space junk, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Teledyne, traveling salesman, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

There are a variety of reasons for the decline of small-town America. But when all kinds of communications and entertainment are delivered to your home, there are fewer and fewer reasons to go into town and exchange greetings in person. Information brings with it unintended consequences, too. Some technology journalists, notably the writer Nicholas Carr, have asked recently whether an increasing reliance on instant communications and Internet data is eroding our need, or ability, to think deeply. “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” Carr writes. “My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.”5 It is the dark side, in many respects, of Kelly’s 1951 prediction, which has proven largely correct, that future networks would be “more like the biological systems of man’s brain and nervous system.”

The researchers at the new lab focused on microwave and lightwave communications. 3 Press release, Intel Corporation, October 19, 2010. 4 Hendrik Hertzberg,“Open Secrets,” New Yorker, August 2, 2010. Hertzberg’s column summarized many points in the multipart Washington Post story “Top Secret America,” by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin; http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america. 5 Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Atlantic, July–August 2008. 6 M. J. Kelly, “Remarks Before Bell System Lecturer’s Conference,” October 2, 1951. 7 Jon Gertner, “Mad Scientist,” Fast Company, February 2008. 8 John Pierce, Testimony, Subcommittee on Communication of the Senate Commerce Committee, March 22, 1977.


pages: 187 words: 62,861

The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest by Yochai Benkler

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, business process, California gold rush, citizen journalism, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, do well by doing good, East Village, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental economics, experimental subject, framing effect, Garrett Hardin, informal economy, invisible hand, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, peer-to-peer, prediction markets, Richard Stallman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, ultimatum game, Washington Consensus, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

They do, however, provide a place where people trained in a free software project could turn around and monetize their skills even if they were not employed by a company to develop the open-source project.) As many examples from the software world repeatedly show, looser, more indirect forms of payment that are not directly tied to specific actions are far better at motivating participation in collaborative projects. A direct appeal or a pay-for-performance model (what Nicholas Carr called Calacanis’s Wallet) simply deters those who are seeking to pursue their own intrinsic interests. Models of payment, then, to the extent necessary and desirable at all, need to be more removed and distinct from the intrinsically motivated activity. So crowding out does not occur in the open-source software world, because the industry developed practices to keep an unusual degree of autonomy in the hands of the software developers and to make the creation process a rewarding one.


pages: 561 words: 157,589

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

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

A world of interoperable self-driving cars would provide an opportunity for current on-demand drivers—or, in a future world of self-driving trucks, independent truckers—to participate in the marketplace as owner-operators; a world in which a company like Tesla is able to limit the ability of its car owners to drive for any competing service reduces the drivers to a real-world version of what author Nicholas Carr has called “digital sharecroppers.” Ensuring interoperability of self-driving cars is as important as was the original interoperability that drove the Internet revolution. Open standards in this area will help ordinary people, not just big companies, to reap the benefits of the next wave of automation.

The essay is also available online at http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/a/495. 54 “a remote control for real life”: Kara Swisher, “Man and Uber Man,” Vanity Fair, December 2014, retrieved March 30, 2017, http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2014/12/uber-travis-kalanick-controversy. 54 “That’s what it’s all about”: Brad Stone, The Upstarts (New York: Little, Brown, 2017), 52. 55 they observed in Zimbabwe: As told to me by Logan Green in 2015. 56 the incentives: Stone, The Upstarts, 71. 57 “everyone benefits”: “The Uber Story,” uber.com, retrieved March 30, 2017, https://www.uber.com/our-story/. 57 one customer in Los Angeles: Priya Anand, “People in Los Angeles Are Getting Rid of Their Cars,” BuzzFeed, September 2, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/priya/people-in-los-angeles-are-getting-rid-of-their-cars. 59 one of the most difficult exams in the world: Jody Rosen, “The Knowledge, London’s Legendary Taxi-Driver Test, Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS,” New York Times Magazine, November 24, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/10/t-magazine/london-taxi-test-knowledge.html. 59 it does save them money: “Workforce of the Future: Final Report (Slide 12),” Markle, retrieved March 30, 2017, https://www.markle.org/workforce-future-final-report. 63 Tesla seems to have other plans: Dan Gillmor, “Tesla Says Customers Can’t Use Its Self-Driving Cars for Uber,” Slate, October 21, 2016, http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2016/10/21/tesla_says_customers_can_t_use_its _self_driving_cars_for_uber.html. 64 “digital sharecroppers”: Nicholas Carr, “The Economics of Digital Sharecropping,” Rough Type, May 4, 2012, http://www.roughtype.com/?p=1600. 67 “proximity to the market”: From an unpublished preprint sent to me by Laura Tyson of Laura Tyson and Michael Spence, “Exploring the Effects of Technology on Income and Wealth Inequality,” in After Piketty, ed.


pages: 234 words: 67,589

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

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

., “Cloud Computing Using Amazon Web Services,” International Journal for Modern Trends in Science and Technology 3, no 1 (February 2017): 55; Brandon Butler, “The Myth about How Amazon’s Web Service Started Just Won’t Die,” NetworkWorld, March 2, 2015. “Let’s make it …”: Jeff Bezos, interview by Om Malik at the D6 Conference in Carlsbad, California, in May 2008, quoted by Nicholas Carr, “Understanding Amazon Web Services,” Rough Type (blog), May 31, 2008. Not the only ones feeling the pain: Furrier, “Exclusive: The Story of AWS and Andy Jassy’s Trillion Dollar Baby.” 106, The team in Cape Town … Barefoot juggling: Marcin Kowalski’s remarks in “Amazon EC2—10 Year Anniversary Celebration,” YouTube, starts around 2:14.


Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business climate, Cal Newport, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, Hacker News, Higgs boson, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, popular electronics, power law, remote working, Richard Feynman, Ruby on Rails, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, statistical model, the medium is the message, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , zero-sum game

To make matters worse for depth, there’s increasing evidence that this shift toward the shallow is not a choice that can be easily reversed. Spend enough time in a state of frenetic shallowness and you permanently reduce your capacity to perform deep work. “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” admitted journalist Nicholas Carr, in an oft-cited 2008 Atlantic article. “[And] I’m not the only one.” Carr expanded this argument into a book, The Shallows, which became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. To write The Shallows, appropriately enough, Carr had to move to a cabin and forcibly disconnect. The idea that network tools are pushing our work from the deep toward the shallow is not new.


pages: 254 words: 72,929

The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy by Tyler Cowen

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, behavioural economics, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Flynn Effect, folksonomy, framing effect, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, informal economy, Isaac Newton, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, Naomi Klein, neurotypical, new economy, Nicholas Carr, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, Richard Thaler, selection bias, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, the medium is the message, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tyler Cowen

The stereotypical web activity is not to visit a gardening blog one day, visit a Manolo shoes blog the next day, and never return to either. Most online activity, or at least the kinds that persist, is investment in sustained, long-running narratives. That is where the suspense comes from and that is why the internet so holds our attention. Nicholas Carr, in a 2008 article in The Atlantic, asked, “Is Google making us stupid?” and basically he answered that yes, Google is making us stupid. He argued that internet culture shortens our attention spans and renders us less likely to think deep thoughts. But he missed how people can construct wisdom—and long-term dramatic interest in their own self-education—from accumulating, collecting, and ordering small bits of information.


pages: 284 words: 79,265

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

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

Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1996. 263–87; Yaeger-Dror, Malcah, “Lexical Classes in Montreal French: The Case of (E:),” Language and Speech 35 no. 3 (July/September 1992): 251. 195 there is a Web site called Worldometers: http://www.worldometers.info. 197 the Web site MeasuringWorth.com: http://www.measuringworth.com/ppoweruk. 198 a series called Media Diet: http://www.theatlanticwire.com/posts/media-diet. 198 This is already happening: Sparrow, Betsy, Jenny Liu, and Daniel M. Wegner. “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips.” Science 353, no. 6043 (2011): 776–78. 198 While this is certainly a common argument: Nicholas Carr discusses this topic, in a qualified manner, in his article in the July/August 2008 issue of The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” 198 a constantly updated online medical reference: http://www.uptodate.com/home/about/index.xhtml. CHAPTER 10: AT THE EDGE OF WHAT WE KNOW 200 This error-checking methodology: Johnson, Steven Berlin.


The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

Pickersgill says, “We have learned to read the expression of the body while someone is consuming a device and when those signifiers are activated it is as if the device can be seen taking physical form without the object being present.”26 The viewer is left with eerie images of lovers, families, friends, staring down at their empty hands, oblivious to the ones closest to them, in effect alone. Turkle’s and Pickersgill’s critiques are part of a sprawling range of critiques of smartphones that tap into a wide range of concerns. Several studies find a link between smartphones and cancer.27 Nicholas Carr, a well-known writer on technology, is concerned that our hand machines are making us dumb. Smartphones are “an attention magnet unlike any our minds have had to grapple with before,” Carr says, and our brains don’t seem to be up to the task.28 Natasha Dow Schüll, a cultural anthropologist, says smartphones—operating like little pocket slot machines, inviting us to swipe, tap, swipe, again and again, rewiring our neurological reward centers in the process—put us into the “machine zone.”29 Fantastic Beasts star Eddie Redmayne recently joined the ranks of smartphone refuseniks, switching to a “dumb phone” that could only be used for voice calls and texting.


pages: 743 words: 201,651

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

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

(A similar complaint was made after the spread of printing in sixteenth-century Europe.) Nicholas Carr and Andrew Keen deplore the online ‘cult of the amateur’, which inordinately privileges mass participation over authority, openness over expertise, Wikipedia over Britannica.91 And the former, they argue, is eroding the latter. Jaron Lanier writes caustically of colleagues who believe that ‘a million, or perhaps a billion, fragmentary insults will eventually yield wisdom’.92 As we are tempted into what Nicholas Carr calls ‘the shallows’ of the online world, so we might all succumb to attention deficit disorder.


pages: 291 words: 81,703

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

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

Now we’re seeing these early writers for what they were: brilliant precursors straining after some of the most important ideas and techniques of the contemporary world, in this case the art and science of search. Returning to the present, Google is making a lot of the memory arts fall away altogether. Nonetheless, that doesn’t mean, as critics such as Nicholas Carr have alleged, that we are becoming stupider. First, we presumably learn something useful through Google, and that information also gives us broader background knowledge for understanding and interpreting other facts about the world, whether they come from Google or not. Second, we have become much better at searching for answers, and that too is a skill.


pages: 324 words: 80,217

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

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

To the extent that the medium of online determines the cultural messages it carries, it pressures creators to make things clickable, browsable, capable of holding attention briefly, but always with the understanding that the reader or watcher will swiftly move on to the next hyperlink, the next video, the next tweet or status update or Instagram pic. It is not impossible for genius to flourish under such constraints, but depth becomes a near impossibility; not for nothing did Nicholas Carr title his powerful critique of Internet culture The Shallows. If the hit single has survived Napster and then iTunes, the old-fashioned album emphatically has not, and there’s an argument—infuriating to novelists, but possibly true—that the novel ceased to matter to mass culture on June 29, 2007, the day Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone.


pages: 285 words: 86,853

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

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

In Snow Crash the hackers were most susceptible to the nam-shub because computational thinking had already reordered their minds: “Your nerves grow new connections as you use them—the axons split and push their way between the dividing glial cells—your bioware self-modifies—the software becomes part of the hardware.”58 The process Stephenson describes here is automatization, the realignment of mental faculties to internalize and homeostatically manage a complex task like driving a car. And, as media journalist Nicholas Carr points out in The Glass Cage, we all experienced automatization first-hand when we learned to read, gradually internalizing the rules of grammar and spelling until the interpretation of written symbols was largely effortless.59 Just as Plato feared, our interaction with the technology of the written word not only changed the medium of thought, extending it to external papers, scrolls and other material stuff, but it also changed the mode of thought.


pages: 299 words: 91,839

What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

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

I would be delighted if education put less emphasis on rote memorization of that which we can easily look up, but I wonder whether Google’s instant access to every imaginable fact will atrophy our memory cells. Or perhaps that’s just my fear of age. In a 2008 article in The Atlantic, internet curmudgeon Nicholas Carr, a sometimes sparring partner of mine in the blogosphere, fretted about these changes in our habits, brains, and society in an article entitled, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He confessed to reading less and differently—as I have. “The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds,” Carr argued.


pages: 339 words: 88,732

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

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

A comprehensive discussion of the genomics revolution is far beyond the scope of this book; we mention it here simply to highlight that it is real, and likely to bring profound changes in the years and decades to come. See Kris Wetterstrand, “DNA Sequencing Costs: Data from the NHGRI Genome Sequencing Program (GSP),” National Human Genome Research Institute, July 16, 2013, http://www.genome.gov/sequencingcosts/. 5. On gaming, see Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011); on cyberbalkanization, see Marshall van Alstyne and Erik Brynjolfsson, “Electronic Communities: Global Villages or Cyberbalkanization?” ICIS 1996 Proceedings, December 31, 1996, http://aisel.aisnet.org/icis1996/5; and Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think (New York: Penguin, 2012); on social isolation see Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2012); and Robert D.


pages: 313 words: 95,077

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

Page 138: Seigenthaler and essjay controversies The Wikipedia articles on the controversy surrounding the John Seigenthaler entry (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Seigenthaler_Sr._Wikipedia_biography_controversy ) and essjay’s faked credentials (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essjay_controversy) are surprisingly good, given that one might expect Wikipedians to pull their punches. Nicholas Carr is also worth reading on this subject; Carr, writing at roughtype.com, is the most insightful and incisive of Wikipedia’s critics. One of his posts worth reading on the essjay controversy is “Wikipedia’s credentialism crisis” (www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/03/wikipedias_cred.php) and Page 140: Ise Shrine Howard Mansfield first noted the linking of the Ise Shrine’s method of construction with its failure to win historic designation from UNESCO in The Same Ax, Twice: Restoration and Renewal in a Throwaway Age, University Press of New England (2000).


pages: 366 words: 100,602

Sextant: A Young Man's Daring Sea Voyage and the Men Who ... by David Barrie

centre right, colonial exploitation, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, GPS: selective availability, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, lone genius, Maui Hawaii, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, polynesian navigation, South China Sea, three-masted sailing ship, trade route

Wolfgang Schuster, “Protecting the Future,” Navigation News, The Magazine of the Royal Institute of Navigation (September–October 2013) 22–24. 6 “Ships’ navigators go back to the future as white van man gets them into a jam,” Times, March 30, 2013. 7 New Scientist, December 12, 2012. 8 Matthew Crawford has written very interestingly about this subject—though in a slightly different context. See Crawford esp. 59–61. 9 For an interesting overview of this subject, see Alex Hutchinson’s article “Global Impositioning Systems—Is GPS technology actually harming our sense of direction?” in Walrus, November 2009 (http://thewalrus.ca/global-impositioning-systems/). See also Nicholas Carr, “All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines,” in Atlantic, November 2013 (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-great-forgetting/309516/). Glossary Azimuth: the bearing of a celestial body’s geographical position measured in degrees either from the north or south pole (whichever is nearer the observer).


Data and the City by Rob Kitchin,Tracey P. Lauriault,Gavin McArdle

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic management, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, create, read, update, delete, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, dematerialisation, digital divide, digital map, digital rights, distributed ledger, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, floating exchange rates, folksonomy, functional programming, global value chain, Google Earth, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, loose coupling, machine readable, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, nowcasting, open economy, openstreetmap, OSI model, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, place-making, power law, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, semantic web, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, software studies, statistical model, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, text mining, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, urban planning, urban sprawl, web application

203 people as relatively passive subjects who participate ‘online’. Notably, Sherry Turkle (2011) no longer celebrates but instead critiques the internet for isolating people from more meaningful and ‘real’ face-to-face human interactions such that especially young people are now ‘alone together’. Numerous other popular critiques such as Nicholas Carr’s (2010) The Shallows and Evgeny Morozov’s (2011) Net Delusion also critique digital lives. While such declarations have been a good correction to utopian visions, they have replaced sovereign subjects with obedient ones. In this way, they reflect a reversal of the understanding of power advanced in modern political theory, which posits a divide between modernity and tradition where a subject to power (tradition) was replaced by a subject of power (modernity).


pages: 416 words: 108,370

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, always be closing, augmented reality, Clayton Christensen, data science, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, hindsight bias, hype cycle, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, information trail, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Roose, Kodak vs Instagram, linear programming, lock screen, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, subscription business, TED Talk, telemarketer, the medium is the message, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, women in the workforce

the top 1 percent of bands and solo artists: Thompson, “The Shazam Effect.” the number of transistors that fit on a microchip: Gordon E. Moore, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” Electronics 38, no. 8 (April 19, 1965), www.monolithic3d.com/uploads/6/0/5/5/6055488/gordon_moore_1965_article.pdf. humans plod along at a leisurely Darwinian pace: Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage (New York: Norton, 2014), 41. I’ve seen several writers juxtapose the exponential pace of technology and the methodical evolution of humans, but the first place I recall reading this construction was in Carr’s book: “Where computers sprint forward at the pace of Moore’s law, our own innate abilities creep ahead with the tortoise-like tread of Darwin’s law.”


pages: 371 words: 108,317

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

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

Solsman, “Attention, Artists: Streaming Music Is the Inescapable Future. Embrace It,” CNET, November 14, 2014. hours of music required: Personal estimation. new podcasts launch every day: Personal correspondence with Todd Pringle, GM and VP of Product, Stitcher, April 26, 2015. four ways books embody fixity: Nicholas Carr, “Words in Stone and on the Wind,” Rough Type, February 3, 2012. 4: SCREENING 50,000 words in Old English to a million: Robert McCrum, Robert MacNeil, and William Cran, The Story of English, third revised ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 2002); and Encyclopedia Americana, vol. 10 (Grolier, 1999).


pages: 374 words: 111,284

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

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

Mind you, the advances of technology are not necessarily all positive for the education and overall mental wellbeing of citizens. There is some evidence of cognitive decay as a result of recent technological developments, notably in video game technology and smartphones. In his book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr argues that the internet is having an adverse effect on our ability to think.30 In an article published in The Atlantic in 2013 called “All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines,” he bemoaned the rise of “technology centered automation that elevates the capabilities of technology above the interests of people.”


pages: 371 words: 109,320

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World by Alan Rusbridger

airport security, basic income, Bellingcat, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, crisis actor, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Google Earth, green new deal, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Murray Gell-Mann, Narrative Science, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, post-truth, profit motive, public intellectual, publication bias, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech baron, the scientific method, TikTok, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism

They have been lauded as the solution to journalism’s greatest woes, and blamed for destroying readers’ already-stunted attention spans. Which is it? The debate shows a press grappling with the opportunities and challenges of an interconnected web. First, the dissent: in 2006, TechCrunch contributor Steve Gillmor swore off hyperlinks and technology writer Nicholas Carr likened them to ‘little textual gnats buzzing around your head’ and ‘violent footnotes’. Carr worried that distracted, superficial reading has become the norm as our brains remain suspended in the constant decision to click or not to click. His suggestion to ‘delinkify’ – to move links to the bottom of an article (SEE: FOOTNOTES) – sparked, well, lots of angry links to his post.


pages: 415 words: 102,982

Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children by Susan Linn

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, cashless society, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, delayed gratification, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, gamification, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, impulse control, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, language acquisition, late fees, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, new economy, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, plant based meat, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, techlash, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple

CHAPTER 1: WHAT CHILDREN NEED AND WHY CORPORATIONS CAN’T PROVIDE IT Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, quoted in Brain Matters: Putting the First Years First, directed by Carlota Nelson, brainmattersfilm.com, 2019.   1.  Susan Linn, Joan Almon, and Diane Levin, Facing the Screen Dilemma: Young Children, Technology and Early Education (Boston: Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood; New York: Alliance for Childhood, 2012), PDF.   2.  Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: Norton, 2010), 34.   3.  National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2017).   4.  The NPD Group, Retail Tracking Service, U.S.   5.  


pages: 424 words: 114,905

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

The hacking vulnerability of voice assistants has been shown with such techniques as the so-called dolphin attack, which used ultrasonic frequencies, too high for the human ear to hear, to seize control of voice-activated gadgets.20 There has even been a murder case in which Amazon was forced to provide the Echo recordings obtained when it wasn’t activated but only listening, fulfilling the legal descriptor of a “ticking constitutional time bomb” with respect to the First Amendment.21 Unknowingly, a couple in Portland, Oregon, had their conversation recorded and their audio files sent to their contacts.22 These examples portend the problems of not establishing data protection and privacy. Nicholas Carr, who is known for bringing out the bad side of technology, had this to say: “Even as they spy on us, the devices offer sanctuary from the unruliness of reality, with all its frictions and strains. They place us in a virtual world meticulously arranged to suit our bents and biases, a world that understands us and shapes itself to our desires.


pages: 1,172 words: 114,305

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

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

The Federal Government of Germany, Artificial Intelligence Strategy 25 (2018), https://ec.europa.eu/knowledge4policy/publication/germany-artificial-intelligence-strategy_en (“The potential for AI to serve society as a whole lies in its promise of productivity gains going hand in hand with improvements for the workforce, delegating monotonous or dangerous tasks to machines so that human beings can focus on using their creativity to resolve problems.”). 12. Lucas Mearian, “A. I. Guardian-Angel Vehicles Will Dominate Auto Industry, Says Toyota Exec,” Computerworld, June 3, 2016. 13. Some forms of autopilot tend to de-skill pilots. Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us (New York: Norton, 2015). However, autopilots can also be designed to maintain or enhance the skills of pilots, preserving essential expertise. David Mindell, Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy (New York: Viking, 2015). 14.


pages: 382 words: 114,537

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, company town, David Attenborough, death from overwork, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, hive mind, housing crisis, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Jon Ronson, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Lean Startup, market design, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McJob, Minecraft, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, precariat, Richard Thaler, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, working poor

Ciulla The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans, Beth Shulman Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, Jessica Bruder Where Bad Jobs Are Better: Retail Jobs Across Countries and Companies, Francoise Carre and Chris Tilly “We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now”: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages, Annelise Orleck On Wanda Stone Age Economics, Marshall Sahlins Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, Robert Sapolsky Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir The Panopticon Writings, Jeremy Bentham Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work, Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare Karoshi, National Defense Counsel for Victims of Karoshi On tech, automation, and the future of work The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, Nicholas Carr Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World, Christopher Steiner Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions, Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths Mindless: Why Smarter Machines Are Making Dumber Humans, Simon Head Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, Martin Ford The Robots Are Coming!


The Future of Technology by Tom Standage

air freight, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, creative destruction, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, double helix, experimental economics, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, hydrogen economy, hype cycle, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, interchangeable parts, job satisfaction, labour market flexibility, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, railway mania, rent-seeking, RFID, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart grid, software as a service, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jurvetson, technological determinism, technology bubble, telemarketer, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Y2K

On the other hand, however, this means that the revolutionary ideas of a few years ago have now become conventional wisdom. Having convinced the business world of the merits of technology, the industry has lost much of its iconoclastic fervour. The corporate adoption of information technology has become such old hat, indeed, that Nicholas Carr, an editor at the Harvard Business Review, even published an article T vii THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY in 2003 entitled “it doesn’t matter”. Many technologists were livid, but Mr Carr had a point. While there are some areas where technology can still provide competitive advantage, its widespread adoption means that it makes less difference than it used to.


Innovation and Its Enemies by Calestous Juma

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, big-box store, biodiversity loss, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, electricity market, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, financial innovation, global value chain, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, pensions crisis, phenotype, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, smart grid, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick

Sharing services such as Uber are acquiring robotics and other engineering capabilities. The implications of exponential growth will continue to elude political leaders if they persist in operating with linear worldviews. These trends have added new elements of uncertainty in human relations in general and in the economy in particular. As Nicholas Carr writes in his book The Glass Cage, “Automation severs ends from means. It makes getting what we want easier, but it distances us from the work of knowing.”8 Such uncertainty may encompass basic societal trends, from the inability to foresee the impact of new technologies to extreme social responses driven by the fear of loss.9 There are also numerous cases where society has underestimated the risks posed by new technologies or adopted them without adequate knowledge about their risks.


pages: 494 words: 116,739

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blood diamond, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gamification, germ theory of disease, global village, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Khan Academy, Kibera, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, North Sea oil, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, Twitter Arab Spring, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, Y2K

Yet, almost 5 million children in the United States suffer from food insecurity in any given year.8 Indeed, there is enough food to feed the whole world, but hunger persists. About one in eight people is malnourished; that’s 840 million people eating less than they need.9 Evidently, technological plenty doesn’t mean plenty for everyone. Skeptics believe that technology is overhyped and often destructive. Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, suggests that the fast-twitch, hyperlinked Internet not only erodes our ability to think deeply, but also traps us like a Siren: “We may be wary of what our devices are doing to us, but we’re using them more than ever.” His book is ominously subtitled What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.


pages: 320 words: 87,853

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

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

Available at http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu /founders/documents /a1_8_8s12 .html. 3 The Hidden Logics of Search 1. David Stark, The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 1. 2. On the use and abuse of the distinction between “IRL” (in real life) and virtual spaces, see Nicholas Carr, “Digital Dualism Denialism,” Rough Type (blog), February 20, 2013, http://www.roughtype.com /?p=2090. 3. Rotten Tomatoes, http://www.rottentomatoes.com /; “Customer Reviews,” Amazon Help. Available at http://www.amazon.com /gp/help/customer /display.html /?nodeId=12177361. Sam Costello, “Buying Music from the iTunes Store,” About.com.


pages: 428 words: 121,717

Warnings by Richard A. Clarke

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, active measures, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, carbon tax, cognitive bias, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, corporate governance, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Elon Musk, failed state, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forensic accounting, friendly AI, Hacker News, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Maui Hawaii, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, mouse model, Nate Silver, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart grid, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y2K

The study looks at jobs at risk from weak AI and robotics. Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osbourne, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?” Sept. 17, 2013, Oxford Martin School, www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf (accessed Oct. 8, 2016). 25. Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (New York: Norton, 2014), reviewed in Sean Braswell, “All Rise for Chief Justice Robot!” Ozy.com, www.ozy.com/immodest-proposal/all-rise-for-chief-justice-robot/41131 (accessed Oct. 8, 2016). 26. McKinsey Global Institute, referenced in Lakshmi Sandhana, “47% of U.S.


pages: 588 words: 131,025

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

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

Back in the fifteenth century, as Nate Silver summed up, “the amount of information was increasing much more rapidly than our understanding of what to do with it, or our ability to differentiate the useful information from the mistruths.”13 Here in the twenty-first century, we call that “big data,” with more data generated in the past two years than in the history of humankind. And an ever-increasing proportion of that is derived from and is passing through mobile devices. In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr recounts the lines from a play in 1612: “so many books—so much confusion! All around us is an ocean of print. And most of it covered in froth.”14 Today we’re at about three quintillion bytes of data generated a day; our digital universe is expected to increase fifty-fold in the current decade (2010–2020) from less than one thousand exabytes to greater than forty thousand.


pages: 544 words: 134,483

The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars by Jo Marchant

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, complexity theory, Dava Sobel, Drosophila, Easter island, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, founder crops, game design, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, overview effect, Plato's cave, polynesian navigation, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, trade route

less able to find their way: Steven Tripp, “Cognitive Navigation: Toward a Biological Basis for Instructional Design,” Educational Technology and Society 4 (2001): 41–49; Alex Hutchinson, “Global Impositioning Systems: Is GPS Technology Actually Harming Our Sense of Direction?” The Walrus, November 2009, https://thewalrus.ca/global-impositioning-systems/. overreliance on technologies: Nicholas Carr, “All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines,” The Atlantic, November 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-great-forgetting/309516/. CHAPTER 7: POWER argumentative but eloquent: For details of Thomas Paine’s life: R. R. Fennessy, Burke, Paine, and the Rights of Man (New York: Springer, 1963), 12–47; Harvey Kaye, Thomas Paine and the Promise of America (New York: Hill & Wang, 2005); Peter Linebaugh, Peter Linebaugh Presents: Thomas Paine: The Rights of Man and Common Sense (London: Verso, 2009); Edward Larkin, Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Craig Nelson, Thomas Paine: His Life, His Time and the Birth of Modern Nations (London: Profile, 2007).


pages: 515 words: 143,055

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bob Geldof, borderless world, Brownian motion, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, colonial rule, content marketing, cotton gin, data science, do well by doing good, East Village, future of journalism, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Golden Gate Park, Googley, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, mirror neurons, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, Plato's cave, post scarcity, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Tim Cook: Apple, Torches of Freedom, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, white flight, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Whether for reasons of politics or politesse, the web would suffer a lot of ruin before many critics, who’d fallen in love with its openness, would admit that things had gone awry. Even so, by the mid-2010s, more and more ordinary users had their own impression of the emperor’s new clothes. Perhaps the first sign of elite revolt was the idea best articulated by Nicholas Carr that the web was making us stupider. Maybe it was the growing talk of an “information glut,” or Jaron Lanier’s argument, in his manifesto You Are Not a Gadget, that the culture of the web had resulted in a suppression of individual creativity and innovation. Even the incredibly powerful tools of sharing and communication—email, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram—once employed by entities like BuzzFeed, didn’t seem so magical, having collaborated in building an attentional environment with so little to admire.


pages: 525 words: 142,027

CIOs at Work by Ed Yourdon

8-hour work day, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, distributed generation, Donald Knuth, fail fast, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, Googley, Grace Hopper, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Innovator's Dilemma, inventory management, Julian Assange, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Multics, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the new new thing, the scientific method, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Zipcar

Yourdon: That’s an interesting area that you’ve mentioned, because obviously not only has technology changed that authors, like me, and editors publish and produce a book, but it’s completely transformed the marketplace in terms of the consumers and customers and their expectations of how they’re going to get the content. And even more than that, you probably have seen some of the material that Nicholas Carr has written—he’s got a book called The Shallows3, which basically argues that because of the Internet he would never be able to read War and Peace today because he just can’t maintain that attention span. And I assume that that has got to have an enormous impact on publishers, too. Mooney: Well, we also have a “professional,” basically it’s a type of buyer that borders on—I was going to say “Borders,” but I’m not sure Borders is going to be around.


pages: 501 words: 145,943

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, digital divide, digital Maoism, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global pandemic, global village, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, megacity, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Tony Hsieh, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, unpaid internship, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

Fishkin’s technique “combines deliberation in small group discussions with scientific random sampling to provide public consultation for public policy and for electoral issues.”28 We must then be both enthusiastic and wary of digital progress—and for the very same reasons. In his skepticist tract The Shallows, Nicholas Carr focuses on the costs of technological innovation. Written text, he notes, sidelines oral literary traditions; movable type pushes aside illuminated manuscripts; television puts an end to radio plays.29 Carr’s complaint about the web is that its incessant noise makes reading books difficult (though Kindle and Nook readers might disagree).


pages: 596 words: 163,682

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind by Raghuram Rajan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computer vision, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data acquisition, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial repression, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Pirenne, Economic and Social History, 83. 31. Pirenne, Economic and Social History, 118–19. 32. Jared Rubin, “Bills of Exchange, Interest Bans, and Impersonal Exchange in Islam and Christianity,” Explorations in Economic History 47, no. 2 (April 2010): 213–27. 33. Goody, Development of Family, 165. 34. Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” The Atlantic, July/August 2008, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/. 35. Timothy Egan, “The Phone is Smart, but Where’s the Big Idea?,” The New York Times, July 7, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/07/opinion/iphone-apple-printing-press.html?


pages: 1,239 words: 163,625

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated by Gautam Baid

Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, business process, buy and hold, Cal Newport, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, do what you love, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fear index, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, follow your passion, framing effect, George Santayana, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Masayoshi Son, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive income, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, six sigma, software as a service, software is eating the world, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tail risk, Teledyne, the market place, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

As you grow older and become more mature, you realize that not everything deserves a response. This truth applies to most things in life and almost everything in the news. We’re surrounded by so much information that is of immediate interest to us that we feel overwhelmed by the never-ending pressure of trying to keep up with it all. —Nicholas Carr The true scarce commodity of the near future will be human attention. —Satya Nadella In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.


pages: 789 words: 207,744

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning by Jeremy Lent

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, different worldview, Doomsday Book, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Metcalfe's law, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, scientific management, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, ultimatum game, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, wikimedia commons

The urges to improve ourselves, to master our environment, and to set our children on the best path possible have been the fundamental driving forces of all of human history. Without these urges to ‘play God,’ the world as we know it wouldn't exist today.” Cited in Singularity, 299. 56. Kurzweil, Singularity, 210; Garreau, Radical Evolution, chap. 4. 57. Kurzweil, Singularity, 325. 58. Minsky quoted in McKibben, Enough, 203–4. Page quoted in Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: Norton, 2011), iBook edition, chap. 8. 59. Christof Koch and Gilles Laurent, “Complexity and the Nervous System,” Science 284 (1999): 96–98. 60. Miguel A. L. Nicolelis, “Mind out of Body,” Scientific American (February 2011): 81–83. 61.


pages: 685 words: 203,949

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J. Levitin

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anton Chekhov, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, big-box store, business process, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Exxon Valdez, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, GPS: selective availability, haute cuisine, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, human-factors engineering, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, impulse control, index card, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, information security, invention of writing, iterative process, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, pre–internet, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, shared worldview, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

Apple introduced Album Art to help, but many people feel it’s not the same as holding a physical object. The procedural and cognitive trade-off at stake concerns searchability (with digital files) versus the viscerally and aesthetically satisfying act of employing the kinds of visual and tactile cues our species evolved to use. Technology writer Nicholas Carr writes, “The medium does matter. As a technology, a book focuses our attention, isolates us from the myriad distractions that fill our everyday lives. A networked computer does precisely the opposite.” Faster is not always desirable, and going straight to what you want is not always better. There is a peculiar irony in all of this: Small libraries are far more useful than large ones.


pages: 669 words: 210,153

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

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

Danielewski) Boreta, Justin: Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Oliver Sacks), Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris), This Is Your Brain on Music (Daniel J. Levitin), The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera) Brach, Tara: The Essential Rumi (Jalal al-Din Rumi, Coleman Barks translation), When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (Pema Chödrön), The Shallows (Nicholas Carr), A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life (Jack Kornfield) Brewer, Travis: Autobiography of a Yogi (Paramahansa Yogananda), Be Here Now (Ram Dass), Conversations with God (Neale Donald Walsch) Brown, Brené: The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho) Callen, Bryan: Excellent Sheep (William Deresiewicz), Atlas Shrugged; The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand), The Power of Myth; The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Joseph Campbell), The Genealogy of Morals (Friedrich Nietzsche), The Art of Learning (Josh Waitzkin), The 4-Hour Body; The 4-Hour Workweek (Tim Ferriss), Bad Science, Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients (Ben Goldacre), Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003 to 2005 (Thomas Ricks), The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11; Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (Lawrence Wright), Symposium (Plato) Carl, Shay: The Book of Mormon (Joseph Smith Jr.), As a Man Thinketh (James Allen), How to Win Friends & Influence People (Dale Carnegie), Think and Grow Rich (Napoleon Hill), The Total Money Makeover (Dave Ramsey), The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R.